THEATRE REVIEW

OCTOBER 2025 | Volume 256

 

Carmen Aguirre’s new play, produced by the Electric Company at The Cultch, is a love letter to revolutionary politics, but with an asterix. Fire Never Dies asks the difficult question of how an artist can live a life devoted to political radicalism yet still be true to her art and her own emotional life. Italian photographer Tina Modotti (1896-1942) is Aguirre’s test case.

The play offers mixed messages in response to its central question, but those messages are never less than compelling in this beautifully acted, visually gorgeous production, directed by Aguirre.

In her first professional role, recent Studio 58 grad Marianna Zouzoulas is marvelous as Tina. With a face straight out of a Renaissance painting she handles Modotti’s journey of exhilaration and heartbreak with the facility of an old pro. Accompanying her in every scene, resplendent in a blood-red dress (one of Carmen Alatorre’s vivid costumes), Melissa Oei plays Modotti’s heart, dancing around her with the personal joy and physical passion that Tina mostly devotes to the cause and the masses.

The play begins at the moment of Tina’s death in 1942, mateless and childless, when her heart challenges her: why didn’t you cultivate your art more fully, and your personal life? Why didn’t you LIVE? In the flashbacks that ensue, Tina’s answer is always the same. Her entire life was lived for the people, the struggle, the revolution, and that was all-consuming.

But we see that wasn’t entirely true. In the time she spent in Mexico City in the 1920s, surrounded by revolutionary artists like Diego Rivera (Matheus Severo), Xavier Guerrero (Brian Martinez) and Frida Kahlo (Ximena Garduna), Tina flowered. She danced and drank, made love and did some of her finest work as a photographer under the influence of American master Edward Weston (Praneet Akilla).

We see all this against the stunning backdrop of Candelario Andrade’s media design: Modotti’s black-and-white photos in huge blown ups, or Rivera’s colourful, densely populated murals.

Tina’s most intense love affair, with the Cuban revolutionary Julio Mella (Akilla), ends badly, as does her experience in the Spanish Civil War where she shares the battlefield with Hemingway and Bethune. 

Ultimately, the revolutions to which she has devoted herself since the poverty of childhood (her mother, played by Tasha Faye Evans, is a looming figure) all fail. Is the struggle itself enough?

Aguirre has put together a crack team of designers. Along with Alatorre and Andrade, John Webber’s chiaroscuric lighting, Evan Rein’s jazzy, sometimes anachronistic music, James Gnam’s light-hearted choreography and Shizuka Kai’s unfussy open set all contribute to this memorable portrait of the artist and her world, which was never enough and often too much for her.

 

 

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