“You will be the little chipped horse on the carousel at the circus, on the outskirts, where she lives in plain view. Although she doesn’t know it yet, your mother yearns for you.”
An epidemic of equine mutations divides the world’s population into Humans and Hybrids. As a tsunami of fascism advances across the globe, a woman runs a circus on the outskirts of a city, a father tries to sacrifice his son “to create a MYTH” and a son, born through surrogacy, decides to look for his mother.
“The cards do not speak, they do not point, they do not indicate, there is nothing written on them. They are pure theatre: images from another age when the Purebloods were the masters. Just like now, everything returns.
Father, I have always tried to love you.”
A narrative fragmented by corrosive satire, not only visits the circus where Silvia Koryfa and the LGTBIQ+ Chorus performatively recreate the way in which the transformations occurred —based on the voices and poetics of Proust, Artaud, Genet, Alfred Jarry, Bukowski, Müller, García Lorca, and Sylvia Plath—, but also explores the life of Iggy Horse, his relationship with his father, his working environment, and the journey that he decides to make.
What more can be asked of a half horse?
“Mother I will find you.
And after that, what?”
Before, sons and daughters went in search of their unknown fathers. Will they now go looking for their surrogate mother? Will they be capable of looking into the eyes of the woman whose uterus once held them?
Silvia K’s Last Stand won the 4th annual Spanish Society of Authors (SGAE) Ana Diosdado Theatre Award. This English translation was made possible thanks to a grant from the SGAE Foundation (Fundación SGAE).
Born out of a collaboration between its co-founders and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed Spanish Golden Age season, OOTW has been bringing English translations of theatre from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds to the UK and beyond since 2008.
All plays at #OOTW2024 will be presented as staged readings.
