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Amazons

 
Alec Martin Review by Alec Martin 3 Published: 7 Aug 2025 Summerhall Show Dates: 31 Jul 2025-25 Aug 2025

Gaël Le Cornec, fresh from winning the inaugural Guimarães Rosa Institute Award, plants herself amid Summerhall’s former gents' locker-room brickwork and broadcasts her bid for UK citizenship to a virtual crowd while deeply real voices of Brazil’s forgotten past elbow onto the stage. Over seventy minutes she leaps between comic commentary on the disturbingly creepy Europeans who first laid claim to Brazil and searing vignettes of colonisation, slave revolts and environmental pillage, summoning mothers, aunties and half-remembered warriors with little more than shifts in posture and the occasional, slight costume adjustment.

She wields humour like a machete, hacking space for heavier reflections

The breadth is exhilarating. One moment we’re laughing at the menu choices of a cannibal; the next we’re chilled by the anguished cry of a pregnant former slave’s desperate journey through an untamed forest. Le Cornec’s physical dexterity and impressive linguistic fluidity give these shifts emotional bite, and her motif of “filling the gaps” in silenced histories lands with genuine pathos. Yet the very density that makes Amazons feel urgent also leaves it gasping for cohesion. Story strands pile up – citizenship oaths, climate grief, social-media satire – and the transitions don’t always earn their gear-changes. A late chorus of ancestral names should thunder; instead, it feels wedged in after an earlier, lighter gag about creepy conquistadors.

Still, the performer’s sheer charisma steadies the ride. She wields humour like a machete, hacking space for heavier reflections, and the meta-live-stream conceit offers deft commentary on who gets to speak and who is merely buffered. Trim twenty minutes or let a director impose clearer architecture, and Amazons could roar. As it stands, it’s a passionate, idea-rich solo that dazzles in flashes but flickers in focus.

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Discover the real Amazon (not the online store!) Plant-sitting and live-streaming from her friend's flat, Gayara unearths the untold history of her Amazonian ancestors, from those who watched the first Europeans lay claim to her land to the women fighting to defend the forest today. Buckle up for a gripping new show by the winners of the Guimarães Rosa Institute Award 2025. Previous work: 'Connected to me viscerally and at so many levels' ***** (Scotsman on Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida!). 'Hypnotic' ***** (The Times on Camille Claudel). 'Emotionally powerful and aesthetically beautiful' ***** (Broadway Baby on The Other).