Twenty Minutes With The Devil by Gomez Romero & Manderson

“You see, my friend, I am just a humble businessman with a knack for success and no tolerance for failure.”

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. Oh - and a boot full of guns.

Part thriller, part black comedy, this play is inspired by events leading to the capture of El Chapo, 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 parents and children, myths and beliefs, childhood memories and fantasies of escape.

The fruit of a remarkable collaboration between two writers from very different cultures, here is a fable for the world we live in: a work which takes real problems in the world around us and gives them a vivid imaginative life. By turns suspenseful and reflective, witty, gritty, and poetic, Twenty Minutes With The Devil will grab you by the throat from the very first moment and demand that you, too, make a choice before time runs out.

Live or die, stay or go, trust or betray: we’re all looking for a way out of the locked room of the modern world.