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'You think he's some cowboy from the wild west? You think he's from the past? Wake up man. He's from the future ... the future of the whole stinking world.'
Half an hour alone with your worst fears and wildest dreams. No help, no witnesses, and not a minute to lose. When the crisis comes-what would you do?
On a lonely desert road in the dead of night, highway police Angela and Romulo are a team-sort of. Romulo is a shambles. Angela's all business. But then they stop a speeding car and discover a man stripped to his undershirt and covered in filth.
Part thriller, part black comedy, part magic realism, this play is inspired by events leading to the capture of Mexico's most notorious drug lord in 2016. But Twenty Minutes With The Devil transcends its original context, opening instead onto a world that is everywhere and nowhere, in an idiom at once strange and familiar. It asks vital questions about law, politics and justice in the modern world. About the lives and decisions out of our control that seem to hold us all hostage. And the patterns that entrap us in other ways-our parents and children, myths and beliefs, childhood memories and fantasies of escape.
About the author
Luis Gómez Romero was born and raised in Mexico where, under the canopy of tangerine and lemon sunsets, he learnt to love justice and beautifully crafted stories. In Mexico, he passionately worked for structuring peaceful alternatives to reduce the harm caused by violent drug prohibitionism. He turned to academic life believing it was his personal route to a serene and joyful Mexican Ithaca. Academia, however, eventually became his path to Australia, where he arrived in 2013. Luis is currently a senior lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Wollongong. In Australia, his academic work addresses the intersections between law, justice and culture, particularly in Latin American contexts. Luis is a frequent media commentator on Latin American law and politics. He has written with Desmond Manderson his first play, in collaboration with The Street Theatre, on a story that is both political and deeply personal, because the contemporary history of the violence unleashed by the Mexican drug war is also the story of Luis' Antipodean exile.
