About Heinrich von Kleist’s novella O Duelo [The Duel] (1811), which she translated and now adapts for Carlos Pimenta’s staging, Maria Filomena Molder says the following: “Neither a Classical nor a Romantic, Kleist is, in fact, the first Modern among German poets.” One of Kafka’s favourite writers, but rejected by Goethe and Hegel, who discarded his “invisible theatre”, Kleist created a body of work that did not suit his time and its laws. In O Duelo, a romantic tale with crime-story overtones that takes place in the late 1200s, the honour and earnestness of the story’s three main characters seem to hang in the confrontation of the title, where God’s judgement will make victorious the sword that upholds truth. But nothing is as it seems, and God is less accurate than we might expect. This play about calculation and chance, failure and success, is ruled by vertiginous poetic justice and led by the voice and body of actor Miguel Loureiro.