Um Sonho

“My most beloved play, child of my greatest pain.” Premiered in 1907, Um Sonho [ A Dream Play ] is one of the most revolutionary creations of August Strindberg, the founder of modern theatre. In it, the Swedish playwright tackles and solves a paradox: to depict the incoherent but seemingly logical form of dreams. Characters take shape, dissolve and regenerate. They leave the scene and then re-enter it in another time and place. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable in this arsenal of apparitions where the pathetic and the comic, realism and oneirism, the lyrical and the ironical clash together. “The distortion of time and space is the soul of the theatre”, says Bruno Bravo, the man charged with bringing this TNSJ production to the stage. This director’s career is marked by a number of austere, ritualised shows, which rely on the words’ power to generate images, movement, surprise. In Um Sonho , we have not one, but twenty, fifty plays that Strindberg has stitched together, much as we ourselves do in the morning with our torn dreams. Who is the dreamer? Who is the dreamed? The theatre is the place where we come together to dream communally.