LAHORE, Nov 23: Love has the power to create beauty and happiness out of nothing but hate, embodied in war, can destroy everything. This is one of the many messages intended to be communicated through the ‘Stories of the waste’, a one-act puppet comedy by Teatro De La Plaza group, being presented as part of the World Performing Arts Festival 2005 at the Alhamra Cultural Complex.

The play, directed by Julio Pompeo, is an attempt to highlight the issues of ecology and peace in a very simple but effective manner.

The performance opens with a scene of a street littered with household waste, comprising empty card boxes, used bottles, plastic bags, pieces of tin, etc., reminding the local audience of quite a familiar atmosphere to identify with.

A man with a push-cart, played by Hector Lopez Girondo, enters the scene and starts picking ‘useful’ items from the waste. Soon he finds an old radio which stirs his imagination and, in a fit of creative frenzy, he starts arranging waste items on the stage which soon gets transformed into a model of a small sub-urban locality with a few houses, a mill, a nearby field, complete with a harvester and a grazing cow.

All this waste world is set in the backdrop of mountains from where a plastic-bag river flows.

Two puppet characters, a man and a woman, are introduced into the set. A love affair begins amid cheerful music from the radio, and the place wears an air of gaiety and mirth. However, the serenity of the habitat is soon disrupted by the shrieks of war sirens. Bomber jets and guns made of used bottles turn the small dwelling into a mess again. Mournful background symphonies add to the gloom of the scene.

Girondo, the sole performer, says he is basically a professional actor who after being inspired by a puppet performance decided a career shift and became a puppeteer. His training as an actor helped him a lot in performing with puppets, whom he lends his voice and appropriate body language.

He joined the company in 1991 in Argentina, from where in 2000 it shifted to Brazil. He says there is a well-established tradition of puppet theatre in Argentina where the company used to perform in schools, clubs and hotels. —FAISAL IQBAL