O Duelo
Event
Is the meaning of this divine sentence still obscure to you?
About Heinrich von Kleist’s novel O Duelo [The Duel] (1811), which she translated and now adapts for Carlos Pimenta’s staging, Maria Filomena Molder says: “Neither a Classical nor a Romantic, Kleist is the first Modern among German poets.” One of Kafka's favourite authors, but rejected by Goethe and Hegel, who discarded his “invisible theatre”, Kleist created a body of work that did not suit his time and its laws. A romantic tale with a crime-story overtones that takes place at the end of the 14th century, in O Duelo the honour and sincerity of the story’s main characters seem to be resolved in the confrontation that gives it its title, where God’s judgment will make victorious the sword that upholds truth. But nothing is as it seems, nor is God as accurate as might be expected. This play about calculation and chance, failure and success, it is ruled by the vertigo of a poetic justice and led by the voice and body of actor Miguel Loureiro. At the end of O Duelo, Maria Filomena Molder, José Bragança de Miranda and José Gomes Pinto ponder on the potential of this text to enlighten contemporary life at the conference Kleist: o(s) sentido(s) da justiça.
About Heinrich von Kleist’s novel O Duelo [The Duel] (1811), which she translated and now adapts for Carlos Pimenta’s staging, Maria Filomena Molder says: “Neither a Classical nor a Romantic, Kleist is the first Modern among German poets.” One of Kafka's favourite authors, but rejected by Goethe and Hegel, who discarded his “invisible theatre”, Kleist created a body of work that did not suit his time and its laws. A romantic tale with a crime-story overtones that takes place at the end of the 14th century, in O Duelo the honour and sincerity of the story’s main characters seem to be resolved in the confrontation that gives it its title, where God’s judgment will make victorious the sword that upholds truth. But nothing is as it seems, nor is God as accurate as might be expected. This play about calculation and chance, failure and success, it is ruled by the vertigo of a poetic justice and led by the voice and body of actor Miguel Loureiro. At the end of O Duelo, Maria Filomena Molder, José Bragança de Miranda and José Gomes Pinto ponder on the potential of this text to enlighten contemporary life at the conference Kleist: o(s) sentido(s) da justiça.
