REVIEW: Faces In The Crowd, Gate Theatre, London ✭✭✭

Mark Ludmon reviews Faces In The Crowd, an adaptation by Ellen McDougall of Valeria Luiselli's novel now playing at the Gate Theatre, London.

Jimena Larraguivel as The Woman. Photo: Ellie Kurtz Faces In The Crowd

Gate Theatre, London

Three stars

Book Tickets

The lines between fiction and reality blur in Ellen McDougall’s stage adaptation of Valeria Luiselli’s award-winning Mexican novel, Faces in the Crowd. The book was originally published in Spanish in 2011 as Los Ingrávidos, which means something like “the weightless ones”, and, in this world premiere at London’s Gate Theatre, there is an intangible elusiveness to the drama that makes it hard to pin down.

Jimena Larraguivel and Neil D'Souza. Photo: Ellie Kurtz

Like the book, the play is about storytelling, shifting and floating between different timeframes. From her home in Mexico City, a woman starts to tell her own story, despite interruptions from her husband and two children, taking us back to her time when she lived in New York City working for a publishing house specialising in English translations of Latin-American literature. Intertwined into these narratives is the story of the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen who lived in Spanish Harlem in New York in the 1920s - a real-life literary figure who was elusive in the myths he created about himself. Adapted by a creative team led by director Ellen McDougall, the staging of Faces in the Crowd adds another layer with a meta-theatrical element that further exposes the process of storytelling, translation and adaptation.

Anoushka Lucas as The Musician. Photo: Ellie Kurtz

With songs beautifully performed by Anoushka Lucas, the play is intriguing and captivating as the stories unravel. Mexican actor Jimena Larraguivel is mesmerising as the woman shifting between past and present, helped and hindered by her increasingly distant husband played by Neil D’Souza and her young son (Santiago Huertas Riaz on the night I saw it).

Like the stories, the set designed by Bethany Wells expands and breaks up, taking us to unexpected places, enhanced by Jessica Hung Han Yun’s intricate lighting design. With its fragmentary structure and shifting realities, Faces in the Crowd has a chaotic beauty but this brings an elusiveness to the drama which means that at times the stories get lost in the telling.

Running at the Gate Theatre in London to 8 February 2020