Upside down cuppa coffee, a web of relations

Review written by Magazine.HD, published on April 26th 2018

“Upside down cuppa coffee”, the first production by teatroàfaca, brings to the stage of the Comuna-Teatro de Pesquisa an extraordinary piece of alternating narratives with constant time jumps.

At the door, a colored card is distributed to each spectator and explained that it represents a coffee that we can drink later. Smiling, the audience enters behind the hostess and is led to a beautiful and simple scenic space: spread across the stage are enough white chairs to accommodate everyone present; there are small side tables with lamps scattered around the stage; some filament lamps hang from the ceiling and a table with two coffee machines delimits one side of the space. The public forgets the existence of the audience, sits on the stage and listens to some instructions. No, after all they are not indications. A manifesto perhaps?

“This is all absolutely real, it’s serious, but none of this really happened, okay? I guarantee you […] You will leave as you entered […] Time does not exist, only pause.”

No, it is already the dramatic text itself. “Upside down cuppa coffee” started from the moment we were welcomed and results in a piece that involves us body and soul, blurring the barrier between theater and a simple coffee conversation. It culminates in a complex and intricate work about itself, based on time jumps and with individual narratives separated by chapters. The different characters, who take their name from the actor who gives them life, reflect aloud about their past. They are the protagonists of their own stories but they are part of a diegesis larger than themselves: each one is an integral member of a global narrative that is transversal to all the other personas on stage. Each spectator is given undue attention, without their individual space being invaded: the characters tell them their story, look them in the eye and describe their close past while analyzing it. They seek public approval during the succession of stages of their logical reasoning in a search for distance between reality and fiction. At the same time, the viewer does the same, trying to uncover the speech given by the actors and put together all the pieces of the puzzle.

Each character does not see, hear, or feel the presence of the others. Although they are all on stage at the same time, each one reflects individually on personal adventures. The viewer is progressively given the power of omniscience, being the only one who has enough knowledge to understand how the pasts are related.

Temporal jumps are constant and the common pasts of the people are interconnected as the speech progresses, with the journey in each narrative being driven by the announcement of the beginning and end of different chapters through video projections. The viewer's attention travels equally from one persona to another, with no flaws in the construction of any of them or in the representation.

“Upside down cuppa coffee” contains well-constructed characters, excellently structured dramaturgically and, above all, exceptionally interpreted. The actors give an extraordinary performance, with vocal and body control that is difficult to find within professional theater, resulting in the construction of strong images on stage (mainly those drawn on stage by Júlia Valente).

It doesn’t take long for us to find ourselves involved in “Upside down cuppa coffe” and we only distance ourselves when we are forced to leave the room. The play ends and we don't even notice, we were taken by the rhythm of the narrative sequence and all the scenic elements that involved the staging.

teatroàfaca is a theater company based in Lisbon with the main objective of promoting and producing new writing and adaptation for theater in Portuguese. From April 25th to 28th at 9:30 pm and on the 29th at 4 pm they will be at Comuna – Teatro de Pesquisa to present “Upside down cuppa coffee“. Normal tickets cost €7.5, for show professionals, students and Gerador members the price is €5 and for €10 the public helps the company.

Created and directed by Afonso Molinar; starring Filipa Correia, João Gaspar, Júlia Valente and Rodolfo Major; audiovisuals by Stella Krämer Horta and lighting design by Gonçalo Morais.

It is important to closely follow the work of this innovative new company.