The portrait of a village where violence is exacerbated, in a world with no past and no memory, is the centrepiece of the play “The Heart Throws” about Boris Vian, which opens Thursday at Teatro S. Luiz, Lisbon.
[dropcap type=”background”]T[/dropcap]he artistic interest of adapting literary works to theatre, with all that entails in terms of transposition and the work of synthesis, was one of the factors that led Nuno Nunes to stage this show from the homonymous work of the French author Boris Vian (1920 1959), he told.
Another reason is that the text focuses on a “classic, but current” issue, which is the “man without past and without memory, who faces a whole world turned inside out,” he said.
“What is our reality is hidden, camouflaged, here is presented as the first image of reality,” said Nuno Nunes, because this text of Boris Vian also speaks of perplexity before the absurd, in the absurdity of existence.
In a village where nothing is hidden, nor at the level of language, since all things are said by name without any kind of modesty, Tiagomorto – one of the characters of the play that we know is not alive – is a newcomer psychoanalyst, which is in the house of a woman, about to give birth, Clémentine.
Tiagomorto is a man without past and without memory, from there he goes around looking for people to psychoanalyze, ending up filling himself with the memories and sufferings of others, which are matters of life that he does not have.
In this village, the fault of the inhabitants is collected by a boatman (Glóira) and thrown to the river, although afterwards everything that originates guilt or shame ends up being referred to by the characters throughout the work.
With the staging of this novel by Boris Vian, Nuno Nunes intended to reflect what we currently identify as abuse, as brutal and excessive and to which, most of the time, “we respond with indolence,” he explained.
Although the spectator cannot see with what reality Tiagomorto is confronted with the reality of the village, he ends up feeling that the place has nothing idyllic. It is rather a place of ancestry, rustic. A kind of purgatory.
At the end of the play, Tiagomorto will also end up assuming the social function of collecting the guilt and shame of the people of the village, once again filling a void of feelings and sensations that he does not know.
For Nuno Nunes, “The plucked hearts“, written in 1953, is “very current,” as it is “a kind of call to attention to the way we live, how we assume in our lives our awareness of things.”
“Or to what extent we need to lie so we can live up to our expectations,” he said.
“The hearts rip off” will be on stage in the Mario Viegas room until February 17, with shows from Thursday to Saturday at 9:00 p.m., and on Sunday at 5:30 p.m.
They interpret Ana Brandão, Emanuel Arada, Hugo Sovelas, Miguel Damião and Sofia Dias.
With dramaturgy and staging by Nuno Nunes, the piece has music and sound design by Nico and plastic design by Patricia Raposo.
