TOM AT THE FARM
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
★★★★★
“The characters are flawed, magnetic, dangerous to love — yet, by the end, we do”
Federico García Lorca once wrote that duende is “a state of tragedy-inspired ecstasy” — a force that doesn’t live in the mind but in the marrow. It is neither style nor technique, nor even grace; it is the blood crying out through art. It seizes the performer from within and tears the audience open in response. It chills without asking permission, bends your breath, makes you weep or laugh without knowing why. You can’t explain it — you have to feel it.
Tom at the Farm has duende.
We step into the space: black polyethylene sheeting, cracked with dry clay; a single bare bulb swaying like an unblinking eye; fifteen buckets forming a ring around us. Amber light pools in the air like a half-remembered dream. In it, Tom and Agatha stand waiting.
This isn’t “fringe” in the usual, hurried sense. The dialogue is unhurried, Portuguese with supertitles, pared to the bone. The pace forces us to breathe the same air as the characters — and, at times, choke on it.
The design is exact, but never ornamental. It edges towards the expressionistic and feels emotionally surreal. Light and shadow carve out fragments of farm life and quiet decay. Like the bare bulb above, the production is stripped back, exposed, without a hint of flinch.
The story: Tom, a sleek urban advertising man, travels to bury his lover Guillaume in the rural soil that raised him. The family doesn’t know Tom existed, nor that Guillaume was gay. Francis, Guillaume’s brother, forces Tom into silence, protecting their grieving mother, Agatha.
From there, the descent begins: Tom and Francis circling one another in a dance of attraction, revulsion, and dominance. Seduction simmers, restrained but electric. Grief becomes violence; violence becomes intimacy. Both men are dragged under. The farm becomes a crucible, where truth burns and secrets rot like crops left untended too long.
This is theatre of the body as much as the word. Water splashes on plastic; clay turns slick; spit strikes the ground. The stage becomes a soupy mess — and so do we. Earth clings to skin and spirit, reminding us that we are born in mess, live in it, and return to it.
Overhead, the supertitles insist: Here things are real. And they are.
Confessions spill. Questions hang like low clouds: Sell the farm? Put the mother in care? The centrepiece is a dance — half courtship, half combat — closing the space between the men until nothing remains. Symbols surface: the lover’s cologne, eight journals, traces of what’s gone. Then Hellen arrives, bright in yellow and pink, and the balance tilts.
The characters are flawed, magnetic, dangerous to love — yet, by the end, we do. As Lorca might caution, these are the most potent and perilous loves: where pleasure and pain mix until you can’t tell them apart.
Michel Marc Bouchard’s Québécois text finds the pulse of Cena Brasil Internacional under Rodrigo Portella’s direction. Armando Babaioff’s Tom and Iano Salomão’s Francis strike like flint, each clash sparking both sexual tension and menace. Denise Del Vecchio’s Agatha and Camila Nhary’s Hellen stand in the gale of this male world — resilient, though changed by it.
The music doesn’t decorate — it drives, seduces, retreats. At times it leads the heart; at others it drifts faintly, like a radio playing somewhere just out of reach.
And the lighting — sharp, purposeful, never random. It illuminates, reveals, sculpts; it directs our gaze without wasting a beam. Whoever designed it, bravo.
In Lorca’s view, duende arrives when death is close — not literal death, but the risk of something breaking and never returning to what it was. Tom at the Farm lives in that risk. It leaves you emptied and fuller at once, marked and branded.
TOM AT THE FARM
Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Reviewed on 12th August 2025 at Lennox Theatre at Pleasance at EICC
by Louis Kavouras
Photography by Victor Novaes
