Review: Tom at the Farm

Just before the play commences, two figures emerge to unfold a massive brown tarpaulin across the stage. A couple of buckets are strategically placed and stage-left there is a large chain sling connected to a commensurately sized hook. Fitting for a large industrial farm. Yet it looms menacingly. As the lights go up, they do so only insofar as to give off a brown industrial hue. The type that predictably drains all other colour from industrial sheds. All of this is the portent of things to come.

City-boy Tom, played by Armando Babaioff, has travelled to a rural farm in Brazil to attend his dead partner’s funeral whose sexuality has been kept from his mother, Agathe (Denise Del Vecchio), by brother Francis (Iano Salomão) in an attempt to protect her innocence. Unbeknownst to Tom, his refined urbanity inescapably exacerbates Francis’ sociopathic tendencies, now enthusiastically breaching all limits of savage cruelty. As the rust hues give way to blood tones, Babaioff’s energy never dims. Keen to show he is something more than a vanilla city slicker, Tom embraces the mud. Commands it. Inevitably, the mud comes to command him: peeling off the sleek veneer that had previously clung to him. Salomão swaggers with the conviction of a faithful. Fleeting moments of tenderness flourish between the two protagonists when, astonishingly, the audience futilely seek the good in Francis.  It leavens the cruelty somewhat. But cruelty begets cruelty, forever seeking to spread its black wings. Not to be outdone, Del Vecchio’s Agathe is perfectly pitched. A hardened woman. Disappointed at life’s turns. Hungry to exalt her dead son in the face of bald facts. She is; however, a worldly woman, and as her grief subsides she sees more than she lets on: Francis inspecting his arse in front of the mirror, for example? These unabashed performances are truly breath-taking.

Directed by Rodrigo Portella, Tom at the Farm is an intense two-hours. A danse macabre on a vast stage, gleefully summoning the implosion of humanity through unabated sadism carried by a tradition of deceit, denial, grief, and repression. It is brutal, unadorned, unadulterated, and utterly magnificent.  

There is good theatre. There is excellent theatre. And there is theatre so electric, so enervating, so downright organic you can taste the mud, turning you into the most avid of disciples. Tom at the Farm is the latter. Outstanding.

Tom at the Farm runs at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre until 24th August.