Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida

Humberto Robles’s play about Frida Kahlo reveals the egoism and the perverse imagination of the tortured Mexican painter, whose main theme was her own pain. It takes place on a stage of vibrant colours with a backdrop of a huge Kahlo double selfportrait. Objects covered in dust sheets are revealed to take us to new stages in Kahlo’s life.

Gael Le Cornec has an uncanny resemblance to Kahlo and plays her skilfully, mixing the flirtatious and the serious. She is also effective in capturing something of Kahlo’s sensuality and humour.

Kahlo’s narrative moves from her marriage on to her relationship with the surrealists, then to a trip to New York where she is teased by kids for looking like a circus freak. There is a powerful description of the bus accident in which she lost her virginity, her body pierced by a metal pole.

Although it is solidly directed by Luis Benkard, the subject matter might have warranted a more experimental approach to tap into Kahlo’s obsessions with her body, the grotesque and the idea of the double.