Historia de Amor

“If Alfred Hitchcock turned a comic into a play, it would look like the witty Historia de Amor.” The Los Angeles Times critic was right in their review of this Teatrocinema piece, because, as Laura Pizarro, actress and founder of the Chilean company, explains, “it is a cinematographic narrative.” Historia de Amor closed a trilogy that also included Sin Sangre and El hombre que daba de beber a las mariposas, all directed by Juan Carlos Zagal, who, together with Pizarro, founded Teatrocinema in Chile in 2005. Their artistic language fuses the essential elements of theatre, film, animation, literature, music, and comic strips.

Their productions have been presented at the world’s most important international theatres and festivals, including Avignon, Edinburgh, Lincoln Center, and the Odeon in Paris.

Historia de Amor, which takes its plot from the French writer Régis Jauffret’s 1988 novel of the same name — a case of rape, harassment, and submission — is a constant surprise, dazzling with its comic layout. Screens project two- and three-dimensional images, real and drawn actors appear, and dialogues emerge from vignettes. And if perversity is one of Hitchcock’s recurring themes, it is also central to Historia de Amor. Here, we encounter an English teacher, a psychopath, who spots a woman on the metro and decides she will become his wife and the mother of his children. She remains unaware of his plans, while he follows her, stalks her, and eventually kidnaps her, convinced he is acting out of love. From that moment, a dark relationship unfolds between them (she, sheltered within autism and acceptance), gradually destroying them both.

The director of Historia de Amor alludes to the presence of stories like this within society, “where the victim and the victimizer are equally alone, equally mad, and equally helpless.” “The play is an allegory of abuse,” explains Laura Pizarro, a reflection on the boundary between reason and madness, domination and submission, humanity and dehumanisation. “We want to ask ourselves to what extent the individual in this contemporary society has lost their ability to be unique and their intrinsic value as a human being.”