ARCHIVES 2015 / António e Cleópatra

It is a well-known legend. Plutarch wrote about it in his Parallel Lives, Shakespeare turned it into a tragedy, Mankiewicz into a cinematic masterpiece. The year is 41 B.C., a republican general has just been given the eastern half of the Roman world to rule when, anxious to safeguard her people's independence, a young Egyptian queen goes to meet him in a gilded ship, surrounded by a crew disguised as nymphs. Their relationship will last ten years, or perhaps is it still going on... How then can you tell a story whose every detail is already known? “By telling the story:” Tiago Rodrigues's answer isn't ironic posturing, it is at the very root of his theatre. If the Lisbon director refuses to give in to “the monumentality of Antony and Cleopatra,” it is to allow us to watch his dancer-actors, Vítor Roriz and Sofia Dias, as through their own breathing they approach the tragic knot of this intimate and political relationship. So that we can watch, all together, how it enters our present. To do so, he has composed, on the very bodies of his performers, a vast cosmogonic poem that requires us to dive deep into the eyes of the other, at the risk of losing what makes us an audience: our belief in the illusion of the theatre.

Recently appointed artistic director of the Dona Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon, one of the oldest and most prestigious theatre institutions in Portugal, Tiago Rodrigues is an actor, a playwright, a director, and a producer. As an author, he writes screenplays, poetry, songs, and opinion pieces published in the press. He has appeared in the film Mal Nascida, directed by João Canijo, and is the creative director of cult television series Zapping. He is regularly invited to teach dramaturgy in Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's classes (P.A.R.T.S.), as well as at the university of Évora. He has appeared in the creations of Belgian collective tg STAN, and founded in 2003 the company Mundo Perfeito with Magda Bizarro. He has been lauded for his original approach to dramaturgy as well as his collaborations with international artists (Tony Chakar and Rabih Mroué, Tim Etchells, or the group Nature Theater of Oklahoma). Tiago Rodrigues has also directed plays written by a new generation of Portuguese writers. His engagement in the artistic life of his country as well as the political and metapoetic vision of his theatre have led him to appear in the most prestigious European theatres.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
Myths are forever being modernised. In his Parallel Lives, Plutarch sees the story of the queen of Egypt, heiress of Hellenistic culture, only through the lens of her official relationship with Rome. By opening his tragedy with “Nay, but...”, Shakespeare focuses on the political discords that plague his own century. As for Joseph mankiewicz, he finds in Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton a way to put the passion of Hollywood at the service of this story of epic love. All three are there, implicitly, in Tiago Rodrigues's play. But his third song, which speaks of the failure of the imperialistic diplomacy of the Roman republic, is an original approach: the desire for efficiency of our productivist societies forever reduces the number of spaces where we can take the risk to meet the other.