Tom’s boyfriend has just died. He’s never met his boyfriend’s family but nevertheless, dutifully heads for the family home to pay his respects. In the backend of rural beyond, he finds his boyfriend’s mother, Ágatha and her other son, Francis running an enormous and unwieldy cattle farm. Ágatha’s expecting Hellen, her son’s reported girlfriend. Turns out Ágatha doesn’t know that her son was gay.

This new staging of the cult Canadian play by Michel Marc Bouchard hotfoots its way to the Fringe, courtesy of theatre company Cena Brasil. Performed largely in Portuguese with English surtitles, this ‘Tom at the Farm’ relocates the action to rural Brazil, a country experiencing shocking levels of violence towards LGBTQ+ people. Tom as grieving lover provides a pretext to explore masculinity in all its forms. Francis epitomises a man who must hunt and gather, who is bound to the farm by duty, who had a crush on a girl once but now can only express himself through violence: even the mother he professes to love is written off with a little less tenderness than he gives to a cow. Brilliant performances and expansive, unflinching direction from Rodrigo Portella stretch the suspense tighter and tighter until the play reaches its final brutal ending.

It’s an incredibly physical production, played out in one of the largest Pleasance spaces at the EICC. Armando Babaioff is alarmingly convincing as Tom, the graphic designer doused in cologne, brutalised into forgetting himself and wanting only to belong. Francis (Iano Salomão) walks a careful line between brute, homophobic bully and a man who’s dedicated his life to defend a bunch of things that don’t exist. Ágatha (Denise Del Vecchio) is cold-blooded enough to have raised such a man though it’s equally clear that generations of societal expectations and ingrained discrimination are playing out under the unforgiving sun.

In a production that Peter Brook would be proud of, the stage is covered with the burnt ombre earth that characterises the farm fields. Lots of water gets thrown about. There’s a lot of spitting. The lighting design (Tomás Ribas) artfully mirror’s Tom’s descent from someone who irons his shirts to a man bathed in (cow’s) blood and at peace in his mucky vest. This is powerful stuff that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but if you’re up for two hours of men wrestling with what it is to be a man, you’ll be in awe.

‘Tom at the Farm‘ is at Pleasance EICC – Lennox Theatre until Sun 24 Aug 2025 at 15:30