Diciembre

Project Arts Centre, runs until Sunday ***

Going against the grain of much of the work presented in the current and recent Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festivals, this play by Chilean writer and director Guillermo Calderón is, he says, about “who we are as a country”. His company, Teatro en El Blanco, tours internationally, presenting theatre that is intensely engaged with contemporary politics, culture and society.

Diciembre

is no exception: set in the near future in a war-torn Santiago, it explores the ways in which war infiltrates every aspect of life, including the domestic and deeply personal.

The intensity of a family Christmas is given additional charge by the visit of a young soldier, Jorge, on a day’s leave, visiting his two sisters. Twins, and both pregnant, they pull him in different directions, at first comically, as one is intent on helping him to desert, while the other, fanatically patriotic, expounds her racist views of Peruvians and Bolivians and, generally, the world beyond Chile’s borders.

While mordantly humorous at first, the conversation darkens to include references to rape, concentration camps, reprisals and torture that are not fully explained, though we certainly get the picture. The three never leave the table, decked with multi-coloured festive bulbs that defy the intermittent power cuts.

Calderón’s direction of the siblings is admirably controlled, even as the sisters seem to be on the verge of breakdown, with a nod to Pedro Almodóvar’s tongue-in-cheek style. With the arrival of a drunken aunt, the tone is pushed into broad caricature, and the tension breaks.

Gripping and intriguing as the dramatic premise is, and with superb performances from Mariana Muñoz, Trinidad González and Jorge Becker, the fictional war between Chile and neighbouring countries remains an abstraction, requiring detailed background exposition in speeches, which does not quite convince. Perhaps the full impact and significance of the play will inevitably elude European audiences, beyond, of course, a recognition of its universal and undeniably powerful themes.