Writer: Ana Carolina Borges
Directors: Almiro Andrade and Najla Andrade
No one has had a worse time in the past three years than Ana Carolina Borges, losing her mother to cancer on 8 March 2019 during a Brazilian carnival that blasted music in from the street outside. But that’s not the only tragedy Borges experienced which is captured in her 45-minute one-woman show Letters to My Dead Mother, her playwriting debut, premiering at the Hope Theatre.
Recreating aspects of her experience and emotional reactions since her mother’s death, Borges structures her show around a collection of missives written to her mother in the months and years since, some humorously describing the things that have happened to the world such as people fighting for toilet roll in the early months of the pandemic to the intense interior reactions stemming from their separation and its aftermath.
And Borges is raw in her grief, often almost intrusively so, as the character and performer use the show to work through a variety of contradictory reactions and behaviours. Unafraid of stillness, of looking her audience directly in the eye and forcing them to see her pain, the small environs of the Hope Theatre suit the intimacy of Borges’ grief which makes light of the grieving process all the while becoming a physical embodiment of its longevity.
There are some really tangible moments as Borges recreates a casual conversation with her mother via video platform, playing both roles as the older woman bats away the idea of a small cancer. Later, at her funeral, Borges explodes in rage at a platitudinous guest, explaining in graphic detail the agonising physical impairments and indignities of her mother’s cancer and the months of suffering it caused, raging against the gods for allowing it to happen if there was never any hope.
Emotionally, Letters to My Dead Mother is undoubtedly powerful, Borges is even courageous in standing so honestly in front of a room full of strangers and reliving the effect of death again and again. But as a theatrical experience, it is a haphazard combination of dance, animation of the letters being written while also voiced by pre-recorded narration and dramatic techniques in which Borges plays herself and other people in the story.
Yet we leave knowing very little about those people and the meaning their lives had, no sense of their personalities, quirks or existence beyond being Borges’ mother, father, sister or acquaintance. Recreating the feeling of absence is something this show does well but it also needs to give substance to that absence by making the rounded humanity and complexity of the people we can’t see more palpable.
There is a lot of humour in show that is entirely about death as Borges mocks the nonsense of Hollywood cancer movies staged on sunset beaches and compares social media grief stories with the family of her favourite writer who died around the same time. The segue “let’s move on” keeps the show moving but maybe there is space to stop and reflect a little bit more on the people she lost and why this show really exists.
Reviewed on 13 June 2022
