Ten years after Minefield transformed the Malvinas War into a haunting piece of documentary theater, Argentine playwright Lola Arias is still asking the same question that started it all.
What does war do to the people who survive it?
On a call from Berlin, Arias told the Herald that the play — which returns to Argentina as part of the celebrations for the Buenos Aires Herald’s 150th anniversary — was actually sparked by a British invitation. In 2012, the Battersea Arts Center in London asked her and other artists to participate in a series called After a War aimed at reflecting on the 100th anniversary of World War I.
“As an Argentine woman raised in the 1980s, I started to think, what’s my relationship with war? And then Malvinas came up.”
Two years later, Arias premiered Minefield at the 2016 London International Festival of Theater. Featuring six war veterans from Argentina, the UK, and Nepal, who revisit their war experiences in a documentary/musical setting, the play was an instant hit and toured in almost 40 cities around the world.
