| Summary: | Revisiting the pointless Falklands war for the stage, over three decades after it took place, was a very timely endeavor for the Argentinean director Lola Arias. By comparison to the larger and more devastating wars of our time, the Falklands conflict was a minor incident in international military history. However, it had a high toll for both nations involved—and all for a futile, absurd cause. By recruiting three Argentinean and three British veterans who actually fought in this war, Arias lets a polyphony of remembered experiences from the conflict rewrite the story from the point of view of individuals who actually confronted each other in the battlefield and had to reconsider afterwards their position vis-à-vis their own nation and government and the rest of humanity. The rehearsal period (longer than the actual duration of the war) and the performance itself brought up a real “minefield” of traumatic memories and repressed emotions which kept reeling and reformulating the stories shared among the veterans and narrated to the audience. Arias combined authenticity with psychoanalytic techniques, devised theatre with personal narrative, digital technology with live music and she trained her recruited war veterans enough to change crude documentary drama into participatory theatre. The paper will make a twofold analysis of the production, on the one hand focusing on the idea of nationhood and identity and on the other hand examining the efficacy of the specific form of verbatim theatre aesthetic employed.
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