A Criada Zerlina
Event
“You can’t make good theatre without a few beautiful things”, João Botelho tells us, so it is no surprise that he brings to the stage what is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, the “most beautiful love story in German literature ”. We speak of Zerline’s Tale, the story that Austrian writer Hermann Broch included in his novel The Guiltless, published in 1950. Zerline is an old servant who retrospectively reveals a story of passion that involves herself, her female employer and her lover. A story shot through sexual and class resentment, a primal eroticism and an ethical obsession, in which Broch's character unfolds her status: servant, lover, governess, spy, instigator of madness, jealousy and revenge. This intense monologue becomes “true” in the voice of Luísa Cruz, whose performance won her a Globo de Ouro in 2019. “A beautiful and prodigious actress”, according to João Botelho, a filmmaker who makes his debut (finally!) in the theatre, a place of shadows and intimacies, pierced here by a ray of light that injures “the obscurity where the revelation and triumph of the text must take place”.
