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The big experiment

In the first in a new series on European theatre, John O'Mahony visits Lisbon and finds a scene thriving without buildings, money - or audiences

Saturday September 13, 2003
The Guardian



There is something uncomfortably evocative about the vast building that housed Jorge Silva Melo's theatre company, A Capital, on the slopes of Bairro Alto, overlooking central Lisbon. The district is a maze of dingy dives, fado bars and chic clubs, populated by just the kind of grungy cross section the complex would hope to draw. The building, once a Portuguese newspaper office, is monumental and wildly eccentric, a crepuscular labyrinth of echoing chambers and cramped cubby-holes, all cluttered with girders, pipe sections and the most amazing industrial junk.

The only significant problem with A Capital as a working playing space is that it was shut down by the Portuguese authorities last year, ostensibly on health and safety grounds. It is now derelict, and the rubble and debris seem haunted by past glories. Here is a corner where, Silva Melo recalls, the company played Waiting for Godot or Happy Days to a promenade audience; there, a tiny cramped room that once hosted Sarah Kane's Blasted.

But there are hopes for the future: "We have the money to refurbish and are looking at the final plan of the architect," he says. "When it is all finished, there will be six or seven companies working out of here. If we can just resolve our struggle with the mayor, this could be one of the finest theatre centres in Europe."

Though Silva Melo, the irrepressible elder statesman of the country's theatre scene, would disagree, the fraught A Capital project serves as a metaphor for the whole of modern Portuguese theatre: nostalgic, highly idealistic but neglected and forever trapped in the febrile process of fulfilling its promise. On the surface, Lisbon seems to support a healthy plethora of venues - from the huge neoclassical Teatro Nacional on the commercial Rossio square to funky, hilltop cafe theatres such as Teatro Taborda - and companies, from established names such as Teatro Cornucopia, co-founded by Melo, to bands of kids performing experimental works in the grounds of mental hospitals.

However, theatre here is afflicted by one overwhelming, trenchant problem: a lack of audiences. At the country's National Theatre - a sumptuous auditorium seating 500, where I witnessed Titus Andronicus playing to a crowd of 120 - a paltry 25% house is regarded as a resounding, sell-out smash hit. Shows in the city are regularly cancelled when theatregoers fail to materialise.

Of those who do turn up, a high proportion are other actors, directors and concerned parties. Theatre in Portugal appears to be stuck in a solipsistic vacuum. "It is both very liberating and very dangerous," says theatre critic João Carniera. "Liberating because, without a tradition, anything is possible. And dangerous because of the danger of total isolation and self-deception."

Much of this phenomenon can be put down historical factors. As every local is fond of telling visitors, the country has laboured under Europe's longest dictatorship: António de Oliveira Salazar assumed power in 1932. Salazar's nanny state not only passed laws banishing "dripping laundry" from Lisbon's balconies, but also imposed a brutal censor on the country's theatre, banning Brecht, Beckett, Sartre and Camus, as well as any comment on religion, the authority of the state or the vicious colonial war fought from 1960-74.

Salazar's miserly social policies also isolated the intellectual elite. "He ran the country like a small grocer's shop," says young director Guilherme Mendonça. "He saved on everything and spent money on nothing - including the education of the people, who would be theatre's potential audiences."

After the revolution of 1974 swept away the dictatorship, there was a brief explosion of activity and a rash of new companies were founded, including Teatro Cornucopia, set up by Silva Melo and his partner, Luis Miguel Cintra, and A Barraca (named after Lorca's famous travelling troupe, shut down by Franco), which featured Augusto Boal, then in exile from Brazil. "There was much social activity," says Cintra, whose company presented Portuguese premieres of works such as Brecht's Fear and Misery in the Third Reich and Buchner's Woyzeck. "People went to the theatre in a very different way, discussing the play, and often we would have open forums in the theatre when the curtain came down."

In the 1980s, the euphoria ebbed away and the country slipped into stagnation. "We don't complain now because, during the 1980s, very often we couldn't perform," says Cintra. "There were no people." And yet, it was this disastrous situation that laid the ground for everything that is vital and exciting now in Portuguese theatre. As Carniera puts it: "In these circumstances, there is no possibility to make money. Theatre becomes pure experimentation, a huge laboratory."

The twin pillars of Portuguese theatrical re-emergence in the 1990s are a pair of extraordinary female actors and directors. The first is a fast-talking firebrand named Lúcia Sigalho, whose anarchic brand of physical theatre seems to spring naturally from her own exuberant personality.

"I spent 10 years working under the bridge, as we say here," she says. "I would rehearse in an old jail today, a grocery shop tomorrow. I was rehearsing in the street, in the castle of St George. There were no spaces, no spaces at all. We were inventing a new map for performing art in this world because otherwise there would be nothing else." Sigalho's early pieces were gregarious dramatisations of her own life: for instance, The Smile of the Jaconda, a one-woman show in which she discussed the hardship of the performer's life while slopping paint all over the stage.

The other totemic figure of the 1990s is the sinuous, tortured siren Monica Calle, whose work is more personal, more quietly explosive. Performed in her crude one-roomed theatre, her early work Casa Conveniente (House of Convenience) involved a strip-tease to the poetry of Rimbaud; audience members wandered in and out, as though at a red-light peep show. More recently, in 2002, she has created a work around the writings of Walter Benjamin. It is performed to only two audience members who join Calle under the covers of an expansive on-stage bed.

"My aim is to create the simplest, poorest theatre imaginable," she says. "I don't use projectors, or anything technical. I want to find the essence of theatricality just in the actors and the texts."

One of the most important contributions of Calle and Sigalho is the enormous influence they have exerted on the latest generation of practitioners, including groups such as Utero, fronted by a fervent, intense young actor named Miguel Moreira. "We don't believe in politics, we don't believe in human relations, we don't have God," he says. "We need theatre in Portugal in order to get together to believe in something." Another idealistic young collective, Praga, recently mounted Noël Coward's Private Lives in the style of New York's Wooster Group, with fragmented texts from Schopenhauer to Beckett inserted over a PA.

However, the company that most epitomises the "laboratory" status of contemporary Portuguese theatre is one of the country's oldest: O Bando, founded in 1974 by the veteran director João Brites. Exhausted by lack of audiences and seeking new frontiers, the company decided in 2000 to decamp to a farm just outside the village of Palmela, 50km south-east of Lisbon. As visitors round the bend, they are greeted by a huge, gleaming, futuristic scaffold ramp set into the hillside. At one end is a cluster of revolving seats, where the audience swivels with the action, and at the other is a canvas turret that houses the musicians and percussionists.

The evening I visited, the show began after sunset. The audience gathered in the old converted piggery that houses the group's administrative offices. After donning blankets and waterproof coats ("against dew", I was told), they took their seats in the darkness to witness Os Anjos, a piece by Teolinda Gersão performed in a style that can only be described as Portuguese folk kabuki.

Characters skipped up and down the ramp, sporting emblematic peasant costumes, false feet strapped to their shins, giving the impression of human puppets. The plot, concerning the church tradition of votive offerings and a widow's search for absolution, was incidental. The magic of the show was the soaring poetry of the Portuguese language, the constant outbreaks of intoxicating, melancholy song and the beguiling eccentricity of the performances, which often hit their high notes on the twilit far end of the ramp.

"The countryside gives us a different focus on the relationship with the people," says Brites, whose shows often achieve unprecedented 100% capacity. "In a conventional room you are locked away from the community. It is a new relationship with people that is not an elitist one. The people now come not just to the theatre, but for the whole experience of Palmela and the sense of occasion."

Theatre in Portugal is afflicted by some major and rather disgraceful shortcomings, not least the almost total exclusion of the country's sizable African communities. My visit coincided with a naive but spirited production of a play called Damas d'Ama, performed by first- and second-generation Angolan actors. It dealt with teenage pregnancy in the many ethnic shantytowns that surround Lisbon. According to its lead actor, such productions are pitifully rare: "In general, if you get work, you end up playing the butler or a workman. There are few outlets of African culture - nothing compared with the situation in Spain, where there are black culture festivals. As an African, you immediately encounter an iron curtain."

The previous government, a socialist one, had an enlightened policy of funding smaller and younger groups, but now the essential laboratory spirit is being threatened by the country's economic hardship and a directive by the country's new right-wing government to consolidate state funding. Predictably, there are many practitioners who feel that any new hardship will simply be another step towards fulfilling the country's obvious theatrical promise.

"I like battles," concludes Silva Melo in the ruins of his theatre. "I relish the prospect of fighting against the right-wing government. Already there is a kind of internal defeat, and people are supporting it with fatalism. But I feel that maybe this is the earthquake we need."

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