Rodrigo Francisco, Artistic Director of the Almada Festival, interviewed by Dana Rufolo.

Rodrigo Francisco steers the Almada Festival; he is also the artistic director of Almada’s Joaquim Benite Municipal Theatre in which many of the performances offered during the festival take place. In addition, he is a playwright whose plays – most recently Calvário which premiered on 5 July 2023 – have been performed in the theatre, and he regularly directs productions – including this year’s festival offering Além Da Dor (Beyond Caring by Alexander Zeldin). Francisco began his career as the assistant to Joaquim Benite, a man revered for his post-dictatorship social engagement with the community. Benite died in 2012, and in a 2019 interview Francisco stated that he believes as strongly as did his mentor that one of his functions is to associate art with democratic freedoms, and this means in part to encourage the “working class” Portuguese people living in Almada to feel comfortable about going to the theatre. But lately the town’s population has been shifting to include up-and-coming young and middle-class Portuguese who have no personal memories of the years of ‎Salazar’s dictatorship (1933-1974). In this 2024 interview, I asked Rodrigo Francisco if the new demographics have had an effect on  his belief that theatre is essential to maintaining an environment conducive to social justice.  

Dana Rufolo
(Interview date 13 July 2024.)

 

DR Along with the theatre festival, you always offer exhibits in your theatre and the surrounding buildings. This year, the exhibit is a look at Portuguese history.  It’s 50 years since the quiet or “carnation” revolution of 1974 that put an end to the authoritarian regime Estado Novo which had been led by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar for most of its 48 years of existence, as the walls of the foyer of the theatre you run, Almada’s Municipal Theater Joaquim Benite, so eloquently remind us. Can you just tell me a little bit about how this auxiliary project developed to coincide with the 41^st edition of the Amada Festival?

 

Photo credit: Axel Hörhager.

RF We are organizing four exhibitions this year with a private archival library [“Ephemera”] run by the historian and EU Parliamentarian, José Pacheco Pereira. He directs this private archive, and he has kilometres of shelves – things that he saves from the garbage. When somebody dies, the inheritors give him documents. And sometimes he also buys some objects trying to keep memory not only online but by actually having the objects. We’ve exhibited a very small bit of the objects. And he actually has all those newspapers, all those documents – especially material associated with the dictatorship of Salazar.  And so, we prepared to commemorate the 50 years of the revolution by having four exhibits with the material from that archive, which has been very interesting. This is the third one. The fourth one will be when we open my next creation, which is an adaptation of August Wilson: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.  It will open in November.

DR Does José Pacheco Pereira live in Lisbon?

RF He actually lives outside the city, because he needs lots of space. The warehouses are huge. The mayor of a city up from Lisbon gave him a huge warehouse, and he has another warehouse outside Lisbon in Barreiro. It’s incredible. He has a team of volunteers who say they are compulsive collectors; they love objects, and they love the past. And they love keeping memory alive, not letting the past die. They keep everything, they don’t throw anything away. They keep documents, theatre programmes, plays, books, objects … everything.

DR But only about Portugal?  And only about the revolutionary period?

RF Yes, only about Portugal but not only about the revolutionary period. They also publish. The other day I saw a book they’d prepared because they’d found a box with love letters in it from a couple that had exchanged letters, and they did a play based on this so you can see how people at the beginning of the twentieth century loved and talked about their relationship. It’s quite interesting.

DR He’s obviously integrated into the cultural scene, because you know about him. It’s a shame that there isn’t something comparable in other countries.

RF I read interviews and newspaper articles about him, and since we were going to have this commemoration, I thought: “Why don’t we invite him to collaborate?” It is very easy to collaborate; I imagine if we were to collaborate with an official institution it would be impossible. We go to the warehouse, and we say we want this, and this, and he gives me the objects or documents – the originals in a big bag. We make copies and enlarge them.

DR Back in 2019 when I first interviewed you, I remember finding it interesting that you believed the history of your theatre came out of the pro-democratic movement and the desire for the people to have their own sense of freedom, so you were a social theatre dedicated to entertaining people of working-class origin. That’s how you described your commitment to the theatre.

Photo credit: Axel Hörhager.

RF That’s how it was when the theatre company came here at the end of the 1970s. Almada was a city of working people who didn’t go to theatre shows. Now it’s changing. You can’t live in Lisbon anymore, because it is very expensive. Many people of my generation are coming back to Almada. There is now a new audience. The cities around Lisbon are having a renaissance.  No teachers want to go to Lisbon to teach, so it is hard for the Lisbon high schools to have professors. The apartment over me is owned by a French person living in Thailand who has never seen the apartment, he rents it as an Airbnb; it’s worldwide capitalism at work.

DR My question is, then, 50 years ago you were working to reverse the oppression of dictatorships. Now, we’re in an era of unjust war. What is your goal as an artistic director? Is international capitalism your new enemy?

RF I would say getting people together is already a very big achievement nowadays.

DR So you’re still very proud that you create a community for your festival? Which you do, beyond a doubt.  

RF Creating and keeping it. It’s very hard. There are very few places where people are together.  They get together at football stadia, bull fights, rock concerts, church and in the theatre.  Church is the main competition to theatre, but it’s always a bit boring because it’s always the same text and the same set. But you don’t have to pay!

I understand when people say, I am doing theatre to change the world. It’s okay, but I don’t know of any revolution which started in a theatre. If you give people the opportunity to have a poetical look on their lives, that’s already enough. And being together: sitting beside people who think in a different way, who are different whether due to social origin or race or age. Today, I read an article about the Almada Festival by a young reporter from a magazine in Madrid who wrote that she had been very surprised to find herself having lunch with two old women; she was talking about those women as I would talk about a very strange thing. I understand, because now you only see the people who are like you and who think like you, who have the same age you have. The reporter was very pleased that she was having lunch with these old women who didn’t talk Spanish, but she was communicating with them.  The way that capitalism puts us together and divides: you like this kind of theatre, you don’t like theatre, you like football; you like music, you don’t like theatre – just forms us into consumers. I don’t trust capitalism; I don’t the trust Internet at all. I don’t trust social networks.

DR I do agree with you. It makes me afraid to understand how many groups there are in the world, and how little critical thinking is going on. So then, looking at it, there is a continuation of a left-wing political agenda in your theatre. You are still against the dominant capitalist forces. How does that affect how you are running your festival and theatre, and your outreach?

RF I am a member of the Communist Party, actually. I became a member two days after they lost elections in Almada. They lost the elections six years ago. This had been a communist city since forever. Our theatre project was built with the Communist Party in power here in Almada and I always wanted to be a part of it, but I had the responsibility of being the artistic director. When they lost the elections, I felt I could join. Of course, I’m a man from the left because I believe in the social state. I was able to go to the university because the state paid for it. But when I see left political parties substituting identity issues for ideology, well, I’m not that kind of left person. Susan Neiman wrote a book, Left is Not Woke. I completely agree.

DR And how does this affect the festival?

RF We’re not profit-oriented. We sell a ticket to see all the shows for €90 which comes out to €4 per show. It’s nothing, but we are in Almada. We believe in the public service of culture. The state gives money for the milk we drink every morning, and in the same way the state should give money for culture, not to the ones who make shows but to the audience. So, when an audience member buys a subscription to the theatre, the state is paying a part of the real cost of that ticket.

DR And your choice of productions?

RF I always prefer that the shows are good. Sometimes I go to a festival, and I am sad to see that all the spectators are the same. All young or all old. Dressed the same way. Festivals are for diversity. It’s 15 days, it adds variety to our lives and gives us a chance to discover new things, not just continuing with what we are used to.

DR I noticed you are avoiding political theatre.  Ukraine, Gaza, the American elections, local politics … is this just by chance?

RF I think that politics is the most important human activity. Sometimes I see some shows that are announced as political theatre, and I think: “Is it really political? Or is it just to have some publicity?” The show is about changing the world, and you go and you come back home and you feel good, because the show was about people killed in Palestine. But what did you do against that? I’ve nothing against spectators who want to see these shows, but me as a spectator? They don’t move me much. Normally these political shows bore me to death.

DR You are avoiding environmental theatre, as well?

RF Climate theatre; I know it’s a topic. But first of all, I’m not a scientist. I only know that it’s freezing now in Portugal, and it should be hot. I don’t think theatre should run after the topics of the moment. I understand those shows are made, sometimes I even programme them, but as a theatre-maker I don’t see their use.

DR I’d like to ask a few questions about Alexander Zeldin’s “Beyond Caring, Além Da Dor”, which you directed.  

RF Do you know where I read about the play for the first time? In a magazine that you might know called Plays International!  I read a very positive review of that play, so I was interested. Also, the topic – cleaning people – interested me. So, I bought a copy of the play and decided to do it. And then Zeldin came to Lisbon with another of his plays – Love – and we went to talk with him, and I said we’re a theatre company in Almada and we want to do your play in Portuguese, and he said okay, do it.

We premiered in 2022 and we had a full house for a month. We won the prize of Best Show of the Year. There was so much interest in it that we decided to revive it. The audience wanted to see theatre; nowadays that is not so obvious. You go to a theatre venue and you have films, a post-romantic guy talking about his life to you. The actors get along so well, the two girls from Guinea, professionally trained in Cascais, who had actually worked as cleaning ladies, said, I know what this is about; I know about the night shift; I had bosses like this guy Phil.

It’s very Anglo-Saxon, the play. Realism. You’re here, I can almost touch you, don’t give me video stuff, don’t tell me about your life. Act! Watching actors acting, like in Peter Stein’s plays yesterday at the festival [Crisi di nervi, three short plays by Chekhov] is just marvelous. Thank God there are people still doing what they should do!

DR The actors are surrounded by the dead stillness of the factory, there is nothing else but them and the meat-processing machines. But I noticed that in between the scenes, you hear the sound of the machines at work.

RF The factory wall moves during the play. You only see it in the end, how it encroaches. It’s my favourite metaphor in the production. It gives you the sensation that something has changed but you’re not sure what, so you’re just a bit unbalanced. One of my favourite things in this production is the metaphor – created by the set designer, Céline Demars, a French woman living in Berlin – of ever-present oppression; these workers are all oppressed by the factory. We had to use the machine noise to cover that the factory wall was moving forward to the audience. Moving it made noise.

Alexander Zeldin is very influenced by cinema directors like Ken Loach; you can feel it. In preparation, we watched some films by Ken Loach. Having people on stage who normally aren’t there … We invited women who clean in a theatre to come to the show, and it was so intense for them. They were crying, because they were watching themselves.

Even our theatre, we are very close to the capitalistic world. For example, when we moved into the Joaquim Benite Theatre, the cleaning team was an exterior company. So, what happened? Every month, we paid the cleaning enterprise. Talking to the girls, we discovered that when they were late by five minutes the enterprise would not pay them an entire hour. But to us the enterprise would always charge everything. It was great for them, and for some years we didn’t know that. When we discovered it, we let the enterprise go and hired the cleaning staff directly. It’s in the play: the boss says, it’s not my responsibility – that’s when the workers go to talk to him. Go talk to the enterprise that sent you here. I’m only here to give you orders, he says.

DR I’ve seen a change of emphasis at the Almada Festival over the years. Last year especially, but also this year with “Sans Tambour”, you are choosing performance pieces where material objects ae unstable and don’t behave as they are defined to behave. Also in “Sans Tambour” [pictured below], the walls fall apart. Last year, objects were falling from the ceiling, people on stage had to dodge tennis balls in Martin Zimmermann’s “Eins Zwei Drei”. Is this conscious on your part? And even if it isn’t, why would you want to stage pieces that show a distrust in the behavior of material objects?

 

Photo credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez.

RF I make theatre, but when I programme, I’m not an artist. The artists, they create. I don’t believe that to make a program is a creative act. I’m not organizing a festival program to make a statement; I don’t believe in doing that. Only to let people see what theatre artists are doing. We should ask the artists, why are you doing this? I have absolutely no intention at all to try and say something about the world with the shows I invite. I think artists are like sponges: they absorb and then they get back to reality.  Now it’s true that the opening show this year at the festival is about climate, but I didn’t invite them because of that. They were here last year with a very nice show, and they proposed this new production, and I said, OK, let’s see what you will give us next year.

This goes back to the question I get every year: what’s the theme of the festival? There is no theme. The theme is theatre. I always think about the festival of sardines, which is much better than a festival of theatre because you eat loads of sardines. The other day, I was on the radio and there was someone from the Festival of Almada (me), and there was someone else, from the Festival of Sardines. The journalist had just put us together.

DR I find this year to be highly balanced. Burlesque, emotionally intense, consciousness-raising, humour, mechanically unemotional …    

RF I agree with you. That’s what I tried to do. Not to make a statement. Because theatre is so many things. What’s theatre; what’s life?

DR Then, material reality being unreliable just happens to be a side effect of the performances you’ve chosen?

RF It may be, I haven’t thought about it. But as a spectator you might think about these things. Why is the artist doing this? Is the world falling apart? It’s been falling apart ever since I remember.

DR And theatre has been dying ever since we all remember.

RF Yes, it’s always in crisis. But there’s a chance for an afterlife. You know the story about Thomas Bernhard? He had a play on at the Burgtheater [in Vienna], and he wanted total darkness. But the chief of the fire brigade said, “No; for security reasons, it’s not possible.” So, in 1984 Thomas Bernhard wrote Der Theatermacher (The Showman), and one of the characters in the play asks, what happened to the chief of the fire department? “Oh, you don’t know”, another character replies. “He went on a picnic with his whole family, and a bolt of lightning stuck the tree they were under and killed them all.” That was Bernhard’s revenge. But we don’t have firefighters in our theatre.

This interview was conducted in English.