'The Last Drop' review: Hamlet meets Brazilian housing rot — SkimNews
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- Dante Passarelli's "The Last Drop," part of Edinburgh fringe's São Paulo Showcase, borrows the opening and closing lines of Shakespeare's Hamlet and recasts its themes of madness, revenge and surveillance in a crumbling apartment block.
- Fernanda Zancopé as Cynthia and Ernani Sanchez as Gilberto play a long-bickering couple whose peeling-wallpaper flat is besieged by noisy upstairs neighbours, mouldy ceilings and construction corruption outside their window.
- Manás Theatre Lab's production, directed to claustrophobic effect by Passarelli and Zancopé with English surtitles, delivers stark commentary on class and inequality that the reviewer compares to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite.
- The 60-minute runtime is faulted for cramming another hour's plot into its final minutes, diluting the play's richly oblique atmospherics and sinister treatment of water as memory rather than cleansing.
- The play runs at Zoo Playground, Edinburgh, until 30 August, with the reviewer calling it a black comedy worth visiting even if you wouldn't want to live at the address.
Why it matters: The São Paulo Showcase's selection signals Edinburgh fringe programmers are broadening the international canon beyond the usual Anglo-American circuit, giving Brazilian domestic-realist work a stage alongside more obvious Shakespeare riffs. For theatregoers, the 60-minute runtime and Edinburgh run-through 30 August make it a low-commitment bet on a work the reviewer says is imperfect but atmospheric — Parasite-adjacent class horror via Hamlet, staged in a city where housing corruption is its own living scandal.
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