The novelist and playwright Peter Weiss is the author of one of the most seminal works of German literature, The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975-81), an iconic novel for the European left-wing movements. Rui Pina Coelho draws freely from that book to create Estética, Resistência e Melancolia, performed by the Teatro Experimental do Porto company and directed by Gonçalo Amorim. Weiss describes the initiation itinerary of three young German Communist working-class men, from 1937 to the beginning of World War 2, through their meetings in museums and art galleries. Their musings on painting, sculpture and literature are a form of opposition to the Nazi regime and a search for affinities between political resistance and art. Everything begins with an absence: while looking at the frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the young men notice that the god Heracles is missing and start imagining a human replacement for him, a herald of the oppressed and exploited, to whom Rui Pina Coelho lends a voice: “I have become used to thinking that artistic creation devoid of truth has little reason to exist.” This show brings that search for meaning to the present day, in the form of a litany about art and politics, truth and camaraderie.