It could be any Christmas reunion. There are the verbal rallies that turn into bickering arguments. There is the tipsy auntie who pops in from next door and offends everyone. There is the mixture of introspection, resentment and sentimentality.
But just below the surface in Guillermo Calderón's vibrant three-hander, staged by Chile's Teatro en el Blanco, is an altogether darker seam. There is something comical about the imperialist ranting of twin sister Paula, who slanders the neighbouring Peruvians for their panpipe music and the Bolivians for wearing too many clothes. But there is nothing funny about the references to eyeless army deserters, concentration camps and rape that slip into the conversation.
Diciembre – named after a month of "sad celebrations" – is an uneasy black comedy set in a near future in which an old territorial struggle between Chile, Peru and Bolivia has reignited and, with it, a 1984-style war of propaganda, and violence. Jorge, a soldier on leave, finds himself torn between one sister's pig-headed patriotism and the other's fanciful pacifism, while trying to stave off the feeling that the camaraderie of the battlefront offers a greater sense of belonging.
Performed with a pleasing simplicity at a table set beneath a tangle of coloured light bulbs, the play lurches from the surreal to the poignant, not least in the scene where Jorge fills in the gaps of a heavily censored letter and the meaningless "rifle . . . blood . . . semen" becomes a message of terrible sadness. For all the play's apocalyptic plausibility, however, it is hard for an audience not rooted in South American history to become politically engaged with a war that has not yet happened.