Comala, Comala review – haunting and hallucinatory musical theatre from Mexico

If Juan Rulfo ’s magic realist novel Pedro Páramo has the feel of a séance, then so too does this music-theatre version by Mexico’s Pulpo Arts. Tightly packed in on three sides, a shot of mezcal in our hands, we gather closely around a stage only just big enough for the eight performers and their giant drums, plus accordion, fiddle, trumpet and piano. The story is less acted than spirited out of the ether.

That story concerns Juan Preciado (Stephano Morales), whose deathbed promise to his mother is to find his estranged father, Pedro. To do that, he must venture into the land of the dead and the ghost town of Comala. “Some towns just reek of misery,” someone says about a place that is “full of those who died and don’t know how to leave”.

In playwright Conchi León’s Spanish-language adaptation, past and present lap fluidly over each other, as Juan learns of his father’s depravity. He is a man who “rose like unwanted weeds” to rule over the place, bringing killing, rape and sex trafficking with him. Even the sweeter townsfolk seem to have been complicit as the rot spread through the whole of Comala. “It was the whispers that killed me,” says Juan enigmatically.

It is strange, hallucinatory stuff, not easy to pin down, all the more so in a production – based on an idea by co-creators Alonso Teruel and Alejandro Bracho – in which each actor/musician takes on several characters, one represented by nothing more than an animal bone. They do not so much tell a story as drift and dream their way through it.

In that same spirit of movement, the ever-present music by Pablo Chemor, with its spare bar-room simplicity, sometimes bubbles up into song – a suggestion that even in this dark and haunted place the possibility of beauty is not extinguished yet.

• At Zoo Southside, Edinburgh , until 25 August

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