Michael Cox speaks with writer Marianella Yanes about her new play at A Play, a Pie and a Pint.
Michael Cox: I’ve read the blurb on the website, but can you tell me a bit more about the play.
Marianella Yanes: I’ll just tell you a little more, enough to spark your interest and persuade you to go!
Throughout the 20th century latin America experienced the cruellest of dictatorships – Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, the Duvaliers in poor pillaged Haiti, Somoza in Nicaragua, Gomez and Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, Videla in Argentina, Pinochet in Chile – it’s too distressing the give the full list. Exclusion, torture, the death of many men and women and the horrors of exile were constants throughout this period. People might say ‘well at least exile gave them an option of survival…’ And that’s true, but it’s a painful choice and is as agonizing as being in the prisons and torture centres where political prisoners were taken to be be beaten and killed. Because when you have to leave the place where you were born it leaves an emptiness. Your memories are frozen at one particular moment, and it never changes, repeating itself over and over. And there is no forgetting. I lived among exiles, the Chileans and Argentines who arrived in my country, Venezuela, in the 70s and 80s. I watched some of them die of sadness; others survived, but always feeling that they didn’t belong to Venezuela or Chile or Argentina, and reliving in their memory the torture and death they had suffered. This is how history weighs on the soul – and that’s the theme of my play.
MC: How about yourself. What is your background as a writer? Have you written a play before? If you have written before, is Soap Hour similar or different to your previous work? If you haven’t written before, where did the inspiration to put pen to paper (so to speak) come from?
MY: I grew up at a wonderful time, culturally speaking, in Venezuela. At 15 I appeared in my first play – ‘Lament for the death of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias’ based on Lorca’s famous poem. I was a founding member of the Theja Theatre Group and I never really stopped from then on. The actors of the group gave classes in theatre in secondary schools across the country. I adapted many pieces of classic theatre at that time, but I never wrote a piece of my own. I did that later, when I was working with Theaomai Theatre who asked me to play Lorca’s Yerma, which they were presenting in a new version. I was writing poetry and short stories at the time, but the play’s director, who was a fan of my stories, asked me to write a monologue about Lorca. It went down well. But then something odd happened; it was repeated on television and I then began to write drama and soap operas for TV, as well as for radio. I was finishing my degree at the time; I am a journalist by profession. So you could say that The Soap Hour is my first play, because it’s the first time I have sat down at the keyboard to write a play. I’m currently revising a novel and still writing poetry as I always have. Obviously what I most want to do in life is – write.
MC: Mind my ignorance, but ‘Soap Hour’ is not a term I’m familiar with. Did you coin it, or am I being a bit obtuse and it refers to something a bit obvious like a soap opera?
MY: It’s not ignorance. You’re not a Latin American so why should you know! Calling it that was a little device which I hoped might stimulate people to find out what it meant. When radio began to broadcast serials and the soap opera genre was born (I know that there is a great debate among academics as to whether this is a literary genre at all, since both radio and TV soaps are generally looked down on), they were commercially sponsored. Until the sixties it was soap companies like Camay and Palmolive who sponsored the serials on rival radio stations. In our culture, ratings are important to identify the audience and the success of the programmes. Palmolive and Camay sold incredibly well, because women were the main audience for both radio and TV soaps, and they bought the products too. That’s why it’s called The Soap Hour. People would say ‘Hey it’s time for the Camay Hour’, and everyone would disappear to catch up with the latest episode.
MC: The blurb makes the play sound like a symbolic work about identity. Am I reading that correctly? Do you have an active interest in the theme of ‘identity’, or is this an idea that you explored in this work only?
MY: Naturally I’m interested in questions of identity. In fact I’m writing two more pieces around the same theme; I’d like this to be a trilogy. Latin America suffered conquest and colonization, but out of the ashes emerged the Latin American identity which implies a respect for the multicultural. When the Indian population were massacred, Africa came bringing its drums, its gods and its dances. The result is a wonderful hybrid that has absorbed the white population too. For us identity is a serious matter and the temptation is to go back to our roots. There is an intense discussion now, for example, about the Indian concept of ‘the good life’ which has re-emerged in debates around climate change. You might ask, what’s that got to do with identity? A lot. Because we are searching for alternative models of development to those that came to us from the west – the return to the land, to nature. I think the same is happening here. I’ve been to the Western Isles and seen signs in Gaelic and English; it's poetic.
This isn’t about nationalism, it’s just that we humans need to feel we belong to something – physically, biologically, philosophically even religiously, though not religion in a western sense. In our culture religion has to do with the ludic and mystical elements that are also necessary for survival, to mediate the encounter between nature and the individual.
In the play the central character needs these links to keep him alive in this alien culture. When someone arrives in a new country, without knowing its culture, they inevitably turn back in their mind to the symbols that root them in their own history. If you come to my house in Glasgow, you’ll encounter a yellow wall and a portrait of a parrot - I didn’t do it deliberately but they are signs, links to my sun and the colours of my country. So there are these subtle things that function in the psyche as connectors between what we left and what we have now. For Carlos, my central character, that is the function of the soap opera.
MC: What kind of a journey are you hoping that audiences take with the play?
MY: This is a lovely question because it assumes the Aristotelian view that the audience accompanies the hero on his/her journey. But my protagonist is no hero – quite the contrary. He’s a survivor and the journey of a survivor is not heroic, because it doesn’t begin with a decision but with an imposed need. The soap opera as a genre is a sequence of hyperbolic events that never reach an end; they are always left open-ended to stimulate the audience’s imagination. Because it’s a game, a witty and sentimental game that persuades the audience to switch on again the following day. That’s what I like about the play. When we first discussed it, I had the idea of experimenting and writing a series of six plays over six days. Crazy? Maybe, but a wonderful challenge. I wanted to take the audience on a journey with Carlos, on an adventure which you don’t so much think about as feel. Working with Paddy Cunneen has been extraordinary for me in that sense, because we have had long debates on thinking and feeling. I want the audience to feel the emotion that a dramatic chord produces, to let their imagination float free and leave behind the burden of thought. Not everything needs to be explained, but everything needs to be felt. My partner says I’m mad, but I think modernity has cut us off from feeling and inhibited us, stopped us from playing. Yet for me, the theatre is play. I’d like the audience to play at feeling what I see and feel. This is not frivolous in any way; I’d like that the mythic world of the protagonist could make an audience member wake up in the night smiling and saying ‘I was dreaming about the heroine of The Soap Hour’, or 'I wonder how I’d feel if I lived somewhere where there were tanks in the streets and children died every day'. This is political of course, and I think my play is political, but narrated from a magical place. I’d like to think people might be able to see the yellow butterflies that Mauricio Babilonia saw in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, because in Latin America reality is more magical than fiction.
MC: As this is being translated, what are the challenges you face with conveying the play to a Scottish audience?
MY: This is a slightly embarrassing question, since my partner is the translator. The major challenge was the fact that my partner is a Marxist and doesn’t believe in ghosts, but I do – that makes me a spiritualist Marxist, I suppose. Because I come from a place where ghosts do appear and have names and hide treasures. I can’t be an atheist because poverty provokes belief to keep hope alive. Even the most rational of us are accompanied by the gods of the indigenous and black populations. In the play that other world is represented in the Manichaean universe of the soap opera, in the rhythm of the tango. But all of it is set in a political context. It is complex to translate this world but luckily my partner is a Latin Americanist. And I can promise you that caught in a Venezuelan rainstorm, he has had goose bumps though he wouldn’t admit it because it’s against his principles.
The challenge is to transmit this emotion through memory, the gulf between what I think and what I feel, the politics of daily life. I hope we’ve managed it. The work has been collective and it has grown as each of the people involved has added a bit of their world. The actors will move on to their next job with a tango step in their feet and a line of the bolero on their lips and perhaps a little of Carlos’s nostalgia in their heart. I hope the audience will feel something similar.
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