Castro

Castro (1598), a play by poet António Ferreira, marks the first incursion of Nuno Cardoso into a canonic piece of Portuguese theatre, Portugal’s first classical tragedy. He intends to inhabit this literary fiction, which itself offers a very particular version of the historical drama/legend/myth of star-crossed lovers Pedro and Inês, making us “see with other eyes”. An immense stage-house-country confronts us with the tangible intimacy of characters that are in thrall to themselves and their intransigence. In Castro , like in Danton’s Death , the issue of utopia (as regards love, as well as revolution) plays a crucial role. Its dark reverse is exposed here: love/desire and power as addiction and chaos, as a blindness that “tarnishes/ The briliant rays of the ancient glory”. And how that tarnishing impairs the powers of decision and replicates itself, tainting with blood and revenge the family’s fabric, via a peculiar dislocation of Castro ’s focal point from Inês to Pedro’s mirror-like relationship with his father, King Afonso IV.