Portuguese theater man Tiago Rodrigues gave the Festival TransAmériques a real seismic shock with the presentation of Catarina and the beauty of killing fascistsa work of unusual power… from which many festival-goers left shaken.
The premise is already unusual. In a small village in southern Portugal, a family gathers every year to execute a fascist. The tradition is 70 years old. We kill to honor the memory of our grandmother before celebrating around a dish of pig’s trotters.
This year, it’s the turn of Catarina, the cousin, to experience this deadly rite of passage. She has been preparing for this for years. But as she pulls the trigger, an icy doubt creeps into her. The questions are burning. Can the desire to do good justify violence? Isn’t it playing the role of the fascists to draw on one’s own hatred to take justice into one’s hands? Should we tolerate the intolerant by giving them the right to express themselves or is it better, on the contrary, to gag them for good by sending them ad patres ?
These questions, we suspect, will not please the family who, apart from this self-proclaimed vocation of killing fascists, is like many others. An uncle too jovial to hide the illness that is gnawing at him; another who quotes Brecht all over the place. A mute cousin or a mother who abuses white wine.
And there is the cousin who wants to sweep away the past and fight this hated fascism other than with fire. By words, perhaps…
All these characters – named Catarina and wearing traditional skirts out of duty to remember – are played with aplomb by top-flight actors and actresses. Not a false note or hesitation to disturb this anthological piece presented in Portuguese, with surtitles in French and English.
An angry public
With an astonishing mix of humor, tragedy and political-philosophical discourse, Tiago Rodrigues signs a text and a direction that are anything but comfortable. He has chosen here to offer no solution to the moral conflict of young Catarina, torn between her convictions and the love of her people. It is, he believes, up to the public to decide good from evil and find their own shades of gray.
And to do it, he uses nothing less than electroshocks in the form of a long hate speech from the fascist which was to serve as the centerpiece of the family reunion. No one is spared: women, homosexuals, immigrants… The man pours out his venom, foaming at the mouth, for a good 20 unbearable minutes.
PHOTO JOSEPH BANDERET, PROVIDED BY FTA
The character of the fascist, played by Romeu Costa, strongly shakes the public with his hateful remarks.
The public, most likely supported by agitators responsible for igniting the powder, ended up choosing sides. On Sunday evening, spectators shouted, chanted anti-fascist slogans or got up to leave the room with a bang. The actor, wonderfully stoic, but also terrifying in his words, did not waver. He machine-gunned his nauseating words to the last with a mastery that commands admiration.
Never have we experienced such a tense moment in a theater. Stuck between the hatred poured out on stage and that coming from the audience, it was impossible not to feel a huge charge of adrenaline filling his veins. So much so that after the final salute (under ovations and cheers), the atmosphere was explosive in the usually very quiet hall of the Théâtre Duceppe.
In short, Tiago Rodrigues struck a big blow with his polarized (and polarizing) text, but also with his brilliant direction which blurs the temporal lines to remind us that the rise of fascism is not just a story of the past. It is on every platform today and risks defining the difficult future of our breathless democracy.
It is to offer theater and dance lovers this kind of thunderclap from elsewhere that the FTA was created 39 years ago. Let us hope for many more for the next 39 years.
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Catarina and the beauty of killing fascists
Text and direction by Tiago Rodrigues
Duceppe Theater as part of the FTAUntil May 28.