‘The World is Round’ premieres Wednesday at Teatro do Bairro

‘El Mundo é Redondo’, literary text by Gertrude Stein, arrives at the stage of the Teatro do Bairro, in Lisbon, from Wednesday, by the voice and body of four actresses, who tell the story to the public making a comedy.

“There are four women doing the show and it’s something that is rarely seen in the theatre: four women doing comedy, and a comedy that enjoys the stereotypes of the female condition,” António Pires told.

‘The World is Redondo’, with translation by Luísa Costa Gomes, is a text written in 1939 by Gertrude Stein for children, ‘but not only’. “It’s a text that has the style of Gertrude Stein there and in a very strong way. And it’s the most iconic text of it, it’s where that famous phrase is: ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’,” said the director.

In a text like this, which “does not have a narrative, it is not a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, nor have characters very well articulated to imitate life”, “it is about building a new world, a world completely imaginary, with completely disruptive things. ”

This construction “is very close to the way children learn the world.”

This is the fourth text of the American author that Antonio Pires stages. “It’s a type of language that I identify with a lot of texts that are not concrete, very free texts, that allow me to make a theatre that starts from a great freedom, that is, I can for the actors to sing, to dance”, he explained.

From an “abstract work” – “it is almost like being in front of a Picasso work, each person sees completely different things” – António Pires made “a very entertaining spectacle”.

“People make fun of it from beginning to end, it provokes emotions and it’s not logical at all, it’s a play on words, it’s a set of situations, repetition, it’s very funny,” he said, noting that Gertrude Stein “used to say that he liked his shows to be like landscapes: a person could spend hours looking at a landscape and enjoying the landscape, the sunset, for example, and not being able to explain why he likes it.”

“The World is Round” focuses on Rosa, a child “who begins to want to learn the world”.

In the play, the cast is composed of four actresses – Rita Loureiro, Solange Santos, Carolina Campanela and Isadora Alves – who act as narrators.

“They tell this story to the public, and somehow they assume, in their own way, Rosa’s personality,” he added.

“Each of them takes Rosa and has a very personal point of view. When we split the text, we did the dramaturgy, it was to think of each of the actresses and they put a lot of them there, physically, but also the point of view of this experience of this girl Rosa to discover the world, “he said.

The “humour and sarcasm” in the play “is a lot of them, a certain criticism, a certain irony, about Rosa and how she sees things.”

The four do the same in relation to another character, Will, cousin of Rose, “and have the chance to criticize some male tics.”

“They all do the two characters, being narrators. It’s as if they were all four telling us a story,” António Pires described.

‘The World is Round’ will be on stage until November 18, from Wednesday to Saturday at 9:30 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m.