Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida

Frida Kahlo’s life was marked by ferocious struggle. Her resistance to suffering is in every portrait, "the artist who gave birth to herself". 

The program for Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida at the Old 505 attests that the play "reveals the woman behind the icon, the artist beyond the face printed on millions of bags, wallets, and other paraphernalia". We saw a kaleidoscope of Frida’s forms re-arranged for the stage. Kate Boukallil made an effort to capture some of Kahlo’s ferocity but the script and direction tend towards a flat recount. Flatness is the primary problem with this show, but it also failed to grapple with some rich lefty content that is essential to any contemporary re-telling of Kahlo. 

We are given only a whiff of her avid communism. She mentions going to a demonstration, makes a joke about free medical service, and shows us the hammer and sickle on her body’s plaster cast. Kahlo had a goddamn affair with Trotsky before denouncing him for his opposition to Stalin. She was embroiled in communism and to ignore that when searching beyond the gift shop tea towel is a problem.

Tequila bottles litter the stage and Boukallil seems to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking. The merit in this is regained when she delivers a strikingly self-aware line, down the barrel to an audience member: "I drink a lot." What wasn’t spoken about though was her lifelong drug addiction to cope with pain. What we didn’t see (and what we sorely wanted) was a human struggling with her own image of herself, not just her husband and her pain, but her existence. 

If you love Frida Kahlo, come and listen to her story again, but it’s not a dissimilar face to the one that your neighbour has on a tea towel over the oven.