memory theatre, intergenerational memory, multidirectional memory, Uruguay, child exile, metatheatre
At the end of Misericordia (2024), playwright Denise Despeyroux appears on stage in a yellow dress to watch an interview with herself as a child in Montevideo during the 1983 “Voyage of the Children”. The interview is projected onto the façade of a geometrical house, erected centre-stage in the Valle Inclán Theatre in Madrid, transforming it into a memory site for the Uruguayan experience of dictatorship, exile and return/non-return. Staged from the perspective of an encounter with childhood memory, Misericordia is the first play to explore commemoration of the flight in order to address the political, cultural and identitarian legacy of exile in the face of the impact of state terrorism. This article sets out to read the play as a form of child exile-writing as well as a device for interrogating different approaches to representing “difficult pasts” (Delgado et al 2024).