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“The fault for our being subordinate lies not in our stars, but in ourselves,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar. Caesar, ambitious and with the support of the Senate, approaches absolute power at a dizzying pace, leading a group of senators – among them Cassius and Brutus – to plot his assassination. For democracy to be saved, Caesar must die. But when the blood is spilled and the dust settles after a brutal civil war, dictatorship triumphs over democracy anyway.
William Shakespeare’s play seems more relevant today than ever. At a time when social democracy is confronted with the threat of the far right amidst a series of financial, social and economic crises, and authoritarianism is once again gaining strength and encouraging war, hatred and censorship, Cassius’ words echo from afar. A play that is over 400 years old – which was already a cry against absolutism at the time – manages to represent human and political nature in a way that is still relevant to us today.
It is between this essence of freedom and the awareness of the zeitgeist of the time that we seek in contemporary theatre a kind of Cassius' cry, which tells us: "We do not want to be subordinated!" Theatre is, today as before, a stage for dispute and debate in politics and society, with the power to confront us not only with reality, but also with fiction. It is perhaps this theatre that we call 'political theatre', but even this definition is a battlefield that ranges from 'all theatre is political' to 'pamphlet theatre'.
The playwright and professor at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema Armando Rosa proposes a clarification. Through the etymology of the word, it is possible to define theatre inherently as public art. “An art of the polis”, the broadest definition of politics. He refers, however, to a 20th century movement, with references such as Piscator and Brecht, whose objective was “to provoke a critical experience, rather than a merely emotional experience.”
But even within this tradition, opinions differ. Some theatre is labelled as pamphleteering, others as anachronistic. For some people, political theatre must be a theatre of reality, for others the most important thing is that the theatre be political in its form. While some argue that theatre is closely linked to democracy and freedom, others see it as an instrument that can be co-opted by any system.
Amidst a sea of contradictions and diverse theatrical practices, we met at the Café-Teatro da Comuna, in Lisbon. A room steeped in history, where we spoke with João Mota, founder of Comuna – Teatro de Pesquisa. An actor and director, João began acting as a child, on Emissora Nacional programmes. “I’ve been at the Teatro Nacional since I was 15,” he tells us. These were difficult times for artists. Portugal had been under a dictatorship for over twenty years and the censors even had the power to cancel a show on the night of its opening.
There were many artists whose practice was attacked during the Estado Novo, both for the nature of their works and for their ability to foster a critical and dissident spirit. This was the case of Anthology of Portuguese Erotic and Satirical Poetry organized by Natália Correia. The blue pencil left its mark on hundreds of poems, songs, novels and plays, forcing creators to censor themselves beforehand so that their works could be exhibited or published. In the theater, curiously, productions were censored more often than texts, because censorship assumed that, in a profoundly illiterate country, only an intellectual elite would have access to texts through reading.
João was one of the first of his generation to come into contact with the international theatre production circuit. He left for abroad before the 25th of April, where he had an experience that was diametrically opposed to that which he had in Portugal. At the Café-Teatro table, he tells us about his experience working with Peter Brook in Persia, where he learned to make the invisible visible through various acting exercises. He explained to us the dimension of otherness in the work they had developed together, the idea ofThe Othero, that I "have to understand The Other to discover myself». It is an idea that is submerged in political meaning, which is empathy, solidarity, understanding and community.
Although the Commune was created during a dictatorship, most of its experience was already under democracy. Perhaps this is why João has an idea of theatre that is closely linked to the community. But for the community to exist, the individual must be free. This is also the role of theatre for João. He highlights the most important lesson he learned from working with Brook, who accompanied him throughout his entire artistic career. “The first thing Peter Brook asked us was for each person not to lose their individuality. Each person should assert themselves as they truly are.”
Working in the post-25th April period, a period of political transition and also of transition in the perception and training of artists in Portuguese society, is an experience with dimensions known only to those who lived it. And one of those people is Mário Moutinho who, on a Sunday morning, takes us to the Puppet Museum in Porto. We enter through an adjacent door, where the puppet shows take place, and there we prepare to interview him.
Mário Moutinho is an actor, producer and programmer who has participated in over sixty theatre productions throughout his life. He is perhaps best known for playing Marcial Andrade in Os Andrades, but he has also dedicated himself to studying the trajectory of artistic movements in Porto, and in particular semi-professional theatre.
In the space that means so much to him, he tells us about the post-25th April period and the explosion of theatrical activity that took place: in amateur groups, residential neighbourhoods, residents’ committees and even in groups that were already doing theatre. In Porto, a city he knows like the back of his hand, he mentions that dozens of groups emerged, mainly in Matosinhos, but also in Gondomar. Mário remembers this theatre as “very pamphleteering”. It was the “most politically active theatre”, which, for him, was “closer to the rally than to any dramatic context on the stage”, he explains.
After this initial enthusiasm, the groups began to want to professionalize themselves, to train their actors and recruit the best talent from amateur groups, weakening existing groups. TAI – Teatro Amador de Intervenção – of which Mário was a founder – also had this need for training. Most of the actors who worked with him had no formal training. “They included everyone from a factory worker to a doctor.” From a sensitivity more interested in Puppet Theatre came the group that founded the Theatre where we are having this conversation, dedicated to “dignifying puppet theatre”.
“Dignification” has been one of the themes of Mário’s work throughout his life. He worked in children’s theatre and says that there was also an artistic evolution in this sense, largely driven by directors João Mota, João Brites and José Caldas who, according to him, stopped treating children as “mentally challenged” and instead as “intelligent beings”. They wanted to abolish the category of “children’s theatre”, replacing it with “theatre for children and young people”, as Stanislavski called it.
For any scholar of the field, the impact that the dictatorship had on the opening of theatre, both in terms of themes and forms, is undeniable. Mário explains that revue theatre was one of the genres that managed to resist censorship due to its improvisational nature, but that many strategies were developed to avoid the blue pencil: some actors would pause and misplace commas or say the text very quickly. He reveals to us the difficulty he has in explaining social change to our generation because the worst thing was not the censorship activity alone, but the conservative morals that reigned in society. Certain themes, such as homosexuality, could never be represented explicitly, even when they were indicated in classical texts. “If that were done, they would cut the scene.”
Because of the context of this battle of moralities, Mário tells us that all theatre is political. “Political theatre is attentive to what is happening in society,” and therefore, if theatre chooses to perpetuate a context of oppression or reproduce hierarchical patterns, that is also a political choice. “All theatre is political, because theatre is life.”
In contrast, the founder of A Comuna refuses to specify a theatre that is 'political', despite having lived through the dictatorship and the transition to democracy. However, he does not leave aside the community and pedagogical importance that he considers inherent to theatre practice. He insistently reminds us, when veering off into tangents about the state of education and respect for pedestrian rules, that 'all this is theatre'. This is the closest we get to an answer, but João had already warned us that he speaks 'in riddles'.
At the cafe The real, in Benfica, we sat down to talk with Anabela, Elisabete and Cátia. The three of them do Theatre of the Oppressed, a genre of theatre that originated in Brazil by Augusto Boal, and which is based on the idea that the oppressed themselves are capable of creating, producing and transforming the world by fighting their oppressions. For Anabela, “pedagogy is a praxis, it is a way of being in life”.
The entire show is prepared by the people, the script is written together, and the audience is not just the audience. “It’s not conventional theatre,” explains Anabela – or Belinha, as she is better known –, “the idea is not to arrive and now we’re going to do theatre. The idea is: there is a need.” Belinha is the ‘joker’ of several Theatre of the Oppressed groups in Greater Lisbon, which means that she is the one who mediates between the audience and the actors on stage. There are several styles within Theatre of the Oppressed that promote different discussions. In legislative theatre, for example, the spectators have the opportunity to make proposals for laws to respond to the situation presented. In newspaper theatre, the actors interact with current news to stage what is left between the lines. In forum theatre, Belinha enters the stage at the end of the performance and talks to the spectators about the social problem that has been exposed. The idea is that the spectators themselves – or 'spectators' – come on stage and put themselves in the place of the oppressed to try to get around the problem presented on stage.
And the stage of the Theatre of the Oppressed is also not the usual one. Outside the dynamic of the stage-audience, Theatre of the Oppressed shows are performed in local associations, residents' and neighborhood assemblies, day centers or schools, and usually touch on themes close to the people who perform them. This is the case of the show Paper Dreams, about the nationality law, which these actresses staged to discuss who has the right to be Portuguese. These are generally themes that are close to the two main groups in Lisbon, according to Anabela: the DRK from Cova da Moura and the ValArte from Moita, and this is a fundamental feature of this style. In fact, Julian Boal, one of the best-known promoters of theatre of the oppressed internationally, sees political theatre as theatre that is part of social movements, and this is what Anabela, Elisabete and Cátia do.
The political nature of the Theatre of the Oppressed lies precisely in its interventionist function. “Its objective is not to entertain, its main objective is to transform”, explains Belinha. “What we understand as a problem for one person is not just for Cátia or Belinha. They may have this problem, but we know that there are thousands of Cátias in this country”. One of the most powerful ideas of the Theatre of the Oppressed, which is shared with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is the idea of bringing conflict to the surface, making conflict viable and getting people to talk about it.
But Belinha leaves us with a warning about political theatre. “In Portugal, we are afraid of the word ‘political’. Theatre is considered an art, it is in a completely separate section and politics is in another completely separate section”. On the one hand, perhaps it is because of the desire to challenge this situation and take a political stance, which the three women tell us is fundamental in Theatre of the Oppressed. After all, when we say that all theatre is political, it does not mean that all theatre takes a stance. “If you ask someone who does professional theatre, they will say that they do politics every day, but the political theatre that we understand is the one that is specifically beaten: ‘ah, this is political theatre’.”
Also in Lisbon, at Culturgest, we met with André Amálio and Tereza Havlíčková, from the Hotel Europa company, two artists who share the same political conviction regarding their artistic practice. Their theatre is openly political. «Portugal não é um país pequeno», «Passaporte», «Libertação», «Amores de Leste» are the names of some of their plays, which have addressed issues related to the contemporary Portuguese historical period, such as fascism and the anti-colonial struggle. These are themes that they have been exploring since they met, when they were simultaneously completing their master's degrees in Performance Making at Goldsmith University, London.
They came from very different backgrounds: Tereza had a background focused predominantly on dance and movement and André on theater; Tereza is Czech and André is Portuguese. In the show «Amores do Leste» they put this contrast of experiences on stage: while André described his youthful fascination with readingThe capital by Marx, Tereza tells the story of the terror caused by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. They have not shied away from leaving their personal opinions expressed on stage; the creators even go so far as to define the work they do as an ostensibly political statement.
This irreverent exhibition is enhanced by the fact that they are performing theatre in a format that people are not generally accustomed to. “People are always expecting to see character theatre” and the Hotel Europa company has opted for a fusion of theatre, dance and live music, adopting a multidisciplinary aesthetic. Both Tereza and André were enchanted by the medium of documentary theatre, which rejects fiction, stages reality and assumes its political function by creating theatre that is “capable of changing people”.
André had always had this motivation during his studies, although it had been rejected before he studied abroad. He explained to us that he did not want to “take a text, a great piece of dramatic literature and put it on stage, a character study”, but was more interested in researching more contemporary forms. He stumbled upon documentary theatre, without knowing what he was doing until he understood that he was joining a long and dynamic tradition of creators and aesthetic sensibilities.
Contact with foreign countries and questions from colleagues in London – including his future wife and co-founder of the company they both currently work for – about the contemporary history of Portugal, made André reflect on the taboos that exist in society, prompting him to focus a significant amount of his academic research on the issue of colonialism.
Tereza and André agree that Portugal took a long time to confront the colonial issue, despite it being such a defining part of its history. They believe that the emergence of counter-narratives that challenge the dominant Lusotropicalism is still recent. And they have already experienced it first-hand, with the disturbance of spectators at some of their shows, accusing the company of exaggerating and distorting the country's history. It is a developing issue. On a radio station in Slovakia, for example, the presenter asked them "why did the Portuguese take so long" to talk about the issue. That is where the Hotel Europa company comes in, bursting onto the stage with post-colonial documentary theatre to tell the other side of the story. Are they succeeding? "We are succeeding, despite the fact that CHEGA and the far right are booming."
The theme of Portuguese colonialism has recently been addressed by other figures in contemporary theatre in Portugal. Pedro Penim, artistic director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, also chose the colonial war and Lusotropicalism, alongside other themes such as feminism and queer experience, in the show Casa Portuguesa. It was a show that caused a stir and was on stage from September to October 2022, now forming part of the Odisseia do Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, in a programme that will decentralise the institution's programming over the coming months. Pedro justifies the approach to these themes on the national stage. He tells us that the Teatro Nacional «is a house with its eyes very much projected into the future» and that «theatre is almost always an exercise in predicting the future».
The director and playwright admits that he makes highly politicized theater, but he does not assume that all art has to be politicized. “Art is different from social justice. Art must be superior to any laws and any preconceived ideas of what society is.” Pedro was the only person we interviewed who spoke about social justice, and he discussed with us the negotiation of political theater. He explained to us that it is one thing to debate, to present a way of looking at politics and problems. “It often functions as an agora, where the topics that are discussed can and should be the same topics that are discussed in society.” And it is another thing to present a solution, a specific angle from which to look at what is happening and how to solve it.
Unlike João Mota, Pedro Penim sees a lot of ambiguity in the political quality of theatre. He sees theatre as an art with a lot of potential for instrumentalisation, as an instrument of resistance, dialogue or oppression, and it is not always a gesture of democracy. “I can imagine a theatre that is quite anti-democratic. It can be and has been”, he explains, giving an example that is close to his heart. “For a long time, the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II was a vehicle for the dictatorship that existed in Portugal”. And even the activity itself does not necessarily escape authoritarianism. Penim tells us that theatre as a practice is not just about freedom; there are theatrical practices that are more rigid and directors who want the actors to be mere vehicles for their will.
When we asked him about what political theatre is, he took refuge in Ancient Greece. “In Ancient Greece, theatre served to normalise society, so it had a very direct political action.” And political theatre is therefore reflected in the attempt to have an effect on society. But there is also a relationship with power. “There is already this desire to exert power, influence over society. Art says: society behaves in one way and should behave in another.”
“It’s a very tricky field,” he comments. “You have to be very informed and understand very well what subject you’re dealing with.” Portuguese House, for example, "every sentence, every word I wrote needed this policing for myself. Because doing activism and making art are two very different things, they often come together in the same project, but you have to be very careful about what that proposal is."
In the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, he sees a vanguard role, which for some may be a mirror of what Portuguese society is like, but it can also be a beacon. “Because people see the theatre as a kind of support, a source of comfort, knowing that there is an institution there that has been around for so long and that they can count on.” The place of creators and spectators is very important to Penim, in fact, it is an approach that also applies to the debate on political theatre. “We cannot control or predict what people will think of our work.” “I prefer that this discussion be left to the viewer.”
From Lisbon we set off for Paredes de Coura, in Alto Minho, to meet Magda Henriques, who has been the artistic director of the Comedies of Minho, a cultural project that is almost twenty years old. It began in 2003 when the municipalities of Melgaço, Monção, Valença, Vila Nova de Cerveira and Paredes de Coura came together to create a professional theatre company that could bring theatre to the villages.
Magda warned us right away that the content worked on by Comédias was not political. She told us: “we don’t do political theatre, we do theatre politically”, and this way of seeing things aroused our great curiosity. Before the conversation, we expected to have a conversation about audiences and themes outside of the big urban centres, but Magda put the question to us in a simple way. “I have difficulty talking about the big urban centres. Each city is made up of many cities.” The people who follow Comédias are very different and Magda rejects the distinction of a conservative audience in Paredes de Coura that would contrast with a progressive audience in Lisbon or Porto. “I know where to go in Lisbon to see more progressive shows, but I also know where to go to see conservative shows”, she explains, concluding, “I prefer to talk about people rather than audiences”.
As Comedies of Minho launched an educational project and a community project in 2007. This was another step in the process of “democratising culture, but also cultural democracy”. The first is designed especially – but not exclusively – for younger people, with their own creations, shows based on the reality of the people who live there and work carried out with a network of collaborators and local cultural promoters. The second is implemented in different ways. For example, through the work done with each of the five amateur theatre groups that the Comédias support and develop, but also through the creation of shows that share the knowledge and memories of people who live in those municipalities.
“In those municipalities”, because Magda says it’s not appropriate to talk about the ‘interior’. “What is the interior? When we’re talking about the interior, we’re talking about a disinvestment in territories.” “Minho” is also not a 100% correct term, because Minho is much larger than those five municipalities. It’s normal that the audiences aren’t always very large at their shows, but that doesn’t matter at all for Comédias. We’re working so that people can enjoy it. One day a friend said to me: “Look, there were 250 people in that parish council” and I asked: “Oh! So?”. He said: “Yes, Magda, you have to multiply that by ten, because those five municipalities together have around 60 people.” Lisbon and Porto have incomparable numbers. Ten times more, at least. We’re talking about five municipalities.
Magda explains the difference between community art and participatory art. Community art is built from scratch by professional and non-professional artists, while participatory art focuses solely on the community’s participation in the show rather than its creation. The Comedies do community theatre, but there are some challenges. The instrumentalisation, “I find absolutely appalling”, she warns us. “In other words, if the immense desire is in fact to create an environment so that more voices are heard, we know that the boundaries are tenuous between these intentions, which are very worthy and important, and other possibilities that we do not master.”
Concern about the possible instrumentalization of life stories and experiences was also an issue raised by Pedro Penim. Where is the limit, then? Magda explains: “It’s not about giving a voice, that no one gives a voice to anyone. It’s about creating contexts so that more voices are heard.”
This collective participation and the expansion of diversity are very important to Magda. “The awareness of diversity that I had twenty years ago is not the same as it is today. Fortunately, my notion of diversity is much greater today and I hope it will be much greater in twenty years’ time,” she tells us. This is what the horizon line means for Comédias do Minho. Moving towards a diversity of voices that can be heard. “It doesn’t include everyone yet, but that’s the way forward.”
As Comedies are beyond anyone in particular. It is all about creating very strong bonds of trust and working together. But Magda does not hold back from making some comments about a more political theatre. She is not very interested in pamphlet art, «but political art is not that». She clearly states: «If I think that politics is everything that concerns society and that everything we decide to do or not to do influences what we do together, what we do is absolutely political theatre.»
We went to the LU.CA Theatre, a performance venue built with children in mind. We wanted to find out if political theatre is for all ages and to better understand the pedagogical aspect of the art. We sat in the balcony of the theatre located in Belém, Lisbon, where we watched a show about children from all over the world who have a connection to the same object: a toy shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The connection that the children had with the toy was made through its production process and life. From the factories where children work to the rubbish dump where children rummage for forgotten treasures, passing through Portugal, where toys are, above all, a coveted commodity. It is about The State of the World When You Wake Up, piece produced by Atomic Formiga and played by Edi Gaspar we are talking about.
The show tells the story of several images of children, each one referring to a completely different story but always through the lens of the fight against climate change. Seeing the dedication with which they staged a play about globalization and climate change that could also be understood by children and young people, we decided to sit down and talk to Miguel Fragata, who, together with Inês Barahona, directs Formiga Atómica. It is a company that has been around for ten years and is interested in contemporary themes and a direct relationship with reality and people. Like Hotel Europa, they feel the need to make their shows emerge from a research process and are interested in confronting theater with other areas, from journalism, as they did with Fake, a show about fake news, to philosophy, as in The Walk of the Elephants, a show about dealing with death.
Ant Atómica is a company that makes theatre for all audiences, which means they have to make plays that are accessible to children and young people. “We really like a highly democratic idea of theatre that can really reach everyone. And that’s why the shows always have dimensions that are designed for different audiences”, Miguel tells us, to which we respond with concern. After all, talking about climate change or death to a young audience is a complicated task, but Miguel doesn’t hold back. “We deeply believe that it is possible to talk to children or any audience about any topic and that it is necessary to do so clearly and directly, because young audiences are as capable and demanding as any other audience.”
Miguel has a similar idea to Magda about the democratization of culture – in fact, The Comedies of Minho and Atomic Formiga, are known and even partners. It was not by chance that The State of the World When You Wake Up was on stage in Paredes de Coura. –, what is needed is to democratize the text, the show and the images, so that they are accessible and well understood, in order to be able to break down the barricades that divide us.
“We don’t want barricades, we want to destroy the barricades,” he tells us about the immanence of politics in his shows. “But to do that, we need to be clear about which side we are on, so that we can destroy this idea of separation, of barricades, of apartheid». Miguel rejects the idea of a rally theatre or pamphlet theatre, but explains that, when it comes to issues that are divisive to reality, it is necessary to take a stand, because one cannot talk about issues such as sustainability or the migrant crisis without taking a stand. «As much as the show wants to be very far from the idea of providing a response – we never intend to do that – in fact there are issues where it is impossible not to convey that vision.» And this is what underpins his vision of political theatre, a theatre that, while seeking to break down the barricades, be democratic, accessible to everyone and straightforward, does not lose sight of the message. «For me, political theatre is anchored in a certain vision of the world and is built on that.»
Sara Barros Leitão, an actress and director, also has her own vision of the world, which usually accompanies her in the shows she produces through Cassandra, a structure she created in 2020 to be able to circulate her shows and to be able to pay the people she works with decently. In Monologue of a Woman Called Maria with Her Boss, she tried to make domestic workers and work viable, but this was not the first time that a feminist dimension was expressed in her work.
We spoke to Sara while she was making changes to her Cassandra to a new space, because the first space had been damaged by the floods in Porto. As we moved to another space, also caught up in the hustle and bustle, he kindly helped us prepare the framework for the video interview before we sat down to talk about political theatre, precariousness and the history of theatre in Portugal.
Regarding the relationship between her worldview and the work she does, Sara demands absolute freedom for theatre. “These are two things that go hand in hand, that are different, that sometimes touch each other – and that’s a good thing. But it’s very important for me not to demand that they touch each other,” she says. It turns out that her work is often close to her concerns about the world, but it’s important to her that theatre can be completely free. “I hope one day to be able to write about any subject that interests me and for it to have validity and interest for others just as it does for me. And for them not to always expect the same agency from me.”
It is really important for Sara that theatre can be diverse and autonomous. “Theatre can do everything and nothing”, she tells us. “When we start trying to put thematic agendas on what theatre can or cannot do, should or should not do, I think we enter a very dangerous zone. Because as long as it serves us, everything is fine and we love it. We love political theatre as long as that politics is what serves us.”
Between the freedom of theater and the way it is done, Sara places politics. After all, the way theater is staged can empty the dramaturgy or imbue it with meaning. "Putting on a showThe Death of Danton, which is clearly political theater, and doing so by making all the actors who are there precarious. The form of production empties the entire content of the play", she explains. We know that precariousness in culture is a topic close to her, and she herself says so: "I am an artist, but I am also a cultural worker. And I am also a boss, in the sense that I hire people."
It is a long-standing struggle, and one in which he praises the status of cultural workers and the network of cinemas that is being implemented. But there are still issues to be resolved. For example, cultural workers have difficulty seeing themselves as workers. “We are the first to make ourselves precarious,” he confesses. It is as if there were an apology for precariousness and this is combined with insufficient cultural policies. We are reminded of the exclusion of Seiva Trupe from the DGArtes Sustainable Support grant, which caused a company with almost fifty years of history to suspend its activities.
Anyone who thinks that precariousness in cultural work is not linked to the political content of theatre is mistaken. Staging a play by Brecht today, for example, is rare. “Not because people don’t like Brecht, but it’s unthinkable because Brecht has seventeen characters on stage, there’s music, there’s choirs. To do that nowadays you need to have financial capacity”, laments Sara. Precariousness limits what can be done and determines the format of the stories. “Today the fashion is to make theatre about ourselves, to make ourselves characters and put ourselves at the centre”, and this weakens collective characters and is also caused by precariousness. “If you don’t have the resources to pay a team of twenty or so people, what you can do with twenty or so thousand euros is talk about what you already know, which is yourself.”
Pointing out that theatre is not alone in the world, and that therefore political theatre is not isolated from reality, Sara finds it difficult to say that all theatre is political. “To say that all theatre is political is to empty politics.” Theatre can be political on the emotional side, because talking about love, about relationships with others, can be political, but there is a theatre that is more specifically political and this should be protected. “I think that the word politics and political theatre should still be reserved for what is political and what political theatre is.”
There is a political theatre that blatantly exposes its desire to intervene in society, as a scalpel of reality and with a very explicit political determination. But there is also a political theatre that finds its potential in the multiplying practice of the freedom to signify and resignify itself, refusing to respond obediently to the categories to which we want to attach it. If the pedagogical or community theatre, performed in a neighbourhood assembly or in the D. Maria II national theatre, in Lisbon or Minho, is political, it is political because someone wants it that way, someone does it that way and someone sees it that way.
The difficulties that the sector faces have not gone unnoticed: chronic underfunding, the need to win over audiences, the devaluation of culture. Fortunately, there is always someone who resists, who surreptitiously builds on difficult terrain while others try to destroy. Who wants to tell stories that are important to them, and that help us think about an open society.
Armando Rosa told us that, due to its community dimension, theatre naturally presents itself as a threat to totalitarian regimes: “even today, there are autocratic societies in which the staging of Antigone can be prohibited”. Despite this, it is clear that in contemporary Portuguese theatre there is “a dividing line between before and after the 25th of April”, with the experience of a kind of collective catharsis after 1974.
Today, theatre is becoming increasingly pluralistic and there are increasingly more critical and creative visions in strengthening one of the essential tools for experiencing democracy. This can only be a strong point. That there are different conceptions, that people think about political theatre differently, that they disagree, and that they make themselves heard, this is what staging freedom means.
