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When a relative is a snake

Behind Fu Manchu may be Freud. This is what playwright Alan Ayckbourn insinuates in Snake in the Grass. Alan is English like Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu, the enigmatic criminal mastermind. The British are masters of the genre, from Arthur Conan Doyle to the legendary Sherlock Holmes, through Rohmer to Agatha Christie, who achieved the celebrity of pop star.

None of them, however, wanted to go beyond intelligent and well-written entertainment, while Ayckburn uses the detective plot as a pretext. The spectator can either have the pleasure of being scared to death and leaving the theater relieved, or taking home questions of a psychoanalytic nature. Because in the play nothing is "elementary, my dear Watson". The gears of action are in those shadows of the mind that gave Dr. Freud.

In the play, there are two sisters who hate each other, an inheritance and a former maid who knows inconvenient things. Killing her is as obvious as the butler being the killer, but this cliché can be turned into a voice in the dark. Threat. Ayckbourn is clear: "The ghosts are within us, born of a past that continues to haunt us, repressed memories that become nightmares of our imagination, that wander inside our heads when we lie in the dark." There's all Alfred Hitchcock, in fact another Englishman. The filmmaker understood feelings of guilt. Because blame and demands dominate the text amid resentment and a spark of madness. If a double dose of black humor is added to this tangle of surprises, then we have something really good; and that's what Ayckbourn offers.

The sisters retrace a family journey in which paternal rejection and childhood competition are equal in treachery. In the background of the domestic war, one or another friction between social classes emerges. Valid for any time and place. In this aspect, the show is closer to experimental groups and far from a mere commercial pastime.

They are artists in tune with the "new theatricalities" and "collaborative processes" (read an attempt at a "new theater", so to speak) that thrive ardently in the performing arts, but without any fear of returning to the traditional form of the consecrated text and on the Italian stage. You can also innovate with old rules and formulas.

The same thing happens in the detective novel. After the crimes of Fu Manchu, pure imagination, came the ideological thriller by John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), psychopathy under bourgeois normality in the masterpieces of Patrícia Highsmith (with the amoral Ripley) and, more recently , the Swedish Henning Mankel who, in Faceless Assassins, addresses the xenophobia that infiltrates one of the most prosperous and democratic European nations. Gives you something to think about.

In these plots, cinema has an advantage thanks to the resources of close-ups, cuts and editing with special effects. One of director Alexandre Tenório's feats is precisely to impose cinematic rhythm and atmosphere to his production with a skillful combination of sounds and lights in a setting full of the inevitable symbols of suspense and/or terror (undergrounds, trapdoors, smoke). Nothing, however, would work without an adequate cast in the precise intensity between parodic histrionics and fierce realism. This is what Lavínia Pannunzio, Alejandra Sampaio and Cristina Cavalcanti do perfectly. Beauty of talent tuning.

With an insolent demeanor and a nervous manner, Lavínia holds back the beginning of the show, which doesn't seem to want to take off, and then unfolds into unusual and fun attitudes. Alejandra intelligently makes the most of her role. Knows how to transmit threats. Cristina Cavalcanti is brilliant in the composition of the woman who slowly dismantles between alcoholic aggressiveness, physical decay and insanity. The three establish a delirious atmosphere, with heavy irony that indicates there is something more submerged in those events. If Freud explains it, The Serpent in the Garden complicates it with amusing cruelty.

by Jeferson Del Rios , for O Estado de São Paulo