ALBANO JERÓNIMO ⁄ TN21

The company Teatro Nacional 21 makes use of that text, but doesn’t stick to it. It crosses another imagery, that of Werner Herzog in his masterpiece, “Fitzcarraldo”, the story of a music-loving German who establishes a company to exploit rubber, in order to generate profit that will allow him to make his dream of building an opera house in the Amazon come true. In this play, Albano Jerónimo blends both universes to weave his own fiction: to play a kind of Fitzcarraldo looking to set up an opera in Portugal. He teaches revolutionary principles to the musicians, sometimes to comply with his music-loving “dream”, other times to incite them to revolt against national politicians, constantly slathering the words of Rodrigo García with the music of Vítor Rua. By creating a disrespectful game, the fury of this opera counters the morbid seriousness of social masks and the crystallisation of “commonplaces”. “Exaggeration”, seen as a fair and necessary measure, eventually uncovers a fragile, restless, reflecting and fighting art.