At the Back
Can You Hear Me In Recife?
The invitation was alluring: "Can you take part in an international seminar on theatre criticism in Recife, Brazil?" The terms clinched it — air travel and a not unreasonable fee. I'm not used to being paid at all for my foreign excursions, so this looked good. It was quite difficult to get much detail about what it was all about, but I'd said I would go and didn't want to let down the organisers, who seemed chaotic but well-meaning. I was slightly put off when I learned that my usual flannel about what it is to be a critic was not required: "Please prepare a one-hour lecture on European Theatre 2000—2010, with illustrations." Still, the pictures of the hotel where I was to stay showed a swimming pool looking out on to the Atlantic. I packed my bag.
Cramped and tiring
A cramped and tiring ten-hour journey took me to S5o Paulo, passing over Recife, then back again on another three-hour flight. My 1992 Lonely Planet Guide To Brazil had told me that Recife, sitting on the elbow of South America as capital of the province of Pernambuco, was the country's third city, with a population of 1.2 million. Time flies — the population is now a cool eight million, twelve if you count the surrounding suburbs. Some more up-to-date research on Wikipedia revealed that the city has quite a number of theatres, which seemed promising. On arrival, I learned that the seminar, the fourth of its kind, had grown from a local event to a national one and then expanded to cover Latin America. Now it had gone global. Not terribly global, as it turned out: my European lecture was one of three international contributions, the other two coming from my good friend Vivian Tabares from Cuba, who gave a splendid account of current theatre in Latin America, and my new friend Miyuki Takahashi, who was equally informative on Japanese theatre. The week was fleshed out with talks from distinguished Recife critics, and a series of performances by local troupes. Another group of invited critics contributed lively blogs to the seminar's website, while a couple of academics from the University of Pernambuco were very active guests of honour.
The big drawback for me was that almost everyone involved spoke Portuguese — a language which I can read with difficulty but barely speak — and practically nobody spoke English. It was only when I did a version of my talk to the theatre students of the University that I had much sense of engagement, for the learning of English is still very much in its infancy in this part of Brazil. This means that any of the following reflections on theatre in Recife should be viewed with caution. I may have completely misread what I saw, or misheard what went on in the long discussions of the shows.
Full houses
I didn't get to see the most important theatres on Wikipedia's list, the beautifully restored Santa Isabel opera house or the huge all-purpose venue on the university campus, but these would both appear to be used primarily for visiting shows. Recife's remaining theatres are in general small, similar in size to venues on the London fringe, which means that in a city of this size full houses are not too difficult to come by. I'm told that the local groups get very good subsidy, too. The majority of them have had their work and aims lovingly catalogued in a well-researched series, Memorias da Cena Pernambucana, edited largely by Leidson Ferraz and already on its fourth volume, thanks to generous funding from the local sources of arts subsidy. From the series I deduce that most companies put on one show a year, the bulk of them original compositions, produced with slender technical resources and fairly primitive sets — though in the field of costume the powerful local tradition of carnival often shines through.
The paradox is that Recife's theatre, which at a too casual glance might be dismissed as the work of enthusiastic amateurs, takes itself very seriously. The city's small professional theatre community is closely linked with both the university drama department and the local newspaper critics — representatives of both groups figure among the companies' directors. Recife may not have much exposure to performances from the rest of Brazil, let alone the rest of the world, but there is a strong awareness of the major theoretical influences of world theatre — perhaps too strong, since I felt, in some of the productions I saw, that this theoretical strength was inhibiting directors from simply getting on with expressing their own idea of theatre.
Brick rectangle
This was particularly evident in the first production I saw, in the converted sugar warehouse that is now the Hermilo Borba Filho Theatre. It's a long brick rectangle with a surrounding balcony on three sides, but the company chose to play on a small platform end-on. The play was Senora Carrar's Rifles, Bertolt Brecht's limp transposition of J M Synge's Riders To The Sea to the time of the Spanish Civil War. The mannered production had "director's theatre" written all over it, with the cast sitting in the front row when not on stage, contributing gestures, murmurs and even song to the main action. They were all made up in white face, a characteristic of Braziliian theatre which may have its origins in carnival. It was surprising to discover that this was a faithful recreation of a 1978 production, this time directed by Joao Denys, a member of the original cast and now a professor at the university. The untutored visitor might ask why this, one of Brecht's least interesting plays, should have originally have been chosen for performance, let alone this museum replica, but an enthusiastic full house gave it the warmest of welcomes.
Later in the week, in the same space, but this time in a more satisfactory lateral layout, we saw a rehearsal of Our Lady Of The Drowned, an atmospheric early (1947) piece by Nelson Rodrigues, Brazil's best-known playwright. The director acknowledged his debt to Meyerhold, which might explain the extended and rather beautifully relaxed physical warm-up that preceded a very formal, rather stilted production that made use of a masked chorus to support some over-histrionic lead actors — only the titular heroine had the quiet intensity that the play appears to demand.
Sensational narratives
Brechtian theory was again to the fore, according to the critic-director, in Chat, a play by the Venezuelan Gustavo Ott. Performed in the elegant 50-seater Joaquim Cardoso Theatre, part of a beautifully restored colonial building now used as an arts centre for the university, it interwove a number of sensational narratives to show the perils lurking in internet chatrooms. It eschewed the obvious use of computer screens to give expressionistic life to the various lurid but fact-based stories. Less successful was the director's decision to share roles between three actors and one actress, when all the victims, here played regardless of gender, were in fact women.
Less insistently theatrical and hence more successful was Fio Invisivel A Minha Cabeca (An Invisible Thread In My Head), a short story adapted into a monologue reminiscent of Koltès, finely performed in the Teatro Capiba by Henrique Ponzi. In complete contrast was the exuberant everyday story of three transvestites, Paloma Para Matar (Paloma The Killer), a wacky karaoke musical offering its audience the choice of three endings. Played in the matchbox Teatro Alfredo de Oliveira on a stage that could hardly contain the six-strong cast, this could be dismissed as crowd-pleasing kitsch — it certainly pleased the crowded house that fell about with laughter throughout. Closer inspection shows it to be the work of a very talented group of actors (and one actress, defying political correctness by appearing in blackface) who extracted every ounce of humour from this very funny show.
Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com