Iwrote the play as a way to reflect upon Brazil’s political crisis, which seemed at first to favour the left, before turning sharply to the right.footnote1 The realist impulse in this case was not of the historiographical, naturalist type. To mark a certain distance, the setting is ‘Brazul’ rather than Brazil. It has a king, a queen, princesses and other fantastic details; but parodic allusions to the country are a constant feature. Based on the structure of King Lear, the work is an attempt to recover and assess the historical cycle that began with the street protests of 2013, culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, Temer’s government and Bolsonaro’s 2018 election victory, and took a final twist when Lula was released from prison in 2019. This type of comprehensive overview is out of fashion, maybe out of date; but I missed it and decided to give it a try.
Some critics said that the play has encyclopaedic ambitions. They can’t have been thinking of the cast of characters, which is clearly incomplete. There are the crowds on the street, students, workers, corrupt politicians, representatives of the ruling class, favela dwellers. But there are no military or religious figures—to state the obvious. Where I did try to provide a more extensive sampling of the Brazilian situation was in the intellectual debate about the transformation that’s underway. The play is basically a succession of rhetorical clashes, everyone arguing the whole time. That is something of a peculiarity. In general, as you know, political debates are not considered an appropriate literary subject; rather the opposite. There is a certain consensus—not just among conservatives—that art stops where argument begins. It is as if the natural subject matter for art were private life, intimate relationships, feelings, sensations: everything except the public sphere. Well, in this play, debate forms the raw material for artistic labour. In particular, the piece presents the polemical idea that political debate, a tedious and anti-poetic subject par excellence, not only takes place but is endowed with aesthetic power.
I am not the originator of this idea in Brazil. One of the models for it would be Glauber Rocha’s 1967 film, Terra em transe. This grandiloquent, operatic, somewhat caricatural film—these can be virtues—takes political debate to great heights. The problem of the radical transformation of society is seen as a public and poetic question, to be discussed in raised voices. The Arena Theatre of São Paulo also experimented along these lines in the same period; in Augusto Boal’s Arena conta Tiradentes, staged in 1967 under the military dictatorship, the discussions of the eighteenth-century anti-colonial rebellion against the Portuguese crown, the Conjuração Mineira, are literally central. In this way, Queen Lira draws from Glauber and Boal in equal measure, as from Oswald de Andrade in terms of debauchery.footnote2 Behind them, of course, lies Brecht, who turned the struggles and debates between social classes into an artistic subject of the first order. In Saint Joan of the Stockyards, he sought to compose a kind of cacophonic concert from the general social dissatisfaction of the late Weimar Republic.footnote3 Within my own capabilities, that is the model for this play.
Glauber Rocha allegorized a great deal, with Brazil in his sights. To put it briefly, he invented non-naturalistic syntheses of class positions—highly stylized, often cutting, almost clichéd or cartoonish, operating outside the realm of individual psychology. Hence the pomp of those works, where the speaker is not a person but an entire historical category. That naturally raises the tone of the discourse, which ends up halfway between magnificence and hyperbole—a dispute between abstract entities arguing about the destiny of the nation. To push the point a bit further, it’s an exaltedly anti-bourgeois art, committed to superseding the individual—who is, however, insurmountable until further notice, on pain of historical regression. The speeches grapple with the accelerated transformation of society as a whole, for better or for worse, and in their own way have a certain grandeur that escapes the narrowness of private life. The film’s power stems from this soaring combination of words and imagery.
In my play I tried to achieve something similar, but by different means. Instead of grandiloquence, I opted for concision, though I kept the shouting. I used the most ordinary language possible, without any poeticization; lean and pared back, but magnetized by the horizon of social transformation, which lends it a sense of urgency and a slightly elevated tone, just above the prosaic. Disciplined by concision and by constant reference to the political crisis, this common speech leaves behind the redundancies of daily life and becomes dynamic—if the device works. In other words, the general movement of society is present everywhere, at all times, and this rids even the most trivial dialogue of conformism. Without being allegorical, it signifies something beyond itself—it engages with the totality, to use an expression that is anathema these days. The distant inspiration here is the Drummond of Sentimento do Mundo and A Rosa do Povo, linking the daily life of a peripheral capital to ‘world feeling’ and ‘the present time’ by means of an everyday idiom, far removed from literary affectation.footnote4 It’s a new kind of intensity, achieved by stripping things away and by urgency.