Actor-producer Mónica Lopera and director Miguel Torres Umba talk London premiere of Colombian play ‘Goodbye’: “We all need to talk more openly about mental health, loneliness and connection”

One more year, Brixton House returns its flagship festival, championing new writing from diverse, international voices. Guillermo Nazara chats with the team behind the first English-language production of Alejandra Chamorro’s life-affirming play, discussing the challenges of reaching a culturally different audience and the difficulties Latin American and emerging theatre currently face in the London scene.

How does it feel to bring Goodbye to London as part of Brixton House’s Housemates Festival?

ML: It feels like a dream that has taken a lot of work to become real. Brixton House is such an important and vibrant space, a place that genuinely celebrates diverse voices and communities, and being welcomed into the Housemates Festival with a Colombian play feels like exactly the right home for this story. I am proud, excited, and incredibly grateful to be here.

MTU: It feels absolutely thrilling to bring a Colombian play that’s hugely successful in its home country, but also deeply universal, to a London stage. We also have a strong team behind it, starting with the cast: one of Colombia’s most exciting actresses, Mónica Lopera, and Samuel Anderson, who’s doing fantastic work in British TV and comedy right now.

Brixton House is a really exciting venue, and it makes perfect sense for us to be here: there’s the Latin American part of us, but also our team is multicultural with Jamaican, Caribbean, British, and European backgrounds. The venue becomes the place where we all merge, and that’s exactly what the show is doing too; bringing this extraordinary, universal play to a place and an audience that needs to be seen and represented, that needs to hear and feel these emotions.

What enticed you to take part in this festival?

ML: Housemates is one of the most exciting festivals for new work in London right now, and being part of it felt like the perfect platform for GOODBYE’s UK debut. But beyond the prestige of the festival it was really about Brixton House itself, a venue that champions exactly the kind of stories we are telling. A Colombian play about connection and mental health belongs in a space that genuinely understands why those stories matter. That is what enticed me.

MTU: London is lacking spaces right now where new work is taken seriously by venues, where it can begin. We’ve had more festivals in the past that gave work that starting point. Edinburgh Fringe is the obvious example: the avenue for a lot of work to be seen by programmers and theatres who might believe in it. Housemates Festival is a great platform for us to bring the work in front of an audience, and invite the wider industry in to see its value.

I’m also local to Brixton and connected to it in other ways: I run the Latinx Youth Theatre which we are running at Brixton House, so it has basically become a second home. It feels really special to be there every day, rehearsing and connecting with the venue.

What themes have you intended to explore and how have you done it?

ML: The themes at the heart of GOODBYE are connection, loneliness, love and what it truly means to be alive, and we explore all of them through dark comedy, which is the most powerful vehicle I know for difficult conversations. When you laugh your defences come down and suddenly you are open to feeling things you might otherwise protect yourself from. The play also opens a conversation about mental health in a way that never feels heavy or preachy. It trusts the audience completely, it does not tell them what to think or how to feel. It simply puts two extraordinary human beings in a room together and lets something unexpected happen between them.

MTU: The play opens up real conversations, with valid questions about why life matters, and about the decisions people can make. We’re not trying to give answers. We want to share the emotional journey of these characters as a way of opening up a conversation with the audience.

It feels important, especially in the UK, to talk about these things: life, loneliness, connection, community, death. Especially at a time when the social fabric seems to be being pulled apart. That’s how we’re doing it: connecting deeply with the material, while also bringing in a lot of lightness through comedy, through the characters and the situations they go through. I think that opens up real connection, the way it always does when laughter and tears sit in the same piece.

Do you think the show offers a distinctive vision into its themes due to its Latin American component/background?

ML: Absolutely, and I think in the most beautiful way. The play was written by a Colombian woman from Bogotá, and it carries a Latin American sensibility in the way it approaches these themes, with warmth, with humour, with a directness and an emotional openness that I think is very particular to our culture. We do not shy away from difficult conversations, but we also do not make them heavy. We find the light inside the darkness. And then there is the fact that I, a Colombian actress, am performing it alongside Samuel Anderson, a British actor of Jamaican heritage, in South London. The cultural mix that is already present in the room before the play even begins says something about what the story is trying to do. Connection across differences is not just a theme of Goodbye, it is the reality of the production itself.

MTU: The show offers a distinct vision because of the personal nature behind who wrote it and poured it into the world. It’s written by Alejandra Chamorro, a Colombian artist, writer and actress, and it carries all her sensibility and idiosyncrasy: being Colombian, living in  Bogotá, in a country and culture that’s naturally lively and joyful, but has also constantly faced hardship and tragedy. That fills the play with nuance, extreme emotion, and a particular way of seeing things.

There’s also a natural approach to death in Latin America that’s more open and present, with a deeper connection to it and a willingness to talk about it that isn’t always seen in Europe and the UK. So yes, there’s definitely a unique approach here.

The show was originally written in Spanish. Apart from the language, does adapting the show to English-speaking audiences entail any differences or challenges of any sort (e.g. different cultural background)?

ML: The biggest challenge was translating the humour, making it land for a British audience the way it lands for a Colombian one. Humour lives so specifically in language and cultural reference that a literal translation would never work. You have to find the equivalent, the joke that produces the same laugh, the same recognition, the same release. Beyond the language, the play is surprisingly universal. The themes, loneliness, connection, love, bureaucracy, need very little adjustment because they speak to something fundamentally human.

Where I did have to make choices was in grounding certain moments in a British context so the audience never felt a distance between themselves and the story. Small things, a reference, a rhythm, a turn of phrase, that make it feel like it belongs here without losing its Colombian soul. That balance between fidelity to the original and freedom to make it live in a new language is the real art of adaptation. And I am very proud of how that process turned out.

MTU: The opportunity is the universality of the subject matter. It’s so universal that we’ll all connect with it, so by finding those universal moments, we connect with an audience regardless of where they’re from. There’s also the personal connection each actor brings to their character, which will land with audiences too, especially at Brixton House, where the audience is genuinely diverse. A British audience, especially in London and South London, is rich and multicultural, and understands the world through people’s different roots and backgrounds. So there’s real potential to tell this story in a meaningful way that allows people to connect with it deeply, through the comedy and the universal emotional themes.

We’re also staging it very differently from the original production. Theatre is special because it’s the actor’s place, and the way our actors are bringing the show to life is unique, but it’s also about immediate connection. Theatre is a sensory and visceral medium, and that’s what makes it exciting.

How would you describe the presence of the Latino community in the current London scene?

ML: The Latin American community in London is vibrant, creative and growing, and I think we are at a really exciting moment where our voices are starting to be heard more loudly in the cultural conversation. There are incredible Latin American artists, musicians, theatre makers and filmmakers building something significant here. But honestly, there is still so much more space to fill. We are underrepresented on British stages and screens relative to how present and how embedded we are in this city. London has one of the largest Latin American communities in Europe; and yet, our stories are still relatively rare in mainstream culture. That is exactly why Goodbye feels so important to me. Every Colombian story that finds its way onto a London stage makes the next one more possible. We are not just making a play, we are opening a door.

MTU: The Latin American community is thriving. We’ve spent a few generations now carving out space in London’s cultural industries, and that space is slowly growing. There are still challenges, particularly around giving venues and gatekeepers evidence that there’s a thriving audience, not just great artists making the work, but people who want to walk into theatres, buy tickets and consume the culture. It’s fertile ground.

There’s great work happening, artists winning awards, festivals starting up, and more Latino actors appearing on TV and film. We’re still a long way from the representation we need and deserve, but we’re on the right track. Having a show like this here, with a cast that’s already prolific, just adds to that presence. It’s an exciting time, and there’s more work to do, but we’re moving in a good direction.

What particular creative challenges have you faced during the development of the show?

ML: The biggest challenge has always been finding the right people. When you are bringing a project like this to life, you need a team that believes in the story as much as you do. And we did, we found an incredibly talented group of people who have brought their whole selves to this work and made it what it is. Once that team came together everything started to flow naturally. The creative challenges become so much smaller when you are surrounded by people you trust completely.

MTU: Mostly it’s been about parameters: time, and the requirements that come with putting on a show as part of a festival, as opposed to on its own in a venue. A festival needs to stay diverse and accommodating to everyone taking part, and also parameters are limited. But those parameters are also opportunities. They push us to find something new, to find solutions we might not have reached otherwise. So the short timeframe and the festival context have been the main challenges, but also a great opportunity to do the work.

Are there any highlights in the show that you’d like to flag?

ML: Performing alongside Samuel Anderson is a highlight in itself, he brings such intelligence, charm, humour and warmth to this role that every moment on stage with him is a joy. Watching him find William is something very special.

MTU: We have an extraordinary cast: Monica and Sam are both extremely talented, experienced and very funny, and that’s a massive highlight on its own. Beyond that, the creative team is strong across the board. Ivan Guevara, director and founder of Classico Latino, composed the music for the show. He’s an extraordinary musician who combines Latin American music with a traditional trio classical style, and we’re honoured to have his music in the show. Tim McQuillen – Wright on production design, Harvey Ebaggie  on Lighting design, and Amir Salim on sound design. Diana Bermudez also features through a voiceover in the show; she’s another prolific Colombian actress in the UK. It’s a show peppered with a lot of goodness and richness.

How would you define the show’s message, if there’s any?

ML: If I had to define it in one line, connection saves lives. Not in a grand or dramatic way but in the small, unexpected, human way that these two characters find each other. The play does not preach, and it does not offer easy answers. It simply opens a conversation about what it truly means to be alive, about loneliness, about love, about the desperate human need to be seen by another person. And it does all of that through comedy, which I think is the most honest and courageous way to approach these themes. The message is ultimately one of hope. Not the loud, obvious kind, the quiet kind that arrives when you least expect it.

MTU: For me, it’s about how far we go for life, whether we’ve lived enough. Have we done everything we can to live? Are we living fully, every single second? Are we really enjoying life to the extent we could be? That’s the question at the heart of the show for me, and it’s one we can all ask ourselves.

Why come see Goodbye?

ML: Come and see Goodbye because you will laugh more than you expect, feel more than you anticipate, and leave the theatre thinking about it long after the lights come up.

Come because it is a Colombian story on a London stage, something rare and worth celebrating. Come because Samuel Anderson is extraordinary in it. Come because a dark comedy about life and death and unexpected love does not come along very often.

And come because we all need to talk more openly about mental health, loneliness and connection, and Goodbye does that in the most human, funny, and completely unexpected way.

MTU: Because it’s an extraordinary piece of theatre that will touch you deeply. It’s going to challenge you emotionally and open up a conversation that’s genuinely needed, but it’s also hugely enjoyable and moving as a piece of theatre. It will have you laughing, crying, pondering, questioning life, and loving it.

Promotional picture credit to Misha Novak.

Goodbye will play as part of Brixton House’s Housemates Festival, which runs from 1 to September. All shows and tickets are available on the following link.

By Guillermo Nazara