“LACRIMA”
Caroline Guiela Nguyen
The Barbican 
Thursday 25th September 2025

LACRIMA is a play that fabricates a fictional story depicting the production process of a haute couture royal wedding dress. We learn about the levels of dedicated craftmanship it takes to produce a dress with such fictitious importance and ultimately, forces the audience to reflect on their own prejudice when it comes to class, privilege and indulgence. Using technology and projections, the characters that live internationally all connect through an imitation zoom. We watch the flimsy screen project very real and disturbing moment of human vulnerability and are left questioning the morality and ethics of the cross-continental power structures at play. 
    
It is a perfect study into fashions relationship with colonisation., an issue that hides so plainly in-sight. The embellished veil of the dress is outsourced by the couture house to a studio in Mumbai that produces the highest quality pearl embroidered fabrics. The studio is small, with one manager and one embroiderer, Abdul, an old and sophisticatedly talented man that spends long hours at a desk, deep in his practice. Their task, recreating the Avecon Veil, comes with many hurdles. But they innovate and elevate the craft to accomplish what the house is asking for in a way that would make it look and move as successfully as possible. Their intelligent innovations are shut down and the impossible task they are given obviously fails as per the nature of what was being asked from them. They knew, warned, not listened to and ultimately, blamed. Throughout all this commotion, the question of ethics is raised. Abdul is tasked out from the job over an eye inspection a month before the veil was to be completed by subjugation of the ethics standards upheld by the not-so-fictional crown. It is a heartbreaking phone call with Abdul unsure of what is being said between the boss of the studio and the princess’s representative because his translator is told not to translate. Due to the rapid deuteriation of his sight, Abdul's boss is told to immediately replace Abdul. There is tensions and angers, all completely validated by cause, and the whole theatre empathises with the imperialistic cruelty that Abdul and the studio has been subjugated to.  

At  least, that is what one would hope. 

 Audience reaction is a wealthy currency in totalling social tendencies. In a play that carries heavy colonial narratives you expect humour to be found in moment of relief - not moments of tension. Here, in this moment of despair, there seemed to be murmurs of laughter. To my surprise, people were finding an argument between the powerful and the powerless, well... funny. Lines delivered by the Princess’s representative that were patronizing and dehumanizing we met with laughter.  And by more than one person. I sat there in utter confusion of how, genuinely, as conversation in this form could have any form of comic relief. If anything, it was uncomfortable, but not in the way that made it awkward and that could be relived through a little giggle. It is here that I comprehended the power of fashion.  

Fashion - to many - is a farcical concept. It is for the rich, conceited, upper classes that have more money than they can handle. For them, anyone who is interested in fashion is automatically trivialized. How self-conceited do you have to be to really care about what you look like. On one side, this play completely reiterates this - the ridiculousness of the effort it takes to make one dress can make anyone with a brain take fashion lightly. But the actuality of this process is one we all take part in, whether you like it or not. We all get dressed, have clothes and fashion ourselves into who we think we are, but do you ever think about the implications of this? do you think about how you will be perceived? How these clothes got to you? How they feel? How were they made? The real question is, do you know? because I can guarantee you, the people that were laughing are ignorant to their own fashioning. One must be so far removed from the barely fictional colonial practice being presented to us to find it funny. The only rational answer for the laughter is that they are blinded by hyper-consumerism to be able to not empathise with what was going on stage. How could you find something so distressing funny? Well, if you thought it is not possible to the extent it is ridiculous. Until fashion is taken seriously, it will be impossible to open peoples eyes to the intersectional issues that uphold colonial powers because, it is one of the biggest contenders.   
  
Not a single piece of clothing can be made without human touch, even the simplest garment.   

So, what is the crime [LACRIMA] here? Is the nonsense of fashion, depicted by the time and effort it takes to produce one garment? Is it the crown, upholding a colonial ethical practice that serves them and not the people they impose it upon? Perhaps the dress itself, made through exploiting people's different lifestyles? or is it us, the consumer, loving the farcifies of fashion so much we spend money to watch a play about it?