“Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne”: “A Chave Perdida” /”The Lost Key” by Flor da Boca - Projectos

Ironically, a better philosopher skewered the idea of truth a while ago.

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...

Even more ironically, although Nietzsche  (and Álvaro Cordeiro aka Paulo Vaz as his on-stage persona) avoids applying the word "truth" to it, he is presenting this as ... truth! Whenever I have tried to read Nietzsche I have got the impression that he presents his subjective views on social and psychological matters as philosophical truth. Basically, for Nietzsche, truth is what Nietzsche says. On this play, truth is what the characters in this play say.

We do not live in a post-truth world; we live in a world of competing "truths" because people do not agree on what our criteria for and sources of truth should be. For many, truth is defined by their own experience and self-perceived identity, rather than with reference to others or history or philosophy or epistemology or science or faith. As a Christian I believe these are vital issues. As someone in the gospels is reported to have said: What is truth?

As a Computer Scientist and Maker, I can confirm that Philosophers and Creative Artists (including artists) give us a different kind of truth to what Scientists do. The purpose of Science is to uncover empirical truth, which is undoubtedly very important for us in order to distinguish fact from myth or other falsehood. However, "Science" has only been around for a few hundred years, whereas Philosophy has been around for Millennia. Much of our fundamental philosophical thinking is derived from times pre-dating Caesar. Indeed the development of the Scientific Method came about through Philosophical means. Philosophy asks the questions: Science (mostly answers them). However, the question is often far more important than the answer. You need to understand how/why the question was asked in order to understand the significance of the answer. This is why Philosophy is far more important to the critical questions of life. How do we live? How do we treat others? Science can definitely help us sort through the details but cannot provide the answers to these most fundamental of questions. Philosophy provides some answers, correct or otherwise.

And Art? Well that's where we get our imagination from. And why do we need imagination? So we can ask the right questions. So Art, and Theatre in particular, is perhaps more important to truth than Science is (and yes, Science is VERY important in this regard). As a simple starting point, the denial that there is truth is itself either true, false, or meaningless. If it is true then it is self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. If it is false then there are truths that we can ascertain. If it is meaningless then we can use the claim as an opportunity to explore why someone might want to make the claim, and this might help our understanding of the complex issue of truth. Some claims are quite easily demonstrated to be either true or false. Other claims may hold some truth, as established by experience (and science e.g.) and the true elements need to be teased out from the false and the irrelevant. Some claims may hold no truth whatsoever, but represent some indirect aspect of the claimants experience and this may be worth the effort to examine, especially if the claimant shows some prospect of being open to demonstration of the truths relevant to their claim. Some claimants show little or no capacity to be.

Abel believes the old argument that "So long as I believe it to be true then it is true." Liars and conmen have been using it for a long time. Whereas theirs is the possibility of bias in regards to one’s personal experiences, especially when conflicted with the desire to remain the dominant or positive influence in a group encounter, the reality is that those people that have "forgotten" the events have really forgotten the lies they used that day to point the blame elsewhere. Those people also usually fall into the "Say sorry to Dog before I die" category. But then try desperately to make amends with the party/ies they wronged all those years ago.

This plays showed me there is trouble with this take because we're not as reasonable as we like to believe, and we're increasingly faced by unfathomable complexity. Digestible, easily communicated, 'truths' aren't really present at the level of politics, regardless of whether philosophers say truths are possible or not. Inevitably people misunderstand (I’m not sure how many people present in the audience misunderstood what was taking place in the play), and others who are aware of the difficulty of grasping truths, exclusively utter ambiguities, which is a fair way to behave considering they're liable to be crucified at the first opportunity. It's nonsense to believe that the social world can consists of established truths; it's only ever pursuit of 'truth', a larger consensus, satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the results, righteousness, rebellion, tribalism, and headaches.

The sooner we hand over responsibility to the algorithms the better. In the current world, truth is like art. I don't know what art is, but I know what I like. If truth depends on your like for it, or not, then I recommend John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". There is an objective way of looking at art, and there is an objective of determining truth. Those who cannot do that have blinders on, for both art and truth.

My impression is that Vicente Morais’ staging successfully embodies "post-truth", although we are not in a post-truth society. For that to be applicable, we would have to have lived through a truth society. What we have is challenge of establishment orthodoxy; the "truth" that the establishment has demanded be treated as truth no longer remains unverifiable. The mainstream media is suffering because it has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to tell anything approaching an honest description of our world. Rather than post-truth, we are experiencing multi-truth. The fun is in attempting to discover which truth is reality and this play wonderfully depicts this.

In a democracy, the shared understanding is the foundation. If we want to reduce and delay poisoning this foundation with harmful fantasies, we may have to come to some common understanding on how to check the extent of broadcasts and watch more stage plays. Something like, don't propagate any new information if it is not an experience had by someone of 2-3 degrees of separation from you. Perhaps it's just etiquette, like when telephones were introduced, we agreed that you ring somebody, wait for them to say "hello" or "ahoy" or acknowledge in some manner.

I like the ritual of going to the theatre in the centre of a city or town. There is a sense of excitement and anticipation as you converge with others who have made similar pilgrimages from their own neighbourhoods. A theatre in a suburb seems earthbound by comparison. Going round the corner is not an event. The best theatres tend to be blank spaces - like the best galleries - because they focus all the attention on the play. The old Victorian jewel box theatres can be very depressing: shabby, smelly, moldering, encumbered by the distant past, poor sight-lines etc. Mind you, when I was a teenager, I loved going to the Laura Alves Theatre, an historic old auditorium, which charged only peanuts per seat. I was born in Mouraria so this way one of my favourite lairs when it came to watching plays. Everything was painted red, green and gold as far as I recall. Going there as a fifteen, sixteen year old in the 1970s one experienced the same sort of frisson one might have expected going behind the velvet curtain of a brothel. That was some theatre. I had the same experience going to Casa do Coreto (Bandstand’s House) in Carnide to watch “A Chave Perdida”. Fond memories reenacted.

Performance needs the emotional reaction from the audience, and I think we ourselves benefit emotionally and intellectually from the face-to-face contact with the arts in all its manifestations. I know so many people who say they've never been to the theatre, etc. who feel it's "not for someone like me". Schools can break this attitude down and enable young people to realise the arts are exactly for them.

Bottom-line:

- As social animals, with understanding potential limited by our sense organs and brains, we need certain axioms to make sense to each other;

- Axioms are produced out of necessity and shaped out of experience. A man in a remote Amazon community can live a fulfilled life without knowing who the prime-minister of Portugal is;

- Gossip is a means of spreading axioms. Gossips take a trial-and-error approach to networking like our own neural networks. Some are reinforced and some fade;

- Not all reinforced axioms are facts; quite a lot are fantasies that persist owing to human interest in aesthetics (art, and music; it was a clever move on Álvaro Cordeiros’ part to juxtapose both Schönberg and Kandinsky in the play) and exercising emotions (joy, fear, anger, surprise and even guilt; Rita/Sónia was absolutely mesmerizing in the way she was able to show us the two extreme opposites of emotion);

- Before the internet, a trial-and-error branch of a gossip would hit about 5-7 people. What gets reinforced over time and what is dropped was shaped by the experience of people in each branch;

- After the internet, the branch can hit thousand to million nodes (people) easily. Many fantasies (harmful base ones as well as innocuous beautiful ones) survive along with facts. Plus, to rephrase McLuhan, the gossip branch is itself information. Google and Facebook are studying the patterns all the time; go watch a play instead.

NB: “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” = On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.

Lear and Cordelia on a Pedestal: "King Lear" by William Shakespeare, Gregory Doran, Antony Sher

“No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her! Look! Her lips!

Look there, look there!”

In King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3.

King Lear is a typical example of that millennium generation. They retire when they’re still young enough to make the most of it. Undoubtedly they’ll have a fat pension as well as 100 knights and a fool like myself to amuse them (with reading out loud, for example), probably a free bus pass and winter fuel allowance too. I don't get to retire till I'm 65, if I don’t die first from burnout. How do you I can carry Cordelia around in 15 years' time when my knees are already done in? That was the feeling I had when I was watching this play with Antony Sher, who seems very fragile. That’s why at the end we see Lear and Cordelia on a pedestal… I’m not sure the same won’t happen to me. Despite all the productions miscasts and misgivings, but those of us in the audience, willing to probe the depths of the human soul, will be paid dividends by a watching this dying art called “theatre”. The actors give everything they have (Sher was sweating as if there was no tomorrow…). For me, the actor (be it a Shakespearean actor or not), is, at heart, a seeker after truth. And that truth is the human soul. Every time I go to the theatre to watch a Shakespeare play, a part of me believes I’m closer to that “truth”, whatever it is.

Having said that, I still think Doran’s choice to have both Lear and Cordelia on a pedestal was a wrong one. The final scene of Lear, from his entry with Cordelia dead in his arms, is the greatest in all Shakespeare, in all dramatic literature. I don’t have any kind of qualms in saying this. Now imagine you are watching the RSC at Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2016. You know the story of Leir and his daughters. If you’re a Shakespearean you probably read it in Geoffrey of Monmouth, or maybe you only know it from the play of about 20 years ago, “The moste famous Chronicle historye of Leire king of England and his Three Daughters”. You also have imprinted in your mind what happens in the end: Cordelia lives, Lear is restored to his throne. And then enter Lear with Cordelia dead in his arms. It's the most visually arresting moment in Shakespeare's works, even before Lear begins to speak. Now imagine my surprise when I see a pedestal with both Cordelia and Lar on it. I literally gasped and almost jumped in my chair to vociferate “bloody murder”! We are not sure how often Lear was revived in Shakespeare's lifetime (he rewrote the play at least twice, as far as I remember reading somewhere). I think it was Charles Lamb who wrote that the original version was unstageable or something to that effect, we also know what Tolstoy said about Shakespeare’s play (suffice to say he much preferred the anonymous “King Leir and His Three Daughters”, the prick).

It took over many years for us to be able to look the truth in the eye as Shakespeare wrote it. (I’m not even conserving the fact that Henry Irving's version omitted the blinding of Gloucester…)

I’ve always believed (or chose to believe, I’m not sure which) Lear dies thinking that he has seen Cordelia's lips move. This way it’d parallel the death of Gloucester as well, who after all his griefs is killed by excess of happiness (or rather "'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief") on finding his son still alive and being reconciled to him. It would be the final cruel blow inflicted in this play by the mocking heavens whose gods uttered "kill us for their sport." I think that's what horrified Tolstoy, a committed Christian. But Shakespeare stayed true to his tragic and agnostic and unreligious vision, staring unblinkingly at the truth. There had been nothing before like it since Sophocles. It's a Greek tragic vision of life that could only be fully understood in a post-Christian era.

I wanted to like this production a lot; I wanted to love it; I wanted to praise the heavens for having seen it, because I very much like Anthony Sher, and felt his portrayals of Falstaff in the Henrys were excellent, but unfortunately I left feeling that it just doesn’t have the intangible magic it needs to be great (I believe Sher no longer has the physical capacity/stamina for this role). As to the actors, Byrne was one of the best Kents I've ever seen and Troughton was also magnificent. Just imagine a world in which actors like David Troughton (or David Bradley!) are offered Lear at the RSC…). Paapa Essiedu's Edmund was a bit incoherent. He didn’t sound like the Edmund “I know”.

Let’s turn to Regan and Goneril. How can I say this without sounding offensive? I don’t understand how they are with a company like the RSC. Neither actress permeates their role with the carefully measured metamorphosis from exasperated daughter to filial impiety to, ultimately, fratricidal frenzy that the text demands. I know they’re not easy roles, but here they are both bitches from beginning to end. That’s not what’s in Shakespeare’s text. Sorry. I’m a Shakespeare die-hard. If it’s not in the text, there must be a bloody good reason for being staged that way. With those two, I don’t understand how they stayed the same during the entire play.

Personally, I go to the RSC expecting to see 'world class' acting and 'world class' productions and this King Lear is far from either of those. It’s actually disgraceful that the RSC should present such a poor production of such a great play. If you’re not a Shakespeare buff, you’ll probably love this production (there were a lot of those in the audience). If you’re a Shakespeare die-hard, you’ll save your money, find a DVD copy of Ian McKellen as Lear and enjoy yourself!

NB: Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Stratford-Upon-Avon, 15^th October 2016.

NB2: All pictures and film clips taken by me in stealth mode...

Shakespeare in Hopscotch Mode: "Cimbelino" by William Shakespeare, António Pires (Stage Director), Teatro do Bairro, and Act for All School

(Entrance's front door to the theatre)

I've just got home from having seen Cymbeline. This is the first time I’ve watched this play (either on stage or on screen) and It’s just very fresh in my mind because I’d also just read it. There are some outstanding performances: Carolina Crespo as Imogen is outstanding and her relationship with José Pimentão as Posthumus is the emotional and beating heart of this production. Iacomo’s “comic” interjections and intonations were also very funny. Yes, there were ideas in abundance and some didn't come off so well (the action around the battle scene in particular lost itself more than a little in visual symbolism). Nevertheless, this is a production well worth seeing - it's also encouraging to see the significant number of actors in the company this year that are just coming out of this particular acting school – “Act for all School” (only Adriano Luz as Cymbeline and Rita Loureiro as the Queen, João Araújo, João Barbosa, and Ricardo Aibéo are professional actors). This production has given an invigorating another feel to the celebrations of the 400 years of Shakespeare’s demise.

This staging was a "showcase of Shakespeare's plays," where one can recognize Romeo and Juliet, Othello and some other of his works. According to the stage director, António Pires, he wanted to play to interact with the memories of the viewers - fetching references to paintings, but also with the songs that populate our imagination, as well as with fairy tales, and popular tradition.

The decisive factor for me to have enjoyed it (it’s not one my favourite plays), was the space where the stage was set, at the Carmo convent ruins; making the action of the play outdoors, allowed the natural “colours” (the play was performed at night), the black sky, and the ruins very much a part of the text.

I'm glad that they made the effort to stage this rather obscure play; many of these plays have many hidden gems. While the "Cymbeline" plot is contrived, I enjoyed it for combining themes and characters that were obviously borrowed from his other works. In this version of "Cymbeline," I had shades of “Othello” (Iacomo as Iago), “King Lear” (Cymbeline betrayed by his wife and step-son), “The Merchant of Venice” (Imagen disguised as a male youth), etc. As one of his late plays, it was both a tribute and a clever parody of Shakespeare’s own canon.

The original Elizabethan text was shown on the front wall of the ruins at the same time the actors were saying their lines. It was the first I saw something like this in a Shakespearean staged play in Portugal (it’s quite common in our Opera houses). I loved it! For my particular type of brain it was a treat. Listening to the text with one part of my Portuguese brain, and at the same time reading the text on the wall with the English part of my brain, produced a very weird but nevertheless very rewarding experience. Henrique Braga’s rendering is the translation I’d have liked to be able to do. It‘s not Shakespeare, but it’s not supposed to be. I’ve always maintained that Shakespeare in a foreign language is not Shakespeare, merely a rendering of the original text into another language. Shakespeare’s peculiarity lies in his words, i.e., in the power and beauty of his phrases in English. Yes, Shakespeare says stuff, some of it rather good, and quite interesting, but the real genius lies in the how, not the what. Considering the amount of text that Shakespeare 'reworked' (let's not forget that Shakespeare was, in effect, writing 'early-modernised' versions of old stuff, and I don't mean this in any way pejoratively), any translation of Shakespeare runs the very real risk of fulfilling Plato's criticism of poetry itself. This is ironic considering we're discussing poetry, but if anything is close to the ideal form of poetry, it's Shakespeare. I ought to go all Shakespearian at this juncture, but my memory deserts me. You can no more translate Shakespeare than you can Schiller or Celan. 

(The beginning of the play)

It is great that other people other than the English love Shakespeare, but the magic is in the unique construction of the words and phrases he used in his prose and blank verse, as delicately crafted as the finest sculpture and in many ways more important than the more obvious theatrical devices of plot and characterisation. He was not a mere storyteller and no translation - even into modern Portuguese, no less - can hope to capture his achievement. It can still make for damned fine theatre, but it is not Shakespeare. Of course the "profound and poetic use of the English language "gets lost in translation", and can only to a certain degree be replaced by a profound and poetic use of the Portuguese (or any other) language, if it is a good translation. So you have an advantage if you are able to enjoy Shakespeare in the original Elizabethan English. But there obviously remains enough of Shakespeare in any good translation, that he can fascinate people all over the world. What you translate of course changes the culture you translate into, but the act of translation also forces you to sometimes stretch, sometimes re-invent the possibilities of our target language. In as much as Vasco Graça Moura, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and earlier translations did just that, they created a whole new Portuguese poetic idiom, "all ours" indeed. (Which modern translators find it hard to emancipate themselves from, by the way; but there are many excellent "poetic" modern versions.) All but four of his plays borrow plots from other sources, likewise with characters. One could rewrite the plays substituting modern English for the Elizabethan original, but that would be another form of rendering. I’m a die-hard Shakespearean. This means the Englishness of his plays must be kept at all costs. On the other hand, this does not mean I’m going to stop seeing Shakespeare’s plays in other languages, namely in Portuguese. I just know it’s going to be a different experience altogether. The level of fruition is just going to be on another plane of analysis. Kudos to Henrique Braga’s rendering of the Elizabethan text into Portuguese. I still feel the essence of Shakespeare's language evades translation even if the meaning is captured. From basic things like the rhythm of "To be, or not to be" compared with "Ser ou Não Ser", to the countless words Shakespeare invented for his own purposes, for me there's just no substitute for the originals. I think for a Portuguese reader moderately equipped with English, the effort required to read Shakespeare in the original is akin to the effort a native English speaker makes to understand Chaucer. In both instances it's possible with a bit of work, if you're really into it, as I am.

(One of the Gothic pillars on the right side of the theatre)

On a side note, it was only by watching this play that something about the 5^th act crystallised in my mind. How was Shakespeare able to interweave strands of narrative elements drawn from Boccaccio, French medieval romance, Holinshed and various other sources? There are people saying Shakespeare was not an original writer. Bah! Everything was drawn together with mind-boggling skill. Producing a coherent work of art from an array of reworked source material is a complex business; it's just not as simple as saying that Shakespeare didn't write his own stories, and therefore the language is everything. Things are not as simple as that.

NB: Play seen live at a packed Carmo convent ruins in Lisbon, on the 9^th of August 2016.

Beckettian Theatre: "O Relógio" by Flor na Boca Projectos

"O Relógio" = The Clock

Is there a way to objectively know what an art object is all about? Be it a book, an opera, a painting, a book, a poem, or a play? At least not in my mind.

When I attend a theatre performance, all I can ever do is say, or write, what I think I saw.

There are times when my mind conjures up things that aren’t there at all and there are times when I miss things that are definitely there. I can just try to grasp that indefinable feeling of "getting it". In this case, what "O Relógio" meant to me, what it felt like for me to be there and the effect it had on me, are something I'm still not prepared to talk about. I'm still thinking about it. I'm not even using the alibi of having read the book on which it was based on, because I haven't read it, and I don't plan on doing so, in case it destroys what I've just seen (instead I'll just read Samuel's Pimenta's other books).

I went to see this play with my eyes completely closed, i.e., I didn't have any kind of expectations on what I was about to watch. At the end of it, what was the play about? As a once regular theatregoer (now not so much due to my personal life), it's quite wonderful not to worry my pretty little head on working out exactly what the play was all about. I just let it flow.

That's also one of the reasons for loving to see Shakespeare performed on stage. At the best of times, even when I know the story inside out, as I always do, Shakespeare is at times extraordinarily abstract. Should we stop watching it? Nope. Theatre, when done right, has a unique capacity to bonk you in the head, heart and other innards all at once. There are some forms of theatre that are more difficult to relate to without a textual medium to be used as a crutch. When along comes a play where the content rather than the visceral experience is not as important, I just enjoy it to the fullest of my abilities and stay silent to enjoy the silences in the play.

Visually, the play works wonders. Light (or lack thereof) served to organize the various structural changes that underlay the performance. As in a Beckett play, where the beginnings and ends of plays derive from the intensity of light, or rather the variation between light and darkness, Vicente Morais' and Paulo Vaz's stage direction emphasized the juxtaposition between light and darkness. The effect was mesmerizing. If it were possible to "watch" this play without sound, I'd say I was watching a play from the Hammer Film Studios, where Paulo Vaz would be a Peter Cushing doppelganger. The fading-up and fading-out of the actor in terms of light and, shadow, and darkness, for me, visually, and in terms of (trying) to interpret the play, represented the focal points of dramatization against the spatially notions of presence and absence.

I don't know whether the intention of inserting a Beckett's play extract at the beginning and at the end of the play and the juxtaposition of light and darkness was an intentional move on the part of stage director and actor, but it worked like a charm.

Things I noticed. Once again the silence/pauses between lines of text is done masterfully and beautifully.

As in a Pinter play, we get to enjoy more, because what's beneath the text is more important than what I can see and hear. There were some parts in the play where I just wanted to close my eyes (I couldn't unfortunately) and "listen" to what was beating underneath. Without a full and well-done articulated pause/silence, I wouldn't have a certain amount of time, during which I could ponder on a single given utterance (be it text, or a pause) to the exclusion of anything else. I was able to do it. That's why the "Überschreitung" between the performer, Paulo Vaz, the stage, and me, as I said above, was achieved beautifully.

Theatre, much more than film, it's all in the hands of the stage director and the actor giving voice to the part.

I was not familiar with Samuel Pimenta's work. It bears digging deeper into (unfortunately the site is only available in Portuguese) ...

NB: Stage Director, Vicente Morais; Monologue, Paulo Vaz (literary persona Álvaro Cordeiro), based on a book by Samuel Pimenta at Sociedade Guilherme Cossoul.

Richard Through Several Doppelgängers: "Richard III" by William Shakespeare, Tónan Quito

This Richard III brought together 6 "words" that keep on forming an important nexus in my life: Shakespeare, English, German, SF, larger than life acting, and cinema. The most compelling aspect of this Richard III was Romeu Runa's performance - a bravura turn that almost seemed aimed, in its intimate moments, for the first-person mode. With me there's always an element of snobbism, an Anglophilia that draws me to the British actors who come out of a theatrical tradition. British actors, even when they appear in Hollywood films, are an alternate reality, a glimpse into the worlds of Shakespeare and theatrical tradition, which is, I think, far more worthwhile, far more compelling than mere movies.

Some Shakespeare plays have little to do with Shakespeare. That the medieval painting gave way to easel painting in oil that does not make paintings and oil paintings identical. On the contrary, the qualities that make a painting a particular medium can more easily be isolated when it's differentiated from, rather that collapsed with oil painting, watercolours, etc. "Everylike is not the same", as Brutus would have said.

Shakespeare in a language other than English, necessarily avoids the principal challenge a theatre director faces in adapting Shakespeare to the stage: how to give life to the verse and prose out of which "Shakespeare" as text and as cultural object is fundamentally constituted. As a result, this Richard "inhabits" another stage space.

I've always firmly believed Shakespeare in translation shifts an audience’s attention from the words to the action. I had just finished re-reading the play in English before going to see the play. While I was sitting in the theatre, the unfamiliar language and theatre conventions had a Brechtian distancing effect on me, as if I was watching very familiar stuff through fresh eyes, as well as getting to experience an unfamiliar form of theatre via a story I already knew.

"Mastering" Shakespeare is synonym with the mastery of the English language, i.e., the power and beauty of his expression in Shakespeare's English.  I don't really care about the plots (Shakespeare was not particularly good at writing plots). For me they are always secondary to his gift with words. Shakespeare in translation, however thorough, substitutes a parallel or similarity which is no longer the work of the author and which changes it. A translation might have a different value from the original but that's not to say it has no value. I feel I only really discovered "King Lear" when I saw Kurosawa's film, "Ran", so if one loves the plays, I find it interesting to see them reimagined in new forms, like the one I just watched. Some choices are debatable. Yes, they are. But who cares? What I really care about is whether the vision is consistent from beginning to end, and Tónan's Verfremdung is exactly that. Something different to ponder about.

On with the play:

NB: At the end of the play, when Richard III/Romeu Runa was doing his horsey ballet, an English woman in the audience hollered "Take me out of here. This is, this is..." There's no accounting for taste...

NB2: SF = Speculative Fiction.

The Transformative Power of Theatre: "Power and Desire"/"O poder e o desejo"

2:57 pm 11 January 2015

"O Poder e o Desejo" ("Power and Desire").

Yesterday I went to see a wonderful play in Lisbon written and directed by Álvaro Cordeiro: "O Poder e o Desejo" ("Power and Desire").

The Actors: Joana Oliveira, Paulo Vaz and Vicente Morais.

This is what theatre is all about. At least it's the one I much prefer: Text vs Silence vs Actors (forget about props, stage sets, etc).

I'm not going to discuss the play in itself. What interested me the most about it was the way it reminded me of a Shakespeare Play: It was all in the Word itself.

A long time ago I watched "The Tempest" in Lisbon directed by Tim Carroll from the English Shakespeare Company.  It was a transformative experience. To care about this kind of theatre is to make me care about the obsession with The Pause (aka "The Silence"). As with any worthwhile Shakespeare play it's all about the silence/pause. There must be a pause—a certain kind of pause, I insist—or all is lost. Cordeiro's play takes this theatre concept to heart, which isn't exactly common in our fast-food theatre plays that we get to see on stage most of the time nowadays. It's a case for Theaterumschulung in terms of the viewer....

Shakespeare for me is a way of life. When it began within me it was a kind of initiation into a new domain. What do I mean by domain in this context? It's a kind of realm of transcendence that I’ve sought with mixed success to return to ever after. It was the experience that, for me, gave a lifelong urgency to the conflicts over Shakespearean questions.

Sometimes I talk about how watching Shakespeare being performed on stage for the first time (in English) was such a transformative experience for me.  How I’ve spent the years since trying to recapture or at least explain to myself why that night was so transformative. I feel almost a bit embarrassed at making this kind of statement... It's something I haven’t recovered from. Ever since then I’ve been trying to recapture it, to explain what it was. Watching "O Poder e o Desejo" last night had a similar effect on me. I’m not sure my experience yesterday in Lisbon at Guilherme Cossoul went as deep as watching a Shakespeare play (I'm still processing it...), but I did feel my heart “report” something it never reported before when watching a play in Portuguese being performed on stage.

About Shakespeare and the Theatre in general I've written a lot in several venues (The British Council, The Goethe Institute, etc). My latest incursion into Shakespeare territory was with the close reading of the book "The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups" by Ron Rosenbaum", which is a wonderful text on what it means to always have Shakespeare close by your side...

I end this text with my favourite Shakespeare Sonnet, which I truly believe represents what my take on what Theatre should be all about:

 “O, learn to read what
silent love hath writ:/To hear with eyes
belongs to love’s fine wit.”

(Sonnet 23)