Guest Blog: Translator William Gregory On CUZCO at Theatre503

Why do we travel? This is one of the questions posed by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez's award-winning two-hander Cuzco, which opens at Theatre503 this week.

Sending a star-crossed couple on the road to Machu Picchu, one of Spain's leading contemporary playwrights asks them, and us, what it is we really want when we jump on a plane and head far from home.

"Tourists spend six months after work, every night, preparing for their holidays," says one half of the couple, played by Dilek Rose (alongside Gareth Kieran Jones), "so they can come to Cuzco and buy themselves some mystery".

Is that what we want? Does a trip abroad mean a voyage into the unknown, learning something about another place and culture - or are we really looking for ourselves? Is it the place we're going to that matters most, or the place we're escaping from for those two sacred weeks?

And what is 'travelling' anyway? Can we really be an authentic tourist? Is it possible to 'live like a local' or are we always tied down by the cultural and historical baggage we carry with us, along with the suitcases we've tried to cram into the overhead lockers?

The couple in Cuzco are from Madrid, visiting Peru, a country that was once part of their own nation's empire. Wandering the streets of the city as the altitude sickness takes hold, they cannot help but be disoriented by the architecture and language that, despite being on the other side of the world, is so similar to their own. Despite their best efforts, no amount of guided tours or books can fully account for the weight of the history that surrounds them.

But more than this, as they retreat to their hotel rooms, the trip also brings them face-to-face with realities closer to home.

As the years have passed, their love story has hit a bump in the road, and both have come to South America in the hope that this trip of a lifetime will reignite the passions of their own shared past.

Alas, everything conspires against them. Run-ins with tourists, encounters with the locals, even a cheery tag-along with a fellow Spanish couple, all knock their trip off-course. The results are by turns comic and tragic.

It is rare for plays from Spain, or indeed from any non-English-speaking country, to be programmed at a UK venue like Theatre503. Some say this is because British audiences can't 'relate' to such stories beyond linguistic or geographical barriers.

But, in the inescapable globalised world that Cuzco's characters stumble through, these barriers not only blur, they melt away. Two wanderers from Madrid catch a plane to a faraway city; a play flies through languages and lands in the UK; and, as if in a prophecy, a condor flies over a theatre - not above the Andes, but somewhere in London, not far south of the Thames.

Cuzco at Theatre503 23 January-16 February

Photo credit: Kieran Jones

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