"The Classics, Our Contemporaries?" | Marta Várzeas

‘Entrelinhas’ (Between the Lines), by Tiago Rodrigues and Tónan Quito | 18 December | 7 p.m.

The play combines Sophocles' ‘Oedipus Rex’ with letters written by a prisoner to his mother, hidden between the lines of a copy of the Greek tragedy found in the prison library.

Followed by a discussion with Marta Várzeas, Researcher at the Centre for Classical and Humanistic Studies at the University of Coimbra, Teatrão's partner in this initiative.

"What do we expect from theatre? Tiago Rodrigues has written several times for Tónan Quito. When it came time to write a new text for the actor to perform alone on stage, for mysterious reasons, Tiago missed all the deadlines. It was then that a series of accidents, as real as they were literary, gave rise to Entrelinhas.

A portrait of the long and enigmatic relationship between the author and the actor, this play is a secret passage connecting reality to the underground world of fiction. In a narrative labyrinth, the play mixes the text of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with the letters of a prisoner to his mother, written between the lines of an edition of the Greek tragedy found in the prison library. But it always returns to the present: a theatre where an actor comes to explain to the audience why he was unable to put on the show he had promised."