A while ago, someone asked Martin Crimp to describe himself, and the British playwright replied: “I once wrote a play called Cruel and Tender.” If we were to ask the same from the ASSéDIO company, their answer would probably be something along these lines: “Once, we created a theatre company that, over a period of nine years, presented six stage productions from texts by Martin Crimp.” Relationships as long, faithful and productive as the one between the ASSéDIO company and Crimp are pretty thin on the ground. In the year of its 26th anniversary, this Porto company returns to Crimp’s dramatic world, precisely with a staging of Cruel and Tender, a loose adaptation of The Trachiniae, Sophocles’ “imperfect” and least known tragedy, which unites the fates of Deianeira and Heracles. Crimp transposes the myth to our times and to the often disastrous consequences of the so-called “war on terror”. Can a general who has crossed the border to “root out terror”, by razing down a foreign city, find peace in his own home?