“Henry IV, Part 3” or how to learn to translate Shakespeare in the age of technique – Express

The title of this text is borrowed to the work "to Learn to Pray in the Age of Technique", by Gonçalo M. Tavares, and well illustrates the sad fate of Henry, a prince precarious of our days, forced to do technical translations cisterns and fork lift trucks. The dream is to translate Shakespeare into Portuguese, but are to pay the bills who lead the life, also they stacked and that relegate the pipe below the artistic vocation. "Henry IV, Part 3" is a someone, imagined, and staged by the writer Jacinto Lucas Pires, who takes the stage of the Carlos Alberto Theatre (TeCA), in Porto, from this Wednesday.

Henry is a man chained to a life of everyday problems that intersect with nightmares and dialogue with shakespearean characters. Such as Leopold Bloom, the main character of "Ulysses", also Henry takes us on an odyssey contemporary. Little bit epic, very negligible. Realistic, in short. Unlike the anti-hero created by James Joyce, that wanders through the city of Dublin, Henry moves in circles through the kitchen, in this third part of king Henry IV, fruit of the imagination of Jacinto Lucas Pires.

The scenario, the position of Sarah the Beloved, is naked and open, to the way of the theatre isabelline, in which, ironically, the characters find themselves subdued inventories mechanical and devoid of freedom, highlighted by the play of commercials. The laps in the kitchen, Henry, played by actor Luís Araújo, lost in conversations and discussions surface with the wife Iolanda (Anabela Faustino), and at the same time indulges in a game of seduction with Miriam (Paula Diogo), the young and provocative woman of the day.

it Is in the middle of this derives from the internal and existential that the translator has the projection or the nightmare of having a dialogue with Sir John Falstaff (Ivo Alexandre), character output to the page, the "fat ideal" of Shakespeare’s play "Henry IV, Part I and II".

Satire of the consumer society

After one of the rehearsals of the show, Jacinto Lucas Pires explains that Henry "is someone who is in this issue, on the one hand, have the will to translate Shakespeare, wanting to be an artist seriously, as he says, and at the same time having to pay bills and have to do technical translations". To the writer that this piece makes a debut as a director, "it turns out to contaminate the personal life [of the character], in that there also seems to be a technical lifetime and another fantasy".

The play presents a satire on the consumer society and can be a metaphor, tragic, and simultaneously comical, of any current artist faced with the impossibility of devoting themselves exclusively to the creation. However, to Jacinto Lucas Pires, turns out to be a dilemma that is not unique to the art world, but also lived, for example, by "someone who wants to design shoes and ends up having to do accounting".

A writer who ventured to "orchestrate" the theatre

The idea for this third part of the output of the imagination of the writer came out of "a clash with reality" and the impossibility of, also it, immerse yourself in the work shakespearian "Henry IV, Part I and II". The problem is, this is not unheard of. "There was no money," he says. "First I gave up and forgot, but then it came to me the idea, as a writer, of: 'Ok, and if this [lack of money] was also a matter of the part?'"

Although he has already written dramatic texts, "Henry IV, Part 3" marks the debut of Jacinto Lucas Pires as a director. "It gave me grace," begins by saying. "I liked the exercise a little schizophrenic. I liked being able to be two, of the power to separate the two functions."

Most of that "draw" the piece", the challenge "is to orchestrate it," noted Lucas Pires. "While the writer would never have imagined this scene nude", explains the author of 42 years, the winner of the "Grand Prix of Literature dst" in 2013, which in this work as a director has had a year to distance himself from what he wrote.

"Henry IV, Part 3" will be on stage until Sunday, and this is a show co-produced by the company "No one" and by the National Theatre São João. The piece is for ages 14 and up. The sessions take place from Wednesday to Saturday, at 21h, and on Sunday, the last recitative is done to 16h.