It is one of the big successes of the Avignon festival last July, taken up at the Paris-Villette theater. Tom at the Farm, the play by Quebecer Michel-Marc Bouchard, adapted for the cinema by Xavier Dolan, was staged by a Brazilian company. A play on homophobia, but also on the lie of a great power.
After the death of his lover, Tom goes to his funeral at the family farm. He meets his mother who is unaware of her son’s homosexuality and his brother, a brutal peasant, who forces him to lie to preserve the mother. Armando Babaioff plays Tom and translated the play into Portuguese.
” Right from the prologue, in Michel-Marc Bouchard’s play, it is about the absence, the lack of someone who is no longer there. He also talks about lying and he has a pithy sentence where he writes that homosexuals learn to lie even before they love and that’s the first thing that struck me “, describes Armando Babaioff. “ And we realized during the first rehearsals that the play was not only about homophobia, but also about humanity. It talks about each of us and the difficulty we have to know ourselves and to assume ourselves. »
human bestiality
The actors take the words head on. On a mud-covered stage, Tom and the brother engage in a verbal and physical contest. Animals are not far away: cows, wolves… Milk, blood and flesh merge. And the most bestial is certainly not the bovine, this calf which has just been born still wobbling on its legs, but the man, this predator which attacks all which foreign to him.
” When you are on stage in front of the public and they react differently depending on the country, you wonder where you come from. It’s a bit like standing in front of a mirror explains Armando Babaioff.
Then he adds: And at the end of the show, people wanted to know more, to know where this violence came from, but even I didn’t have the answer. I had to think about it then. And I said to myself that in Brazil, we may have lost the power of words. And that’s when I said to myself that it was necessary to embody this violence through the body, because there is an urgency to express it », stresses Armando Babaioff.
The room Tom at the farm was created when Dilma Roussef was in power, and it has continued to play out under Jair Bolsonaro and until now around the world and in Brazil, where violence against minorities has become almost commonplace and the lives of homosexuals, of the poor, of women is worth very little. A piece that we receive like a punch.