I have no mouth but I must scream

A terrorist is not only one who carries a bomb or pistol, but also one who spreads ideas contrary to Western Christian civilisation
General Jorge Vidal President Argentina 1976

For two nights only at Kulcha, I have no mouth return. Three one act plays which are sometimes funny, other times absurd and ultimately extremely touching.

Last chance to see the show the West Australian hated but the Australian loved

Copious background notes taken from the programme follow...

In March 1976 the commanders in chief of Argentina's three armed forces installed themselves as the supreme power in the country. Although intervention in Argentina's politics was not a new occurrence it had never been so brutal in its oppression and suppression of it's opponents - a category that now extended not only to guerillas but also to anyone suspected of 'aiding' them notably students, lawyers and trade unionists. Between 1976 and 1977 an estimated 20 000 people disappeared at the hands of people described by the playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky as messianic ideologues who 'went to mass by day and threw people from planes by night'.

TEATRO ABIERTO, from which tonight's plays are drawn, was the creation of a large group of writers who, in the words of the dramatist Carlos Somigliana, wanted to 'demonstrate the existence and vitality of Argentinian theatre' a theatre whose true potential has so often been denied it. Teatro Abierto advocated both freedom of expression and freedom from the artistic restraints imposed by the commercial theatre.

Other motivating forces included a belief in the importance of the group over the individual, a love of communal enterprises, and a desire to reach mass audiences by putting on shows of the highest quality but with the lowest possible ticket prices. Not least as Somigliana said, 'Teatro Abierto was the only homage we know how to make to a country with which we are painfully in love'

For the opening season twenty one writers decided to collaborate with twenty one directors to put on twenty one short plays that would involve a total number of around two hundred participants, none of whom would receive any money. An outlying small theatre called the Teatro del Pacadero was chosen for this projected eight week season, which involved seven shows of three plays each, all of which were rehearsed in snatches at all hours of the day and night, and in whatever places that became available. Although only advertised only be word of mouth, and put on at the unusual time of six o'clock in the afternoon, the shows attracted daily audiences that far exceeded the theatre's official capacity of 300 seats.

The extraordinary success of Teatro Abierto proved too much for Argentina's military authorities, who only one week after the opening of the first season, sent in a military commando to burn down the Teatro del Picadero. The response to this news was remarkable; the owners of no less than twenty theatres in Buenos Aires offered to host the rest of the season in their establishments. More than one hundred painters donated canvases so as to raise the money that the companies had lost and many of the country's most prominent intellectuals - including writer Borges and Sabato and the Nobel Peace prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, lent their support to the whole movement. The season was completed in the Teatro Tabaris, the most commercial of thew theatres in Buenos Aires, the season selling out ever night and the enthusiastic audiences transforming the performances into anti fascist meetings. Four more seasons would be held, the second of which opened only a few days before the outbreak of the Falklands war, which represented the regimes last desperate attempt to stay in power. Democracy was restored to Argentina in 1983.

The bizarre, absurdist streak running through the works of Teatro Abierto owe much to the special character of Buenos Aires itself - a place described by Garcia Marques as the ' most surrealistic city in the world'. It is the most European of Latin American capitals, with a population of predominantly Italian and Spanish descent. The post district of La Boca, nostalgically recalled in Greyness of Absence, is an extraordinary assemblage of brilliantly colored corrugated iron houses built by Neapolitan immigrants, whose songs and music, sung and danced in the smoky bars along the districts dark alleys, gave rise to the tango, that musical distillation of all the sadness.