Published: 26 January, 2012

I AM told the basement of the Phoenix Artist Club, where a colleague met Mario Vargas Llosa (pictured), is a lot like the setting of the Nobel Prize winner’s play: dimly lit and full of characters.

The venue in Charing Cross Road on Tuesday is staging a UK premiere of his 1986 script La Chunga.

He said: “This place is a natural environment for it because it is set in a little bar, cosy and somewhat primitive. It is usually produced in small theatres, more or less marginal or fringe. I like that.  I think it’s a kind of invocation for the play.”

He rarely gives interviews and declined to speak to eager journalists over the phone prior to the performance.

Here’s a man, I thought, who knows that big is not necessarily beautiful.

Mr Llosa, 75, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, is the author of novels including End of the World and The Feast of the Goat. He travels the world to see productions – however small – of his plays.

The drama, set in 1950s Peru about an erotic relationship between two women, is a thinly veiled assault on South American macho culture.

“In times of trouble people want to escape the real world and will immediately go to fiction,” he said.

• La Chunga runs at the club at 104-110 Charing Cross Road, WC2, from January 24 to February 19.