(Sopro is the Portuguese word for breath.) Sharing anecdotes from her 40-year career in the wings, Vidal’s is the memoir of an invisible woman, a proudly discreet observer since the age of five, with a professional philosophy built around self-effacement.
Sharing anecdotes from her 40-year career in the wings, Vidal has been a proudly discreet observer since the age of five, her professional philosophy built around self-effacementĪgainst this foretelling of oblivion, the prompter, already mostly an anachronism, is presented as the memory, heart and lungs of the theatre. If that upends the theatrical order of things, Rodrigues prompts a greater upheaval, where rushes sprout from Thomas Walgrave’s clean set of stage boards as though nature had reclaimed a disused building. This, we come to realise, is Vidal, an unobtrusive figure now calling the shots. Or so it seems.Īlthough actors address us, in stilted poses and projected voices, their words originate as whispered instructions from a shuffling, epicene figure dressed in black. That oblique perspective comes with the job, belonging to the prompter of Teatro Nacional D Maria II, Christina Vidal, a background figure who is here thrust, with great reluctance, into the foreground.
“I see the world as I see the theatre,” explains the protagonist of this elegant meditation on art and life by the Portuguese theatremaker Tiago Rodrigues: “From behind or from the side”.