O Dia do Juízo

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Stage director Cristina Carvalhal visited us in 2018 with the stage adaptation of Elizabeth Costello, a novel by J.M.Coetzee. Two years later, we will meet her again with a play by Ödön von Horváth. We could start by talking about this playwright by quoting a lapidary phrase: “I have attempted to be as disrespectful as possible towards stupidity and lies.” If we add to this brutality an abruptness for human insufficiencies and a corrosive sense of humour, we begin to grasp the dominant tone of the work of Horváth, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire who settled in Berlin in the 1920s, to then reinvent the German-speaking popular theatre. Written in 1935-36, the intrigue of Judgment Day could easily be confused with a run-of-the-mill bourgeois drama, led by an unexpected “love” triangle. But the play acquires, as it progresses, the density of a parable on guilt and innocence, to question individual responsibility within the daily life of a community. The use of video pieces is one of the building-blocks of the show. The video done by the filmmaker Pedro Filipe Marques, will be instrumental in achieving the phantasmal dimension of guilt or, to put it another way, in the “materialisation” of the unusual presence from the “beyond”…