Argentine lives inexorably turn to destruction at Mariano Pensotti's hands

Turntables and theatre have something in common. Especially in recent years, a theatre-goer increasingly runs the risk of facing a so-called rotating stage. After Johan Simons made use of this technical stylistic figure in his direction of Hiob at the Munich Kammerspiele and Christoph Schlingensief made the stage spin spectacularly at his swan song Mea Culpa, it is now the turn of Argentinian Mariano Pensotti. His show El pasado es un animal grotesco (the past is a terrible animal) literally revolves around four life stories.

The small turntable is of homely wood and gives us a view of four living rooms in big-city flats. At least, that is what can be inferred from the otherwise extremely austere and sparse furnishings.

Four actors tell a story about four more-or-less lonely souls in the big city. Lives that stand alone, pathetic at times, laughable here and there and also and bizarre, like the story of the amateur writer who is suddenly saddled with a severed hand delivered through the post.

The lives Pensotti depicts in his play are fairly recognisable to the modern metropolitan dweller, but are again further away from us than we think. After all, the 10 years covered by the play have been totally different in Argentina than in the Netherlands. Argentina's economy has experienced several extreme crises, making the middle class a lot less sure of its own position, than in north-western Europe. The fear that savings, pensions and property could evaporate at a stroke is a lot more concrete in Argentina than here.

The doom that Pensotti and his Argentine audience take for granted hanging over the play is absent here, and that makes the murderous pace at which the play is told more tiring than ominous. However perfectly the carousel of small and big sufferings is put together, and however beautifully the actors maintain their almost Dutch informal play, the play gets a bit boring in the long run, especially as the history is told in a rather linear fashion: the years follow each other neatly and inevitably. So, just as in a speech you can tell from the remaining pile of paper how long the speaker still has to go, in El pasado es un animal grotesco you involuntarily start counting down. That's a shame.

Seen during the Noorderzon festival in Groningen, on 19 August 2011. El pasado es un animal grotesco is in Rotterdam to be seen on 27 and 28 September. Information.