O Pecado de João Agonia

With “O Pecado de João Agonia” (The Sin of João Agonia), we continue the rescue operation of Bernardo Santareno’s words, which began with our production of “A Promessa” (The Promise), in 2017. Thus, we do justice to the voice of one of the most important Portuguese playwrights of the 20th century, while refreshing the memory of a contemporary stage classic. The common denominator of both projects is stage director João Cardoso, artistic director of ASSéDIO, a company with whom we share a new incursion into the territory of a playwright who explored a “poetics of roots”. “O Pecado de João Agonia” (1961) is part of a group of plays where Santareno asserted his opposition to an oppressive system, exploring issues of a sexual (homosexuality) and religious (sin, sacrifice) nature. This instigation to a sort of “disobedience of dogmas” is experienced here within a tight community circle – a “primitive and cragged hamlet”, Salazar’s retrograde Portugal, a country that is still ours. A place where the “wind burns” and the sky is filled with black birds on the night of the crime. “Don't go, João Agonia! Run away, run away!”