Manuelita centres a visually striking hyper-reality around a sexy, charismatic and multi-faceted female lead, and its playful, pacey and poetic interpretation of history will strike a chord with any intrigued by the question, “who wants to hear about the Madonna when you can hear about a whore?”
The play suggests that Manuelita's erasure from history is evident in both the public’s ignorance of her bravery, ambition and military prowess and in patriarchal history's neglect of passion, music, sex and dance in favour of dry military analysis. Writer and performer Tamsin Clarke plays Manuelita as a storyteller and proto-feminist, unhappy to be sidelined. She asserts not that she was Bolivar's lover but that he was hers. This theme of self-assertion is typified when she refuses to let the musician, Columbian guitarist Camilo Meniura, take centre stage. It is therefore fitting that Bolivar himself has a minimal role in the play, and the degree to which he regards her mind and not just her body is left ambiguous.
Clarke demands the audience's attention as she fills the stage, convincingly playing Manuelita throughout her life, in various guises of “the bastard, the beauty, the wife, the whore, the soldier, the loca.” She also uses excellent comic timing to provide humorous snippets of other characters. There is imaginative use of the stage and minimal propping: a chair transforms believably into a horse, among other roles.
At times, Clarke darts around the audience demanding our attention, admiration and compliance, although there is not a lot of audience participation required. The music fits perfectly, swiftly moving between triumphalism, despair and humour, echoing Manuelita's proclaimed need for dance, music and passion.
Manuelita centres a visually striking hyper-reality around a sexy, charismatic and multi-faceted female lead, and its playful, pacey and poetic interpretation of history will strike a chord with any intrigued by the question, “who wants to hear about the Madonna when you can hear about a whore?”
