The forklift

Wearing suits and guns, two co-workers wait for the guy they have to kill to arrive. They don't know who it is. They don't care either. They are alone in a room, an underground that could be any place, but never cozy. In the background, a forklift delivers messages from someone who watches and listens to them, without them being able to see him, and who appears to be the person who placed the order. As the wait lengthens, the tension grows and the conversation increasingly becomes a confrontation.

This is the plot of The Forklift, a work that the Englishman Harold Pinter wrote in 1957, when he was barely 27 years old and there were still almost 50 years left before he won the Nobel Prize. Claudia di Girólamo read it when she was studying theater and it obsessed her ever since. Now he premieres it at GAM, respecting the original text in each word, not only those said by the actors, but also those that Pinter used to describe the movements and gestures of the characters.

"The play that he plays in the indications of gestures and movements speaks as much about them as his texts. I discovered that the gestures accounted for what is not said and it did not seem fair to leave them aside," says the director. That didascalia also defined the choice of the cast, because the actors had to have “a great sense of humor to choreograph almost clown routines.”

This is how he summoned Antonio Campos, his son, along with Álvaro Morales. Morales and Campos play the pair of former agents who have become hitmen. It is this work transition of the characters that sustains the reading of Claudia di Girólamo's work: "It has to do with what we experienced historically, with the dictatorship and how certain individuals were discarded with the advent of democracy. People who had direct participation in the dictatorship today are on the margins. They are people without any power, totally utilitarian in the system, who continue a fairly normal life, without any guilt. They are apolitical people, who have no conviction, have no utopia, have no sense of reality or of questioning what is happening. That seems very masculine to me, that they allow themselves to be carried away by a brute force, by an uncontrollable force of violence.” The hitmen watching her could have been DINA agents. “I am interested in these human remains that history drags along until it completely forgets them, because they are super uncomfortable places to visit, people that one does not talk about, however, they interest me a lot,” says Claudia. Campos and Álvaro Morales
Comprehensive design: Rocío Hernández
Musician: Miguel Miranda 
Videographer: Roberto Contador
Production: Katy Cabezas
Technique: Karl Hein