Performance suspended. More information here.

“You can’t make good theatre without a few beautiful things”, João Botelho tells us; hence, we are not surprised by his decision to bring to the stage what Hannah Arendt has described as “German literature’s most beautiful love story”. By this we mean, of course, A Criada Zerlina [Zerline’s Tale], the story that Austrian writer Hermann Broch included in his novel T__he Guiltless, originally published in 1950. Zerline is an old servant who retrospectively reveals a tale of passion involving herself, her employer and her lover. A story shot through with sexual and class resentment, primal eroticism and ethical obsession, in which the status of Broch’s creation unfolds: servant, lover, tutor, and spy, as well as an instigator of insanity, jealousy and vengeance. This intense monologue becomes “true” in the voice of Luísa Cruz, whose performance won her a Globo de Ouro award in 2019. “A beautiful, amazing actress”, according to João Botelho, a film director who has finally decided to tackle the theatre, that place of shadows and intimacies, transfixed here by a ray of light that cuts through “that obscurity where the revelation and triumph of the text must take place”.