Edinburgh International Festival Theatre

After the Silence

The Studio

Five stars

The first thing the three Afro-Brazilian women and a man who sit at tables in front of a triptych of screens do is applaud the demise of Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime and the country’s return to democracy.

As opening statements go in writer/director Christiane Jatahy’s multi-faceted dissection of the long-term fallout of slavery, racism and blatant power grabs in Brazil, it speaks volumes. As the women recount first-hand litanies of land grabs, assassination and abuse of Brazil’s indigenous black culture, it is as if we are witnesses at some truth and reconciliation hearing.

What follows in Jatahy’s dizzying construction is a remarkable mash up of historical fiction, archive film footage and community ritual that mixes live performance with onscreen re-enactments and hypnotic live percussion music in an aesthetic fusion that brings its points home with devastating power.

Jatahy’s production draws from contemporary Brazilian writer Itamar Vieira Junior’s best-selling novel about Afro-Brazilian sisters, Torto Arado (Crooked Plow), first published in 2019. She also incorporates excerpts from filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho’s 1984 documentary,  Cabramarcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later). This is a study of peasant leader, João Pedro Teixeira, who was killed in 1962 by local landowners.

Coutinho began his film in 1964, only to fall foul of the authorities, before returning to the material in 1984. As the three women on stage talk directly to the audience about the murder of those closest to them, their actions are amplified by contemporary film footage beamed behind them to give extra dimensions to the work.

After the Silence is the final part of Jatahy’s ‘trilogy of horror’ that began with Dusk, her metatextual reimagining of Lars von Trier’s film, Dogville, seen at Edinburgh International Festival in 2023. As her Brazilian cast of Caju Bezerra, Aduni Guedes, Juliana França and Gal Pereira perform in Portuguese with English surtitles, this makes for something of a prodigal’s return for Rio de Janeiro born Jatahy. This unleashes a ferocious piece of hidden history that becomes a highly charged polemic. Infused with a deep-set artistry, the result is an unmissable creation that is both damnation and purging.