© Magda Bizarro

TIAGO RODRIGUES / TNDMII – Antony and Cleopatra

Teatro das Figuras
Fri 27 OCT, 21h30

Theatre / 2014 / 80' / M12 / 10€ / 7.5€*

If we say one of the names, the other follows it. Our memory cannot evoke one without the other. Plutarch wrote that, from them on, love became the ability to see the world through the sensibility of someone else’s soul.
They mixed love and politics and came up with a politics of love. They are a historical love story. They are a romance based on real events often romanticized about. Shakespeare built them a verbal monument that turned into the truest of truths what never happened to them. In Mankiewicz’s film that led 20th Century Fox to bankruptcy, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the celluloid and real couple they never – and always – were.
In this show written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz are the here-and-now duo of what they were there-and-then. They are and are not Antony and Cleopatra. They are Antony seeing the world through Cleopatra’s eyes. And vice-versa. Always vice-versa. Vice-versa as a rule of love. Vice-versa as a rule of theatre. This show is seeing the world vicariously, through the sensibility of the souls of Antony and Cleopatra.


Text by: Tiago Rodrigues with quotes from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Directed by: Tiago Rodrigues
With: Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz
Set: Ângela Rocha
Costumes: Ângela Rocha, Magda Bizarro
Light design: Nuno Meira
Music: excerpts from the soundtrack of the movie Cleopatra (1963), composed by Alex North
Artistic collaboration: Maria João Serrão, Thomas Walgrave
Set construction: Decor Galamba
English translation: Joana Frazão
Executive production: Rita Forjaz
Executive production on the original creation: Magda Bizarro, Rita Mendes
A production: Teatro Nacional D. Maria II after an original creation by the company Mundo Perfeito
Co-production: Centro Cultural de Belém, Centro Cultural Vila Flôr, Temps d’Images
Artistic residence: Teatro do Campo Alegre, Teatro Nacional de São João, alkantara
Thanks to: Ana Mónica, Ângelo Rocha, Carlos Mendonça, Luísa Taveira, Manuela Santos, Rui Carvalho Homem, Salvador Santos, Toninho Neto, Bomba Suicida
Support: Museu de Marinha


Tiago Rodrigues (born in 1977) is the artistic director of the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, in Lisbon. He is an actor, playwright and director whose subversive and poetic theatre has made him one of Portugal’s leading artists.
At the age of 21 he quits theatre school to work with Belgian company tg STAN having co-created and performed several performances, touring in over than 15 countries. In 2003 created the company Mundo Perfeito together with Magda Bizarro, where he pursued a work heavily based on artistic collaboration and collective processes being produced by renowned festivals such as alkantara festival, Kunstenfestivaldesarts or Festival d’Automne à Paris and touring in countries such as Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Lebanon, Norway, Romania, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States of America.
His pace of work is astonishing: with Mundo Perfeito he has created more than thirty plays between 2003 and 2014. In that period, Rodrigues has also collaborated with artists from Belgium, Lebanon, the Netherlands and Brazil. One of his last performances, Three fingers below the knee, was awarded with two prizes: Best Performance 2012 by Portuguese Author’s Society and a Golden Globe by the Portuguese TV channel SIC.
In the meantime, he has collaborated with other companies, choreographers and filmmakers. He has also been involved in teaching in schools like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker‘s contemporary dance school PARTS, in Brussels and in other theatre and dance schools in Portugal and abroad, also included in university programs such as The Autonomous Actor at Stockholm’s Theatre School. He has also done work as curator and in artistic community projects.
Deeply rooted in a collaborative theatre tradition, he has recently created pieces that stand out by the way in which they manipulate documents with theatrical tools, combining both public and private life and challenging our perception of social or historical phenomena.