Frida Kahlo: Viva La Vida

She plays a woman who turns her body into her great artistic subject after it consistently lets her down.

Humberto Robles' play has the artist celebrating the Day of the Dead and enticing Death to embrace her with as much passion as her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera.

Mind you, she desperately hopes that Death will prove a more constant companion than did Rivera, easing her from the pains of her treacherous body rather than causing her more pain by being treacherous with any beautiful woman who crosses his path.

Le Cornec leaps around the small, crowded stage as well as Kahlo's broken body will allow, gesticulating with her stick, berating her limbs, mourning her losses, creating a baby out of her leg and pulling off coverings to reveal significant items in her life. Most of these coverings are white but one is blood red. By the end, with them all spread around, the littered space seems to show us her eviscerated body, almost as though she has literally spilled her guts out to us.

Not that this is a depressing piece; the performance is too high-energy and full of volatile life for that. A lot of it is funny, too. She displays a nice line in vituperative scorn, mostly directed at New York, European intellectuals, surrealist thinkers and anyone who regards her as Mrs Rivera.

While not denying her own affairs, male and female, she expresses herself forcefully on the subject of Rivera's many dalliances. To keep both sorts in the audience's mind a discrete skull was held by my neighbour in the front row, signifying the other great male love of her life, Leon Trotsky. I was given the large, flashy, glitzy skull that signified Rivera.

In spite of being on the receiving end of some passionate pleadings and some searing sarcasm, I count it a privilege to have played, in however minor a way, the person who was, in spite all his infidelities, the man Frida Kahlo clearly regarded as the passion of her life and her only true equal as an artist.

This encounter with Kahlo was like experiencing a fizzing, spectacular firework display, one that shook up all my emotional juices.

Reviewed at Edinburgh Fringe 2008.