Villa+Speech
Villa+Discurso
by Guillermo Calderón (Chile), 2010
Three female.
Photo: María Paz González
Villa at Teatro Dallas, TX, 11 Oct-02 Nov 2019
Speech at the Edinburgh International Festival 2017 as part of the Royal Court Theatre’s New and Now season. Performed by Kika Markham (see clip).
Villa at the Play Company, New York, March-April 2017. (★★★★ Time Out; ‘William Gregory’s translation is a gem’, Theatre is Easy)
August 2015, ICES, Colombo, Sri Lanka, directed by Indika Senanayake
27 May-14 June 2014, The Mac, Belfast, co-produced by Prime Cut Productions (★★★★ The Irish Times); 28 April 2014, Segal Center, New York, presented by PEN World Voices.
A duo of plays exploring the legacy of Pinochet’s rule on the Chile of today. In Villa, three women debate the future of the site of the Villa Grimaldi, a dictatorship-era torture and extermination centre which exists today as a memorial garden. In Speech, Calderón imagines a farewell speech by President Michele Bachelet. What might she have said if she were not bound by political pragmatism?
I’m sure the people who killed us had crosses in their pockets.
Maybe they were thinking of infinite kindness.
And forgiveness for the penitent.
Maybe they thought we atheists didn’t deserve to live.
That we were pieces of meat with brains.
Or maybe they thought we’d go happily to communist heaven.
‘The translation, by William Gregory, is eminently speakable’, Lighting and Sound America
‘I’ve seen Guillermo Calderón’s plays both done in Spanish and in English and I really wanted to commend William Gregory’s translation. Villa and Speech were first performed in English at the Royal Court Theatre in March 2011, directed by Guillermo Calderón and performed by Kika Markham, Indira Varma, Claudie Blakely and Emma Lowndes. They were published in Theater Magazine, volume 43.2, June 2013. A full video of the rehearsed reading of VILLA at PEN World Voices is available here: Contact me for more details. Back to translation page, or see more about my work with the Royal Court.
