Escola da Noite premieres on Monday, in Coimbra, “The Alice Trilogy”, by Tom Murphy, a show staged by Nuno Carinhas that focuses on three moments in the life of a maid and everything that remains to be said.
The 75th creation of the Escola da Noite (which closes the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Coimbra company) is the first performance in Portugal of the “Alice Trilogy”, a play written by the Irishman Tom Murphy, in 2005.
The work presents, in three moments of her life, Alicia, a maid married to a banker and mother of three children, between the 1980s and the beginning of the 21st century, in paintings that portray a half life full of things that remained saying or doing
There is Alice torn between the gratitude of an apparently peaceful life and suicidal thoughts, then a meeting with an old boyfriend, and finally, sitting in a restaurant, with her husband in front of her, grieving over a child who died prematurely, stretching out on her chest. a long internal monologue.
The work is a kind of “inner pilgrimage” of the woman, as the director Nuno Carinhas refers to it, on a journey that oscillates between disappointments, longings and yearnings.
“The unsaid is very present here, that burst of discourse, which is what is surprising about this work and what I was interested in exploring,” Nuno Carinhas, who had already performed at the Escola da Noite in 1993, told the Lusa agency. Comedy on the limit of the city of Coimbra”, by Gil Vicente.
For Nuno Carinhas, what attracted him to this text by Tom Murphy was “about what women cannot say”.
“I find it very interesting and relevant to the times we live in. There is a part of society that says that everything is out of date, that their habits have already changed, that everything is solved, but in reality it is not like that. Characters like this help to undertake reflections and overcome what has not been said, to show what is still stagnant, what has not yet been resolved ”, she underlined.
The director, who has been in charge of presenting several works of Irish drama in Portugal, finds in this theater “a certain reserve”, a primacy for the “tacit, which later explodes in the fictions and the characters”.
“Irish theater is relevant –probably in any part of the world-, but in Portugal the characters are very notorious in relation to our reality”, he pointed out.
In addition, there is also, in the country, “a certain closure of women.”
“They are always guardians of a certain way of being and witnesses of a way of being,” said Nuno Carinhas, former artistic director of the São João National Theater in Porto.
The play runs from March 27 to April 2, and then resumes from April 6 to April 23 (Thursday through Sunday).
The work is interpreted by Ana Teresa Santos, Igor Lebreaud, Miguel Magalhães, Ricardo Kalash and Rita Brütt.
The show also includes Henrique Pimentel (scenography), Ana Rosa Assunção (costumes), Danilo Pinto (lights) and Zé Diogo (sound).
Source: Observadora
