Noite de Estreia

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The film “Opening Night” [Noite de Estreia] (1977), by John Cassavetes, brought the theatre to the cinema. By bringing it to the stage, Martim Pedroso gives us “a stage show about a film that is about a stage show”. The heart of this mise en abyme beats in the solitary and against the tide journey of Myrtle Gordon, the actress who plays Virginia in the play within the play “The Second Woman”. Myrtle does not recognise herself in the conventions of masculinity and femininity that the text conveys. Her discomfort in the role precipitates, as she witnesses the death of a female fan, in a spiral of crisis that puts everything in question, starting with the play itself, which she wants to turn upside down. Martim Pedroso's “Noite de Estreia”, in its game of mirrors between theatre and cinema, keeping close to Cassavetes and his acting “method”, is a compliment of actors and the theatre’s intimate ability to seek hope, as Myrtle asks the playwright and her director, something able to shatter all stereotypes. Who is this second woman, after all, who takes the stage by storm on “the night of all openings or the most delightful of all failures”?