Thursday, 4th of July, 21:00 (Lisbon time) at Teatro Maria Matos

Casa Portuguesa [Portuguese Home] tells the (fictional) story of an ex-soldier of the Portuguese Colonial War who, while talking with the ghosts of his past, finds himself confronted with the decadence and transformation traditional models of home, family, country and the father figure canon. A portrait of what was, is and could be (or not), the patriarchal family unit par excellence – the home. A production with a backdrop of recent events in our democracy that revisits the most painful of our history's open and festering wounds. At an unspecified time perhaps towards the end of the 1940s, in a bar in a hotel in Mozambique, three Portuguese write the song Uma Casa Portuguesa [A Portuguese Home]. It is a cheerful but sad fado1 that echoes the stereotypical nostalgia of an idea about Portugal, so dear to the Estado Novo’s 2 ideology. Even after 48 years of democracy in Portugal, many Portuguese still know this song by heart. In 1968, Joaquim Penim set off against his will and beliefs to the Colonial War in Mozambique. This experience provided the material many years later for his book called No Planalto dos Macondes. In 2021, Emanuele Coccia published Filosofia della Casa, an essay that describes home as a space where injustices, oppressions and inequalities have been concealed and repeated mechanically for hundreds of years. It’s at home and through it, for instance, that most of the sexual violence that encourages heteronormativity and racism takes place. It was by bringing together these three strands - fado, war diary and philosophical essay – that Casa Portuguesa emerged as a stage play.

More details on this event here.