Castro
Event
Let's start over, carefully. We are in no hurry, we miss you. And we have a public thanks to make. Let's start over with those who love us and those who have done us good. “Caring when everything is good throws the sadness away”, we hear in Castro. In early July, we will return to the performances that the pandemic has suspended.
Together again! Let's start over, with joy and safety. "Live joyfully, Castro, live safely, throw your fears away."
Castro (1598) by the poet António Ferreira, marks the first incursion of Nuno Cardoso into a canon piece of Portuguese theatre, Portugal’s first classical tragedy. He intends to inhabit this literary fiction, which itself offers a particular version of the historical drama / legend / myth of star-crossed lovers Pedro and Inês, making us “see with other eyes”, revealing to it the intrinsic modernity and density, veiled by the language’s poetry and by utterance. An immense stage-house-country, a kind of giant model of the spaces of action, a primordial and claustrophobic family cell, confront us with the tangible intimacy of characters that are in thrall to themselves and their intransigence. In Castro, like in Danton’s Death, the question of utopia (of love, as well as of revolution) is crucial. It is his dark reverse that is exposed here: love / desire and power as vice and chaos, as a prerogative, impunity and arrogance, as blindness that “tarnishes the brilliant rays of the ancient glory”. And how this tarnishing impairs the decision and replicates itself, tainting the family’s fabric with blood and revenge, in a peculiar dislocation of Castro’s focal point from Inês, and from the reason of State as fiction and morals, to Pedro, in his mirror-like relationship with his father, King Afonso IV. "What star was that so dark?"
Together again! Let's start over, with joy and safety. "Live joyfully, Castro, live safely, throw your fears away."
Castro (1598) by the poet António Ferreira, marks the first incursion of Nuno Cardoso into a canon piece of Portuguese theatre, Portugal’s first classical tragedy. He intends to inhabit this literary fiction, which itself offers a particular version of the historical drama / legend / myth of star-crossed lovers Pedro and Inês, making us “see with other eyes”, revealing to it the intrinsic modernity and density, veiled by the language’s poetry and by utterance. An immense stage-house-country, a kind of giant model of the spaces of action, a primordial and claustrophobic family cell, confront us with the tangible intimacy of characters that are in thrall to themselves and their intransigence. In Castro, like in Danton’s Death, the question of utopia (of love, as well as of revolution) is crucial. It is his dark reverse that is exposed here: love / desire and power as vice and chaos, as a prerogative, impunity and arrogance, as blindness that “tarnishes the brilliant rays of the ancient glory”. And how this tarnishing impairs the decision and replicates itself, tainting the family’s fabric with blood and revenge, in a peculiar dislocation of Castro’s focal point from Inês, and from the reason of State as fiction and morals, to Pedro, in his mirror-like relationship with his father, King Afonso IV. "What star was that so dark?"
