John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night [Noite de Estreia] (1977) brought the theatre to the cinema. By bringing it back to the stage, Martim Pedroso offers us “a stage show about a film about a stage show”. The heart of this mise-en-abyme beats in the solitary, against-the-grain career of Myrtle Gordon, the actress who plays the role of Virginia in the play-within-a-play The Second Woman. Myrtle does not recognise herself in the conventions of masculinity and femininity propagated by the play’s text. Her discomfort with the role boils over when she witnesses the death of a female fan, spiralling a crisis that puts everything in question, starting with the play itself, which she intends to turn upside down. Martim Pedroso’s Noite de Estreia, in its game of mirrors between theatre and cinema, which hews close to Cassavetes and his acting “method”, is a celebration of actors and of the theatre’s intimate ability to search for hope, as Myrtle asks to the director and to her playwright, something able to shatter all stereotypes. Ultimately, who is this second woman, who takes the stage by storm on the “night of all openings or the most delightful of all failures”?