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In July 2024, the 8th Out of the Wings Festival at Omnibus Theatre closed with a reading of Silvia K's Last Stand, winner of the 2022 Ana Diosdado Award. In this blog, playwright Laura Aparicio shares her personal reflections of when the play, translated by Kate Eaton, arrived on the English stage.
On 24th April (2024) an incident occurred that was reported by the British press and which my dear translator Kate Eaton, shared with me, as she did every time she found something related to horses or circuses in the UK. Later, Mary Ann Vargas, the director of Silvia K´s Last Stand, would add to these themes as well.
The news stories and the images from that day spoke of four horses belonging to The Household Cavalry, a regiment of the British Army who, throwing their riders to the ground, ‘bolted’ and ran loose through the streets of London. As they fled four people were injured and various vehicles were damaged. Vida and Quaker, two of the horses, were finally captured at Limehouse, some four miles away. It seems that the white horse, Vida, already had a history of being frightened and had kicked a soldier in the head during the King’s coronation in the May of the previous year.
On the 1st of July (2024), three horses from the Royal Household Cavalry were on routine exercise when the leading horse was spooked by a bus. As he broke free he was followed by two other horses, and they ran off through London after throwing the soldiers who were riding them.
In Spain we have a saying “No hay dos sin tres”. I am not sure if you can say “All good things come in threes” in English, but if you can, then my play Silvia K´s Last Stand also ran free through London on 20th July 2024, closing the 2024 Out of the Wings Festival which took place from 16th -20th July at London’s Omnibus Theatre.
For those who know nothing about Silvia K´s Last Stand and its connection with horses, I can tell you that it’s a satirical fable that is full of humour. The action takes place during an indirect dystopia and tells how after an epidemic of equine mutations the world population is divided into humans and hybrids; a woman runs a circus on the outskirts of a city whilst at the same time a tsunami of fascism engulfs the planet, a father tries to sacrifice his son to create a MYTH, and a son born through surrogacy decides to search for the mother he has never known.
In reality it is a metaphor for our own society where violence towards those that are different becomes more evident and more dangerous every day.
The Out of the Wings Festival gives voice to plays translated into English from the Spanish and Portuguese languages. The call-out for 2024 offered a great opportunity for writers from Argentina, Chile, Brazil, El Salvador, Ecuador and my own country, Spain. During the Festival I was able to enjoy the plays by my fellow dramatists.
If I look back I find that events were inter-connected, sometimes because of particular actions or occurrences, at other times because of a strange kind of synchronicity as though everything had been premeditated by the gods.
I recall that I really enjoyed the Omnibus Theatre as a space. I attended rehearsals for Silvia K over a few days in a fantastic rehearsal room. I also enjoyed watching the other plays and talking in the bar with audience members, translators, actors… essential for finding out people’s impressions of the plays.
And then it was the turn of Silvia K. I will never forget how the text resounded around the walls of the theatre thanks to actors and actresses such as Constanza Ruff, Jimena Larraguivel, Peter Clements, Theo Saint Claire, Rahim El Habachi and Malu Sá, who gave body and voice with a thrilling depth and dexterity. For an instant, sitting there in the auditorium, I had the feeling that this was a unique and unrepeatable moment.
Mary Ann Vargas had envisioned a simple and profound staging for the fragmented narrative at the end of Silvia K’s journey and the beginning of Iggy Horse’s. She put the two worlds into dialogue with the circus where the characters recreated through performance numbers the way in which the transformations had come about, — based on the voice and poetics of Proust, Artaud, Genet, Alfred Jarry, Bukowski, Müller, García Lorca and Sylvia Plath— with a tight, latent, precise tempo, making use of the actors’ own mother tongues in certain more intimate moments, thus creating a connection that was deeply moving.
That this was possible was due to Kate Eaton and to that ride towards the English language where the words resonated incredibly around the auditorium. Months earlier she had worked on the translation of the images, on the poetry of the text with creativity and tenacity in the search for the right word, and of course with a splendid sense of humour.
In January (2024) there was a dramatized table read with Out of the Wings which I attended online, and it was there that I realised what a great job Kate had done. It was very exciting to hear my text for the first time in English with Gigi Guizado, Jessica Hooper, Radhika and other members of the collective.
That reading was made possible through a translation grant from the SGAE Foundation* (*Spanish Author’s Association) and a meeting with William Gregory during the Alicante Theatre Festival where I won the IV SGAE Ana Diosdado Theatre Prize in November 2022 for La última función de Silvia K. Meeting William led me to reconnect with Kate, who I had first met online during the pandemic year of 2021.
And so I arrive back at the beginning, the seed of this play began to germinate in a writers laboratory with María Velasco, where the first Hybrids made their appearance.. Afterwards, it was during the TEXT X SOUND Workshop organised by Rosa Fiel of the Goethe Institut Madrid with Bernhard Glocksin (Opera Neukölln, Berlin) and Jörg Gollasch (Schaubühne Berlin) that Silvia K. first began to cry out to the heavens.
I am extremely grateful to the Out of the Wings Festival, to all its members (and especially to Catherine Boyle) for their important work in translating texts and making it possible for these stories and their poetics to travel to other countries.
“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. (Pensive.) Just like how, everything returns”. Silvia K.
"There are gods and fathers who demand that you sacrifice yourself for the bonds of blood and heredity. Damned heredity. Will I be able to avoid the sacrifice, or will I remain tethered for centuries and centuries to the Patriarch? Tired and sad, I want to know if I will be capable of freeing myself from this commandment. I’m just a poor Hybrid, an ill-fated Equus Ferus.
What more can be asked of a half horse?
Father, I have always tried to love you." Iggy Horse.
Laura Aparicio, November 2024
Translated by Kate Eaton
Submissions for the 2025 Out of the Wings Festival are now open until 17 February 2025. Out of the Wings also invites you to enjoy more Spanish playwriting in English translation at Plays from Spain, on February 8 at Omnibus Theatre.
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