I find myself in a funicular… another me, but without any of my defects, and I ask her to take charge of the rest of my life, because quite frankly, I am just too tired.”

María can’t remember life without Rómulo. But now, finally alone, she leaves Mexico convinced her future lies at the other end of the world; Bergen, Norway. Instead, she finds only a cursed typewriter and a meeting with her doppelganger on a mountaintop.

So begins a road trip that takes María, alongside best friend Lola, across European and Latin American landscapes, memories and dreams, in a quest for new meaning. Figures – parents, priests and guitar-makers – light up and fade away like fireflies. But who exactly awaits at the end of the world?

‘Firefly Love’ is a magical-realist, modern tale of love, friendship and the people you meet along the way. This translation was developed as part of Foreign Affairs’ Mentorship Program 2022/23.

You’re a creator of illusions, darling. It’s hardly surprising you confuse real life with the lives you invent. (Tallulah Bankhead, Dr Feelgood)

Tennessee Williams and Egas Moniz, Portuguese winner of the Nobel prize and inventor of the lobotomy, never met in real life, but in the theatre nothing is impossible. This fictionalised Tennessee Williams is in hospital for detox. He’s visited by others in their own in-between world of death-in-life – trapped in a story they would like to leave like his sister Rose, alive but never ageing after her lobotomy at the age of 24.

Dr Feelgood, like many other plays of Armando Nascimento Rosa’s, approaches familiar figures from history and legend from unexpected new directions and is written for performance by a small number of actors playing multiple roles.

The angel gathered her wings and hung the song from the space which united the trees. (Senescence, The Ages of Man)

During a visit from his granddaughter and her boyfriend, elderly grandfather Gonzalo’s conversation is surreal and transcendent.  His thoughts drift between dreamlike aquatic journeys and recollections of their younger days. Despite his delirium, the dying man imparts his eternal love and wise life lessons to the next generation.

So what do we do? 

What day of the week is it? 

F**k knows. 

Where’s the calendar? 

We threw it out, I think. 

Well, let’s say it’s… Tuesday. 

Apollo 13 Videos, a video store – perhaps the last remaining in all of civilisation. 

The year, unknown. 

Two clerks keep the place going, though they can’t remember the last time anyone came in. 

Perhaps the post-apocalyptic films, breaking news reports, and email alerts are trying to tell them both something? 

But perhaps they’re too preoccupied with their daily routine to notice? 

When a stranger joins in their daily game of “playing shop”, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. 

With a newfound enthusiasm, a plan to lure in customers emerges – forcing them to confront what they’ve been avoiding all along… 

Playwright Filipe Pereira and translator Jenny Witzel met through the Royal Court Theatre’s international script submissions, for which Pereira was shortlisted. This English translation of The Last Surviving Video Store is Still in Business was made possible thanks to an Arts Council England grant.

‘I begin by remembering’ that I was born and raised free and then enslaved, accused of witchery by two girls and condemned ‘cause of hatred and fear. The accusations to which I was subjected are false….’

Four hundred years after the Salem Witch Trials, Tituba, an enslaved woman accused of witchcraft, returns to tell her side of the story. And it’s not the story you think you know.

Determined to clear her name, she takes us back to where it all began, to Salem and to the Parris family. But secrets and dark deeds lurk behind the Parris’ front door. Abigail Williams makes a doll to get rid of Proctor’s wife so they can be together; Little Betty Parris is always lurking in the shadows; and Elizabeth Parris turns a blind eye to her husband’s un-Godly behaviour. And then come the accusations. They claim Tituba is an evil witch who forces the girls to serve the devil. But women like Tituba are always the ones to be systematically criminalised. 

In an English translation by Toni Roberts (Harakiri) and directed by Tian Brown-Sampson (The Lesson), this rehearsed reading of Denise Duncan’s (The Fight of the Century) acclaimed play based on true events weaves in music from African American music’s greats to explore one woman’s fight to rewrite the narrative and give a voice to history’s marginalised woman.

 As part of Out of the Wings Festival’s 10th anniversary, we are thrilled to conclude the festival with the Chilean play Spider Girls’ in English translation by the renowned translator and Out of the Wings founder Catherine Boyle.

Written by Luis Barrales, one of Chile’s most exciting playwrights, Spider Girls is based on the true story of a gang of teenage girls from Santiago in the 2000s, who became media sensations by breaking into the apartments of the upper middle class, climbing up buildings to do so.  The girls came from a shanty town in the borough of Peñalolén, which had been created through a land seizure, but was then undergoing redevelopment as part of an urban renewal initiative. Taking the motivations the girls presented to the press as a starting point,  the play explores their desires for the luxuries and comfort that they observe and enjoy in the homes of Santiago’s affluent residents. Through Barrales’ funny, sharp, and politically charged writing, we follow the spider girls as they navigate their lived experiences of reality, of poverty, adolescence, and social welfare.