A review by Chad Armitstead for Extra! Extra!

Luis Benkard’s Frida Kahlo: Viva la Vida is painfully true to Ms. Kahlo’s art: it’s a portrait, bold, bright and heartbreaking.

As the glut of solo shows makes its triumphal entry into London post-Fringe, we’re reminded that what makes great drama doesn’t change based on the size of the cast. Robles’ script stands out among the transfers, despite the fact that at times it is perhaps a bit more portrait than performance.

Frida is a 2008 Fringe show making its London premiere, having garnered awards in Edinburgh as well as Brighton. Its Fringe award went to Gaël Le Cornec (Universal Arts Best Actor), the pistol who is also the lock, stock and barrel of the cast.

Set on the Day of the Dead, November 1st, (the day when the living may more easily commune with the dead), the play finds Frida in her house in Mexico, La Casa Azul, recounting her life, trials, miscarriages, affairs, passions and paintings—betwixt all of which she draws no clear line.

Entering hunched over beneath a blood red sheet and holding a skeleton marionette, Le Cornec opens the show with creepy gaiety. The play, Kahlo’s life and Le Cornec’s performance are all infused with the macabre joy of Kahlo’s dance with death.

Ms. Le Cornec wears Kahlo’s proud hysteria like a jewel in a crown of thorns. Dangerous, sexual and wild, Le Cornec paints Kahlo like a wounded animal stripped of its young and caged. Her visceral performance both unnerves and endears. One doesn’t know whether to offer a sympathetic embrace or flinch when she approaches the audience, sitting on laps, looking at belly fat and soliciting rendezvous with audience members in the lobby after the show.

She certainly renders the show in vibrant colour, as does Luis Benkard (director) and Sophie Mosberger (set and costume design). Diabolically inventive, characters come in the shapes of skulls, hanging overalls and dresses, and deer skeletons. Handing the skulls to audience members, Le Cornec turns unsuspecting spectators into lovers—Trotsky, Breton and Diego Rivera.

Actor, director and designer weave visual metaphor into the fabric of the text. At one point, Le Cornec’s Kahlo speaks of tying her work, passions and life together. As she does, she ties the portraits, people and objects on stage together with yellow ribbon, the color of sickness and madness.
Le Cornec and the director create another particularly poignant moment out of a visual trick. Kahlo tells the story of the accident that punctured her womb, crippled her right leg, and led to the deeper wounds of a succession of unsuccessful pregnancies. While telling it, Le Cornec wraps her crippled leg like a child, cradles it and rocks it. It looks real enough to unsettle. In one fleeting action, Le Cornec encapsulates the sadness of Kahlo’s life, a sadness which she says is represented in all of her work. Each portrait and action on stage then becomes readable as an attempt to nurse old wounds.

An unfortunate proportion of solo show’s script makes the aforementioned herculean efforts of casts, directors and designers a requirement to keep the show active. For a short time at the beginning of the show, seeing Le Cornec seeking to give intensity to lines that just don’t provide it points out an unfortunate truth. Too many writers don’t acknowledge adequately that drama is conflict, not just storytelling.

Antagonists forcing heroes to make hard decisions under pressure makes compelling drama. Finding ways to do that with one actor is the responsibility of the writer of a solo show. Robles is liberal with biographical detail, but a bit stingy with dramatic action.

However, Kahlo’s life itself was compelling and so the details are interesting and metaphor comes easily for Robles. His show therefore succeeds to a greater degree than many shows of its kind. Though I still left wishing the show had educated me a bit less and moved me a bit more.

It should be noted that much of the political theatre of late seems to be generally forgiving of dramatic inertness when the cause is good enough. This encourages the kind of show that truly imprisons actors on stage. They stand before an audience, performing to earn the freedom that only the curtain call provides. Viva la Vida thankfully doesn’t make it onto this list of shows.

Le Cornec, Benkard and Mosberger make Frida Kahlo: Viva la Vida a primal force. For all her flaws, Frida certainly makes it clear that life is for living. No matter how beyond repair you are, if you’re breathing, you’re the envy of the dead. It’s worth spending some time with a wounded manic-depressive genius addict at the Oval House Theatre if you’ve forgotten that.

Chad Armitstead, Extra! Extra! — 24th October 2009