Review – Book of Loco

The Book of Loco is a chronicle of madness. With each story Alirio Zavarce elucidates on a type of insanity: the street-life of Caracas, Venezuela, the animal panic of a scramble for survival, or the Rational Madness he sees in bureaucracy and war.

There is, likewise, madness in the show’s method as Alirio screams and bellows, dances and kicks, runs about the stage and pulls at his hair. The Book of Loco flies along with tempo and spittle, bouncing from tale to tale as Alirio invites the audience to share in his stories, with the direction, set design, video, sound and lightning working ingeniously well to set alight the melodrama.

The Book of Loco can be a little trying, though, indulging in false starts and asides which aren’t always justified in the pay-off. Early on, for example, Alirio bullies the audience to accept his fairly sophomoric contention that money only has abstract value. It’s a point that serves the story, but it’s a lot of sound and fury for not much significance. And he’s not always a gracious story-teller, especially to his ex-wife. He recounts a visit to Singapore, after which he learnt she had cheated on him, where he compares her infidelity to an act of terrorism.

Though he later defines that word as violence for political ends, which he more reasonably equates with state warfare, he still yells about how she brought their relationship crumbling to the ground like the twin towers. I doubt her affair was the sole catalyst for the breakup of their marriage, but regardless his personal anguish is not the tragedy of two-thousand deaths. Despite this calculated misuse of poetic licence, and some thin conclusions, The Book of Loco makes for ambitious and stirring theatre.