Griselda Gambaro
Griselda Gambaro is an Argentine writer, whose novels, plays, short stories, story tales, essays and novels for teenagers often concern the political violence in her home country that would develop into the Dirty War. One recurring theme is the desaparecidos and the attempts to recover their bodies and memorialize them. Her novel Ganarse la muerte was banned by the government because of the obvious political message.
Gambaro is a celebrated playwright, and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982, as well as many other prizes.
Selected works in English translation
- The Camp by Griselda Gambaro. Play. Translated by William Oliver in 1971; first staged performance in UK in 1981 by the Internationalist Theatre company.The Impenetrable Madam X. Novel. Translated by Evelyn Picon Garfield. by Griselda Gambaro Information For Foreigners by Griselda Gambaro and Marguerite Feitlowitz. Contains 3 plays: The Walls, Information for Foreigners, and, Antigona Furiosa. Edited, Translated and with an Introduction by Marguerite Feitlowitz. With an afterword by Diana Taylor Saying Yes. Play. Sebastian Doggart, Nick Hern Books, 1996.Siamese Twins by Griselda Gambaro and Gwen MacKeith.
Selected performances in the United Kingdom
- In October 1981, the New Internationalist Theatre launched the English language premiere of Gambaro`s The_Camp_(1967 play) in London at the Africa Centre and York and Albany. The date was chosen to coincide with the publication by the IADA on the ongoing cultural repression by the Argentine regime, which also provided a list of disappeared artists and intellectuals. The play has been described "as coming from the allegorical theatre of oppression, written in a society in which brutality and censorship suppress democracy". Gambaro herself had gone into self-imposed exile after the banning of her novel Ganarse la Muerte in 1977.
- In September 2011, The Siamese Twins had its UK premiere directed by Mara Lockowandt and Jorge Perez Falconi for the Silver Lining Theatre and performed at Theatro Technis. Jonathan Lovett for The Stage noted that the UK premiere was "long overdue" and called it an "atmospheric production" that "weav comedy into menace, and vice versa". Howard Loxton for the British Theatre Guide wrote of Siamese Twins that, "on one hand this play is an outcry and a prescient warning about this the misuse of authority and fearful acquiescence before it and on the other a picture of the exploitation, cruelty and even torture that even partners or siblings can inflict upon each other."