“Homosexuals Learn How To Lie Before They Even Learn How To Love”: Armando Babaioff On Being Tom at the Farm

Ahead of the arrival of Tom na Fazenda at the Barbican, the Brazilian actor talks to Man About Town about the process of bringing this story to international audiences and the inherently political nature of artistic expression. 

Don’t let the glitz and glamour of theatre’s storied walls fool you. Beyond the blinding lights, cheering crowds and (hopefully) critical acclaim, bringing a play to the stage is very much a labour of love. In some cases, like that of Recife-born actor Armando Babaioff, it becomes the work of a lifetime. At the height of his career in 2017, when he was already an established television actor in Brazil, he came across a project that would go on to become the most significant of his career: a reimagining of Michel Marc Bouchard’s queer play Tom at the Farm.

“In the original text, Tom à la ferme, Michel Bouchard writes something that really stayed with me, which was that ‘homosexuals learn how to lie before they even learn how to love.’ I know exactly what that feels like,” he tells Man About Town. Originally set in rural Quebec, the story offers an unsettling look at the consequences of a patriarchal system. Yet, over the course of its ten-year run, its themes have remained as urgent as ever.

Following Tom’s journey to the countryside after the death of his lover, the play takes audiences into a world of grief, homophobia and oppression. Its sparse staging invites viewers to imagine the setting in which this violence unfolds, opening up a wider reflection on how one man’s story speaks to universal struggles. In Babaioff’s adaptation, the play is performed in Portuguese, with the stage stripped bare save for a covering of the farm’s mud. For two hours, there is nowhere to hide.

Like many artists and activists before him, Babaioff is a dreamer, one who understands the power of hope. Having spent the past decade touring with Tom na Fazenda, he is now looking to the future: to the enduring power of storytelling and the possibilities of expanding Brazilian theatre’s reach. He hopes that audiences leave the theatre with more than the memory of a performance, taking the play as a starting point for conversations about the issues that continue to shape our society.

Following a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Babaioff now brings Tom na Fazenda to London’s Barbican, where he sits down with Man About Town to discuss the process of bringing this story to international audiences and the inherently political nature of artistic expression. 

Armando, thanks for chatting with us. Where are you speaking to us from, and how has the lead-up to your London performances been?

I’m in Brazil right now, in Camaçari, Bahia performing Tom na Fazenda. We just came from Feira de Santana, and our next stop is New York. Everything we’re experiencing and everything that is happening with this play is only because we’ve been doing this for ten years. It has been a long process of building to this; we’re only going to London because last year we were at the Edinburgh Fringe. We only went to Edinburgh because we did an European tour beforehand, and we only did that tour thanks to a successful run in Paris, which was the result of going to the Avignon festival. 

This play has been running for ten years and it hasn’t aged a day, and that’s because the world keeps feeding Tom na Fazenda, the world keeps feeding us information that as actors makes us believe that the need for art in the discussion of issues that are very relevant to our society is evergreen.

Building on that, why do you think this story has remained so relevant over the years? Tom na Fazenda has endured through some of Brazil’s most turbulent recent years, but it also touches on something universal.

We know what is happening in our country, but it’s not necessarily a Brazilian story in the sense that international audiences expect something very specific in relation to what Brazil is. These international audiences are usually surprised, because whilst it is a play performed in Portuguese, and reflects the situation in the country, it also shows that these issues are present all over the world. The play has a very sparse scenery, and it relies on the audience’s imagination to compose the environment in which the story takes place, and through that invitation to participate through imagining, the audience enters the story. I noticed this when we first brought Tom na Fazenda abroad to Montreal in 2018, and it made me question why Brazilian theatre hasn’t spread internationally as much. 

I think the theatre is the space where the artist really comes together with the audience, and with Tom na Fazenda, we are able to break barriers and approach a variety of issues in a way that is very accessible. The text is incredibly universal. At the end of the day, it’s a story about a dysfunctional family. I think that a lot of the invites we’ve had to perform in Europe came as a response to this wave of extreme right politics which we are seeing around the world. One thing I’ve realised as we’ve performed in different countries has been how Brazilian audiences have a different response to violence. In Montreal for example, I found that using a slur is enough to shock an audience, whereas in Brazil for our version of the story we had to be a lot more physical.

Is there a sense that we’ve almost become desensitised by our overexposure to violence, and that you have to go to greater extremes to elicit certain reactions?

Exactly, there is a specific scene where I hang upside down, and that is written in the text but has never been shown in any staging of the play, and we made that creative choice because it was the only way to communicate a level of violence. In Brazil, it’s common to hear slurs, to be policed to not act a certain way, at least that was my experience being young and gay in Brazil, and so it was shocking to me to arrive somewhere and realise through the audience’s reaction that we had normalised a certain type of violence. In the original text, Tom à la Ferme, Michel Bouchard writes something that really stayed with me, which was that “homosexuals learn how to lie before they even learn how to love.” I know exactly what that feels like. You feel inadequate before you even start to understand the world, you start policing yourself. Theatre really saved me, I started studying theatre at school when I was 11, it was a required subject, and it showed me the world. I come from a very simple family, my mother is 80 and works as a seamstress in Olaria, but she was always very encouraging, so I have this crazy dream to bring this play, and Brazilian theatre, to the world.  

I wanted to ask you about bringing Tom na Fazenda to London. Theatre is a big part of the cultural landscape here, as is consuming art more broadly. There’s also a significant amount of funding allocated to the arts. How much of a challenge has it been to sustain this production over the past decade, and how important do you think international recognition is in creating opportunities for Brazilian theatre back home?

The play was sponsored in 2017 for the opening, and that funding covered three months which included the rehearsal and the runtime. After that initial run we realised that this play had a lot of potential, and at the same time that we could stage it in any theatre, and that’s when I really started to chase it. I realised we had this really special piece in every aspect, in terms of artistry and work and I wanted to give it continuity. I decided to invest in Tom na Fazenda and I have been able to give the people who work on the show something that is so rare in our industry, which is stability. 

Everyone receives a monthly salary, regardless of how many performances we have that month. So I have to find a way to put on the production and sell tickets in order to keep it going. From 2017 to 2023 we didn’t receive any additional funding, and in 2023 I left TV Globo [the country’s biggest broadcaster] and took nine people to France for the Avignon Festival with the hope that if things went our way, we’d be seen by theatre programmers who would book the show. I had to go to therapy because I was so anxious at this time, I had made a huge personal financial investment, I did something no sane person would have done. If I hadn’t taken that plunge, I wouldn’t have had all of these experiences and I’d have been the most frustrated person in the world if I hadn’t seen how far I could take it. Through booking Avignon, I got in touch with some people, and before we even got there the Theatre Paris-Villette had already booked a 28 day run, and it had a great reception. That trip to Avignon then yielded a five month long European tour across 27 cities. The plan to go to Edinburgh Fringe almost fell through until Anthony [Alderson] from The Pleasance Theatre stepped in and I went to Brasilia and we got support from the government in a way we hadn’t had before. 

I’ve had so many people come to me after a performance to tell me their stories and how they see themselves in Tom. There’s a scene in the play where the mother reads her late son’s diaries, and I had a boy tell me that he ran away from home and how he’s wondering if his mother is reading his diaries. There are so many stories like that. I was in Belém do Pará, and there was a boy selling sweets in the parking lot of the theatre, and he told me that he had never been inside and I asked him if he wanted to come to a performance.  Him and his friend showed up that evening all dressed up, and the next day his mother came to talk to me and told me that she’s a gay woman and when her son came home from the play it was the first time in her life that she was able to talk to him about her sexuality. Tom na Fazenda isn’t just about homophobia, a lot of people see themselves in the story because they have also felt silenced and oppressed or experienced violence for a variety of reasons, this play at its core explores the repercussions of the patriarchy. The play doesn’t have a happy, hopeful ending, it really poses as a starting point for a conversation once you leave the theatre, and hands over that responsibility to the audience. 

Tom at the Farm (Tom na Fazenda) opens on 13 October at the Barbican Theatre, running until October 17. More info here.