Histoire d'Amour

There are two ways of being diverted by this unpleasant play, the simple tale of a man who spots a fit girl, decides to marry her, then stalks and rapes her for an hour and a bit.

One is by admiring the brilliant staging from Chilean company Teatro Cinema. Standing between two screens on which are projected swooshing, vertiginous cityscapes and unsettling interiors, the actors, Bernadita Montero and Julián Marras, are trapped in the monochrome world of a graphic novel. The set-up is ingenious but the effect is somewhat alienating. 

This visual language is spectacularly ill-suited to telling a story about rape. Each assault is reduced to a comic book tableau, making sexual violence look noirish and cool.

Worst is the treatment of Sofia, the victim. She simply isn't a character. Given barely a line, she exists in a series of sexualised moans and gestures. Why present a woman this way, devoid not just of agency but of inner life?

The charitable thing is to assume that some point is being made with all this. But this mind-numbing play doesnt antagonise, it doesn't provoke interesting questions; Histoire d'Amour is dull as well as distasteful. The odious protagonist is in prison for all of two minutes, and he loses track of his victim a couple of times, but overall his campaign of rape progresses smoothly. For ninety minutes. What's the point of a story where the protagonist gets everything his own way?

The second diversion, by the way, comes from sniggering at all the typos in the surtitles: "I spent many moths without seeing her."