Stage Direction + Set & Costumes Design
THEATRE PLAY | Gladiators | Gladiadores
Text > Alfredo Cortez | Stage Director, Set & Costumes Designer > Pedro Ribeiro | Musical Director > Paulo Pires |Excerpts from > Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; Chopin’s Sonata No. 2; Fucik’s Entry of the Gladiators; Holst’s Planets Suite; Larionov’s Kalinka; Mahler’s 5th Symphony; Mussorgsky’s Suite Pictures at an Exhibition; Wagner’s Die Walküre | Light Design > César Cardoso | Sound > Francisco Rebelo | Cast > Alda Machado, Bárbara Correia, Emanuel Oliveira, Hélder Sousa, Inês Ferreira Alves, Marta Costa, Pedro Barros de Castro, Rafaela Sá, Ricardo Pinho. Ensemble: Bruno Bernardo, Bruno Fonseca, Elisa Silva, Margarida Sampaio, Pedro Silva, Rita Sampaio | CT4V Executive Producer > Ismenia Leite | Executive Producer, DSM > Anita Magalhaes Faria | New Production > Quatro Ventos Theatre Company, GDA Foundation | Sto Tirso PTG | © Images from the show by Andre Leite PS Photography 2025
REVIEWS
As it celebrates its 20th anniversary, the Os Quatro Ventos Theater Company (CT4V) revives one of the most disruptive plays of 20th-century Portuguese drama: Gladiators, by Alfredo Cortez. It is essential, from the outset, to acknowledge at this remarkable milestone of 20 years of resistance and persistence, that Cortez’s play aligns with great intensity, with a coherent project of risk-taking and reinvention of theatrical creation in Portugal that CT4V has undertaken. This project stems from a kind of constitutive postulate regarding theater as a creative act, which must be in a permanent process of interrogation and dialogue with the present, like a mirror that figures and transfigures, that brings closer and distances, that embraces and critiques the reality we are in the time we live in. It is, therefore, a political project in the full and original sense of the term. However, this propensity for the present, in the case of CT4V and Pedro Ribeiro’s projects, avoids a banalized practice, especially in the performing arts, of didactic and supposedly transgressive updating, through which creative production is revived through the limited codes of reading the present. Now, in the case of Gladiators, perhaps the most intelligent, disruptive, and original option of this new staging (after others more recent, such as that of Teatro do Noroeste in 1993) was to consider that, in its formal, aesthetic, and ideological integrity, the play is sufficiently capable of startling the modern spectator without any alteration of its original pregnancies. Thus, this new staging of Gladiators opts for the radicalization of expressionist aesthetics, in which Alfredo Cortez deliberately sought to inscribe his play in an act of renewal (at the time, completely failed) of Portuguese theater, in a period of full rise of the Estado Novo and the promotion of aesthetic avant-garde movements under the aegis of António Ferro. This radicalization of expressionist aesthetics becomes immediately evident in the stage design, a successful blend of a Roman arena and a circus tent, simultaneously evoking a space of confrontation (a confrontation between men and women) and burlesque (each character is a “caricature” or stereotype), eliminating the theater’s mimetic tradition. Note also the explicit references in the costumes to the German artistic movement New Objectivity, particularly Otto Dix and George Grosz, as well as to Oskar Schlemmer (Bauhaus) and his Triadic Ballet, which are combined with the mechanical, exaggerated, and desubjectified movements of each of the figure types. Conceived in their voices and gestures as a grotesque and obscene caricature, most evidently embodied by the “Child”, the characters develop a scenic tension – a “battle of the sexes” – whose outcome, however, culminates in an ironic and pathetic happy ending, symbolized by the long kiss between the “Ingénue” and the “Leading Man”, which unmasks the farce of the idealized resolution. But, whether through theatrical strategies or metatheatrical strategies (creating a theater within a theater), in a constant game of deceiving and disillusioning, of alienating and distancing, this revival of Gladiators is a permanent effort – successful, moreover – to constitute a political experience, through which we are confronted (yes, we too must be in the Gladiators’ fight…) with the state in our polis. As in 1934, we live in a context of aesthetic, social, and political (re)affirmation of fascism, a context of a new attempt to absolutize the pure, the Apollonian, and order. And, as in 1934, there is likely no more combative way to combat all types of fascism than the constitution of radical experiences of impurity, Dionysism, and disorder, as the Expressionist movement attempted in pre-Hitler Germany. In this sense, CT4V’s current staging of Cortez’s play meets all the conditions to elicit, in an ironic twist to the failure of 1934, the political upheaval it always sought, projecting itself onto all of us, 91 years later, with all its original intensity. > Eusébio Machado | EntreMargens Newspaper
Director’s Note
“A caricature of the global era we are living through” A. Cortez 1934 | 2025 We imagine a decadent Europe celebrated by a banquet where illusions of past glories reign. A new and authoritarian Belo-Bruto emerges, and a Child – the unexpected son of this union – who embodies the promise of a new order as violent as the previous ones. Meanwhile, lawyers, presidents, journalists, guests, workers and proletarians, and even Satan parade in a grotesque spectacle that exposes the fragility of justice, politics, the media, and love. In the end, between faked deaths and cinematic kisses, what remains is a feeling adrift, staged in a modern world where even the truth “could be” a staged one. 91 years later, what do we want?