I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole at the Gate Theatre

An almost invisible door between a pub and a delivery yard is the single entrance to Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre. This tiny donation-funded theatre aims to be an affordable space for the screening of new, cutting edge experimental theatre. The unforgettably titled I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole is the import of playwright Rodrigo Garcia, who grew up in the slums of Buenos Aires and is devoted to revealing the underbelly of Hispanic city life.

“Aw!” ripples through the aisles as two piglets are introduced to the stage. “Gloucester Old Spot, ten weeks!” an in-the-know audience member discloses proudly. Representing the speaker’s young sons, the pigs are passive throughout the show, nuzzling each other in a corner of the stage. Their inactivity is a blessing; they prove enough of a distraction as it is, especially when one of them has an attack of hiccups. This porcine casting isn’t just audience titillation, they show the speaker’s perverted impression of reality, as well as raising questions about the nature of realist characters – is this a one man show, or are the pigs as much characters as the speaker (Steffan Rhodrl)? Their uninhibited animal state, after all, is what many modern directors attempt to bring to their characters. The pigs promote a tangible empathy in the audience, which makes the implied violence of the speaker towards his sons, and the off-stage abattoir-esque squeals at the end of the show, very chilling.

The speaker hatches a plan to bring the “boys”, along with German Sloterdijk, to Madrid and introduce them to drink, drugs, prostitutes and break into the Prado to stare at Goya’s paintings all night. Goya, often called “the first of the moderns”, began to doubt reality as he became blind and mentally ill. When we recall that his “black painting” period saw him lost in his own hellish delusions, the parallels to the suffering protagonist are obvious. Sloterdijk, represented with a Mickey Mouse balloon, is no random addition to the plot. An advocate of posthumanism, Sloterdijk states that the traditional boundaries believed to exist between things – man, machine and animal – are imaginary. The characters’ treatment of objects as sentient things echoes this background theory – is his awareness deluded or heightened?

This play is a joy; a hilarious, disturbing trip into madness. Joshua Pharos’ lighting is inspired, flashy and metropolitan, with the use of UV paint for a brief macabre puppet show. The final image is most striking, with Rhodrl and a confetti of falling banknotes silhouetted against blue UV strobing. Rhodrl is sufficiently manic to imply an impending descent into insanity, and his Welsh twang (he’s a household name since Gavin and Stacey) brings the tale close to home. I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole is an every-story for our modern pandemic of urban loneliness.

Martha Thompson
Photo: Ikin Yum Photography

I’d Rather Goya Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Arsehole is at the Gate Theatre until 29^th March 2014. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.