2024-04-22 16:19:05
It begins like one of Chekhov’s country outings: the family gathers around a wooden hut in the cork oak grove. They watch the swallows fly and exchange ideas about the recipe for braised pig’s trotters; the youngest is ridiculed for her veganism.
Later, like every year, another fascist will be shot. But this time everything is different; at the end of this clever and disturbing evening of theater, even the audience joins in loudly.
The scandalous climax of “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” takes almost two hours to arrive. During this time, the family of seven is observed. Together they sing “Grandola, vila morena”, the famous song of the Portuguese “Carnation Revolution”, which celebrates its 50th anniversary on April 25th this year. The coup ended the dictatorship of Salazar’s “Estado Novo,” which had lasted more than 40 years.
Director Tiago Rodrigues goes even further back in Portugal’s history – to 1954, when farm worker Catarina Eufémia was murdered by Salazar’s regime. The dead woman becomes an icon of resistance. Rodrigues alludes to them in his piece: Since 1954, every family member at the age of 26, which is how old Catarina Eufémia was, has had to kill a fascist.
The action in the play can be roughly dated to 2028. There is war in Europe, fascists are in power in Portugal. A “patriotic algorithm” protects the state from mockery, hatred and agitation online; trade unions are banned. There is an embroidered “Não passarão!” on the tablecloth of the large table – you won’t get through! “No pasarán!” was what the Republican forces shouted at Franco’s troops in the Spanish Civil War.
Only violence helps where there is violence?
Only one sits silently on the edge, wearing a suit with a shirt and tie. It is the fascist who should be shot. But when the chosen one refuses, the anti-fascist family idyll begins to crack. Everyone talks about her: the fiery sister. The strict mother. The uncle with his Brecht quotes. The grandfather with his philosophical dilemma.
They all have their own way of justifying the murder. It is necessary to “do evil in order to do good.” Hasn’t history taught us that we have to fight back against beginnings? That only violence helps where there is violence? That democracy cannot defend itself against fascism using democratic means?
No tolerance for intolerance, no freedom for the enemies of freedom, these are the beliefs of the left-wing family: “You don’t talk to fascists, you fight them.” But how?
As if it were a Chekhov play
Source: Joseph Banderet/Schaubühne
Up to this point, “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” is a thesis on the paradox of tolerance, which is spread out in numerous verbal battles, which it would not have done any harm to discuss a few other political options for action between taking up arms and laissez-faire. However, the rhetorical escalation serves a purpose: when the left-wing family is eliminated in the internal shootout, the previously wordless fascist makes his appearance.
The fascist steps up to the ramp and the lights in the auditorium come on. He, recently described as the “moral author of violence,” begins his speech with the words: “I want to talk about freedom.” What follows is a half-hour monologue that cleverly combines a deflated liberalism with fantasies of a strict state and moral corset connects. It goes against minorities and elites, for the fatherland, family and police state. Salazar’s “New State” is now called the “New Republic.”
“Who will stop this person?”
It doesn’t take long before the audience starts coughing ostentatiously. The first boos follow. “Who will stop this person?” someone shouts. Slogans and chants are uttered, the boos become more frequent and louder, at times they drown out the speech. Numerous spectators leave the hall, the mood is restless. At a performance in Frankfurt am Main last summer, the actor is said to have had earplugs and objects thrown at him.
Presumably the audience may have previously sympathized with the humanistic doubt rather than the execution, but now the desire to silence the stage fascist breaks through. Or the desire not to find his ears polluted by its effusions. The audience becomes involved in the piece with their emotions. Some people may have been later surprised or annoyed by his reactions.
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“Long live Portugal!” ends the speech, the play is over. Some of those remaining applauded standing up, others were irritated. In the follow-up conversation, Rodrigues says that there had already been more violent turmoil, but also ghostly silence. “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” was first performed in Portugal in autumn 2020, where Rodrigues directed the National Theater, and in 2023 he took over the theater festival in Avignon, southern France. The piece has now been performed at the Festival for International New Drama, or FIND for short, at the Berlin Schaubühne.
“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” is not a feel-good piece. It unsettles instead of morally confirming. Rodrigues says theater needs to ask delicate questions. He doesn’t want to preach ideological lifestyles and he doesn’t have any solutions, otherwise he would be a politician and not an artist, says Rodrigues. Sophocles did not recommend that the Athenians with his “Antigone” behave like the title heroine. Now the audience is challenged to find better solutions than in the play – great theater!
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