After more than 600 performances around the world, the internationally acclaimed Brazilian production of Tom at the Farm is finally making its London debut. GLL speaks to its adaptor, producer and leading man, Armando Babaioff, about hidden love, toxic masculinity and why this story feels more urgent than ever.
A man arrives at a remote farm for his boyfriend’s funeral, only to discover that the family knew nothing about their relationship. Surrounded by grief, silence and suspicion, Tom becomes trapped in an increasingly dangerous web of lies, suppressed desire and violence.
Based on Michel Marc Bouchard’s play, Tom at the Farm has travelled a remarkable distance since opening in a 63-seat theatre in Rio de Janeiro. Adapted by Armando Babaioff and directed by Rodrigo Portella, the visceral Brazilian production has captivated audiences across the world with its physical staging, mud-covered set and unflinching exploration of homophobia, patriarchy and the price of hiding who you are.
Now, almost ten years and more than 600 performances later, the show comes to the Barbican for its London premiere. Ahead of its arrival, we spoke to Armando about the deeply personal connection that first drew him to the play, the reactions it has received around the world and what he hopes London’s LGBTQ+ audience will take from it.
You acquired the rights, translated the play into Portuguese, assembled the creative team, produced the show and took on the role of Tom. What was it about this story that made you want to give so much of yourself to it?
I think I identified with it immediately. I first came across the play in 2014, through a friend who told me about Xavier Dolan’s film and mentioned that it was based on a play. I asked him not to tell me anything else because I wanted to find the text and read it for myself first. I found it that same night and read it in one sitting.
And something curious happened: as I was reading, I was already producing the play in my head. I was imagining who could play each character, who I wanted to direct it, how it might exist on stage. By the time I finished, I knew I wanted to tell that story.
Although the story was written in Canada, I knew that world intimately. Not necessarily that particular farm, but the mechanisms at work within it: silence, lies, fear, violence, the desire to be loved, and the need to hide who you are in order to continue belonging somewhere. And, to a greater or lesser extent, I recognised parts of my own story in it.
I felt called by the play.
So there wasn’t really a rational decision to take on so many roles. One thing simply led to another. I began translating it so that Rodrigo Portella could read it, got in touch with Michel Marc Bouchard, negotiated the rights, started putting the team together and, before I knew it, I had put practically everything I had into the project.
More than ten years later, as we prepare to bring the production to the Barbican, I still find it difficult to explain rationally. At the time, I simply knew I had to make this play.
The line “Homosexuals learn to lie before they learn to love” became an early inspiration for the production. Why did those words hit you so powerfully?
That line appears at the end of the preface Michel Marc Bouchard wrote for the play. So, before I had even started reading Tom at the Farm, I came across it. It is a warning about the story he is about to tell, but it is also a line I understand deeply. Because what I find in it is my own story.
How many times have you lied before you even understood that you were lying? How many times have you hidden something about yourself in order to be accepted, not to disappoint someone, or simply to stay safe?
I find it deeply disturbing to think that, for so many gay people, this lesson can come before love. You learn to protect yourself first. To measure what you say, to be aware of where you are, who you are with, how much of yourself you can reveal in that particular place. And that stays with you. It settles in the body.
And as a Brazilian, I know that this fear does not belong to the past. Violence against LGBTQIA+ people is still part of our reality. That line also made me realise that I could turn something that affected me personally into artistic material. I could use theatre to talk about it and try to bring that conversation to as many people as possible.
The play was originally written in Canada. When translating and reimagining it for Brazil, what did you want to preserve, and what needed to change?
I removed the climatic, geographical and cultural references that located the story specifically in Canada. I didn’t want Brazilian audiences to look at what was happening and see it as an exclusively Canadian issue. But I didn’t relocate the story to any specific place in Brazil either. I wanted to leave that open.
Michel Marc Bouchard’s text is remarkable as it is. It goes beyond the intimate drama of one family and speaks to issues we recognise in many places: masculinity imposed as a norm, the violence produced by silence, homophobia, the cost of hiding who you are in order to continue belonging somewhere, and patriarchy.
And for me, the farm is a very powerful representation of patriarchy. It is a place where ideas of land, family, inheritance, physical strength, power and a very rigid notion of what it means to be a man all come together. That can exist in Canada, in Brazil and in many other places around the world.
So I didn’t need to turn that Canadian farm into a specifically Brazilian one. The text is Canadian. The work we created from it is Brazilian.
Tom at the Farm began in a tiny theatre in Rio de Janeiro and has since reached audiences around the world. When did you first realise the production had become something much bigger than any of you expected?
I think it was in Paris, in 2023. We had already experienced some very important moments with the production, both in Brazil and abroad, but Paris was when I really thought: “What is happening with this play?”
We did a run of 28 performances at Théâtre Paris-Villette. A two-hour Brazilian theatre production, performed in Portuguese for a French audience. Performances were selling out, extra dates were being added, one after another, until we reached the largest audience the theatre had ever received for a single run at that point.
I think that was when I truly understood the scale that Tom at the Farm had reached. It was no longer one special night at a festival, or two or three performances in another country. This was a full run. People were talking about the show, recommending it to each other, coming back and bringing other people with them. The same word of mouth that had begun years earlier in that 63-seat theatre in Rio was now happening in Paris, in another language, in another culture.
It was incredibly moving to realise that. We had crossed an ocean, but something happening between the stage and the audience remained exactly the same.
You’ve said that the production hasn’t aged and has, in fact, become even more urgent. What feels more urgent about its themes today than when you first staged it in 2017?
It is the world that has kept finding new ways to make the play feel urgent. We are seeing far-right movements gaining ground in different parts of the world, hate speech returning to the centre of public debate, and rights that seemed to have been secured being called into question once again. As I answer this interview, we have just seen another far-right victory in a state election in Germany, while in Brazil we are approaching a presidential election that is deeply polarised between left and right.
Perhaps what frightens me most is the speed at which this can happen. I was a child of the 1980s. Back then, I was told that I was the future of the planet. And I believed it. I grew up believing that certain advances would be permanent, that society would always move forwards. Today I know that isn’t true. Rights can be taken away. Ideas and rhetoric that once seemed unacceptable can become normalised again. Prejudice can acquire a new language, a new justification, and reappear as though it were a legitimate debate.
You’ve described how “the farm merely changes location”. What different versions of that farm have you recognised while taking the production from country to country?
The system is the same. What changes is the farm that each person creates.
We don’t have a conventional set. There is no house, no barn, no fence, nothing that tells the audience: “this is the farm”. It is constructed in each spectator’s imagination. And that is very important to the production, because each person ends up placing the story somewhere they recognise.
When I say that “the farm merely changes location”, I’m talking less about geography and more about a structure that repeats itself: power relations, patriarchy, violence, silence, the rules about who you are allowed to be within a family. We have recognised that same system in every country where we have performed.
The farm someone imagines in Brazil is probably not the same farm someone imagines in France, Korea or the UK. But what happens inside it is recognisable anywhere. Somehow, everyone knows where that farm is.
The mud-covered, permanently unstable stage gives the production such a physical and unsettling quality. Where did that idea come from, and what does the mud represent to you?
The mud was Rodrigo Portella’s idea. He says that, at the beginning of the process, whenever he closed his eyes and imagined the production, he saw mud. It was from that image that our set designer, Aurora dos Campos, began to work.
The mud invites us into a constant state of instability. No matter how many times we perform the show, we never completely master that ground. It changes, reacts, interferes with our movement and demands our attention at all times. And that puts our bodies in a condition very similar to that of the characters: no one there is ever truly safe.
Over the years, I’ve heard many different interpretations of what the mud represents in the production, but I’m particularly drawn to the sacred and the profane that coexist within it. Mud is also primordial clay, connected to origins, to creation, but at the same time it is dirt, filth, something that stains, that contaminates. I like that contradiction: what can be the material of creation can also be something we desperately want to wash from our bodies.
Perhaps that is why I prefer not to define exactly what the mud represents. I like all those possibilities to remain mixed together within it.
The play explores homophobia and toxic masculinity, but also grief, desire, power and the need to belong. How important was it to resist giving the audience a simple villain or an easy moral conclusion?
The first thing is to realise that there is no monster. There are people. Then it is about finding the humanity within their contradictions, because that is what allows us to see the limits of the world we live in.
It is about taking the audience out of a comfortable position, provoking them, keeping them actively engaged, without allowing them simply to point at someone and say, “the problem is over there”. Because when you create a monster, you also create a safe distance between them and us.
The play offers no such distance. It draws us closer, implicates us and constantly puts us on a collision course.
After more than 600 performances, how do you keep Tom emotionally alive rather than slipping into something familiar, and has your understanding of him changed over the years?
Through listening. Theatre demands that you remain in the present. I may know every word, every movement, and exactly what is going to happen, but I don’t know how it is going to happen that night. The interplay with another actor is never exactly the same, I am never exactly the same, and the audience is never the same. So it is through listening that the production stays alive.
After more than 600 performances, there is a very deep memory of the production in the body, but that memory cannot become certainty. Listening is precisely what prevents that. A pause might last a little longer, a look might land differently, the silence of the audience might alter the rhythm of a scene. And we have performed this play in so many theatres, cities and countries, in front of such different audiences, that every performance requires us to rediscover it.
As an actor, perhaps my greatest challenge is this: to know the path intimately without deciding in advance how I am going to travel it that night.
This will be the production’s London premiere. What do you hope LGBTQ+ audiences in London will recognise in the story, and what would you like them to still be talking about after they leave the Barbican?
I hope LGBTQ+ audiences in London will recognise something of themselves in this story. Michel’s play begins with a very simple and very painful situation: a man loses the man he loves and, in the midst of his grief, discovers that their love has to remain hidden. I think we know, in different ways, what it means to have to measure what we say about ourselves.
But I wouldn’t want people to leave the Barbican thinking only about the violence. Tom at the Farm is also a play about desire, affection, and the need to love and be loved. And for me, there is something very powerful about taking the stage at a place like the Barbican and telling this story in Portuguese, with a Brazilian cast, almost ten years after we began in a 63-seat theatre in Rio de Janeiro.
I want that audience to be there. I want them to recognise themselves, to feel unsettled, to laugh, to be moved, and to keep talking about the show afterwards.
And perhaps I want one thing more: for London to want more of Tom at the Farm. I would love to see this production in the West End. After everything that has happened over these almost ten years, I’ve learned that it’s better not to put a full stop on this story.
From a tiny theatre in Rio to one of London’s biggest cultural stages, Tom at the Farm arrives carrying almost a decade of history with it. Raw, physical and politically urgent, this is queer theatre that wants to get under your skin, cover itself in mud and stay in your head long after the lights come up.
Whether London gives Tom his West End ending remains to be seen. For now, you can catch the production’s long-awaited London debut at the Barbican this October.
Tom at the Farm (Tom na Fazenda)
Dates: Tuesday 13 to Saturday 17 October 2026
Venue: Barbican Theatre, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS
Language: Performed in Portuguese with English surtitles
Running time: Approximately two hours, with no interval
Age guidance: 18+
Tickets: From £29
Book tickets and find full performance details at the Barbican website.
