FESTIVAL DE ALMADA is Portugal’s premier international theatre festival. It is staged every July in venues across its home city of Almada – which sits, beneath the famous statue of Cristo Rei (Christ the King), on the south bank of the River Tagus – and across the river in the Portuguese capital Lisbon.
The brainchild of its founder, the late, great theatre director Joaquim Benite,Footnote 1 Festival de Almada was established in 1984, exactly ten years after the ‘Carnation Revolution’ of 25 April 1974,Footnote 2 which overthrew the fascist dictatorship of the Estado Novo (New State).Footnote 3 My first experience of the festival was in 2008, and I have been fortunate to attend most of its programmes since then.
What I experienced in 2008, and have experienced on every occasion since, was a festival of tremendous ambition, genuine international standing, and an impressive, highly distinctive ethos. Benite and his festival achieved great respect internationally, a fact that was reflected in the quality and diversity of the artists he was able to bring to Almada in July. For instance, in 2008 the programme included: Companhia Culturarte from Mozambique; Compañia Jaime Lorca from Chile; Teatro D’Dos from Cuba; the Berliner Ensemble from Germany; as well as numerous companies from France, Spain, and Italy.
In addition to the theatre productions, Benite’s programme included visual art exhibitions, public discussions with invited speakers, and live music. The latter was performed on a purpose-built stage on the ‘esplanada’ (actually the teachers’ car park of the secondary school next door to Teatro Municipal).Footnote 4 Every July the esplanada becomes an outdoor restaurant and bar for everyone connected with the festival. There theatregoers, artists, critics, and other guests of the festival queue together to avail themselves of the good-quality, affordable Portuguese cuisine and wine that Benite insisted upon.
Benite was a man of the left. From 1974 until his death in 2012, the municipality of Almada elected mayors from the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). From the outset, both Companhia de Teatro de Almada and Festival de Almada enjoyed the support of the local government (Câmara Municipal de Almada).Footnote 5 From my first visit to the festival, and on every occasion since, I have been struck by the collective ethos, the friendliness and the informality of the festival. Its communal kitchen – which feels like a small expression of municipal socialism – exemplifies that ethos; a fact I was reminded of at a recent edition of the festival, where I found myself eating in a large gathering that included the acclaimed Hungarian-Serbian choreographer and dancer Josef Nadj and the renowned German theatre director Peter Stein.
Crucially, following the founder’s death, Festival de Almada has – under the excellent leadership of Benite’s previous assistant director, and his chosen successor, Rodrigo Francisco – honoured the founding principles of this unique showcase. The democratic and egalitarian philosophy of the festival has remained in all of its aspects, as has the ambitious programming, which showcases high-quality and diverse work from across Portugal and throughout the world.
My own experience of the festival over seventeen years attests to the calibre of the international work. My first visit to the showcase (in 2008) included a vivid, bold and memorable production of Ibsen’s great fantasia Peer Gynt, directed for the Berliner Ensemble (in the year before his death) by the outstanding German stage director Peter Zadek (Figure 1). Starring the extraordinary actors Uwe Bohm (in the title role) and Angela Winkler (as Åse, Peer Gynt’s mother), the staging achieved an emotional resonance, alongside a muscular comedy, that many productions of this challenging play struggle to muster.
Peer Gynt (Berliner Ensemble, 2008), directed by Peter Zadek. Uwe Bohm (left); Angela Winckler (right).
In 2011, the international strand of the programme included the extraordinary, four-and-a-half-hour Hamlet Cabaret, by the iconoclastic Swiss director Matthias Langhoff. The piece was a French-language production that contemplated Shakespeare’s longest play by way of the musical theatre of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, and the visual aesthetics of the brutally satirical Weimar German painter Otto Dix and the French post-Impressionist master Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The staging featured a late-middle-aged Hamlet, a live horse (which, on the night I saw the show, stood calmly beside the piano before, inevitably, shitting on the stage), and a powerful rendering of the famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’, which was delivered directly to a single member of the audience. By turns thrilling, surprising, and humorous, it was, without question, the most original take on the Bard’s opus that I have seen in almost four decades of serious theatregoing.
A more recent international highlight, from the 2019 programme, was the great French actress Isabelle Huppert’s performance of American writer Darryl Pinckney’s three-part monologue Mary Said What She Said. Directed for Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, by the outstanding American auteur director Robert Wilson, and performed in the grand auditorium of Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, the production presented Mary, Queen of Scots, in a brilliantly stark and unashamedly stylized fashion (in terms of language, movement, and visual aesthetics). Mary is a historical figure who has fascinated dramatic artists for centuries, from the German bard Friedrich Schiller,Footnote 6 to Italian opera composer Gaetano Donizetti,Footnote 7 Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead,Footnote 8 and, most recently, ballet choreographers Sophie Laplane and James Bonas.Footnote 9 However, Pinckney’s writing, Wilson’s directing, and Huppert’s performance created a dramatic image of Mary that was truly transfixing and utterly distinctive (Figure 2).
Isabelle Huppert in Mary Said What She Said (Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, 2019), directed by Robert Wilson.
Reviewing the piece in Lisbon for the Daily Telegraph newspaper, I wrote:
Huppert (who, it is not ungallant to say, is more than twenty years older than Mary was when she died) plays the ill-fated queen with a captivating grace and an awe-inspiring versatility. Dressed in a hyper-realistic, yet stylishly restrained, period costume, her Mary is, by turns, bitterly calm, scintillatingly frenetic, agonizingly plaintive, and, always, resolutely defiant.
Performing in French, with Portuguese supertitles (I was forearmed with American author Pinckney’s English-language script), Huppert plays on a stage that is, courtesy of Wilson’s brilliantly stark set and lighting designs, the quintessence of minimalist abstraction. Pinckney’s text (the title of which refers not only to Mary herself, but also to her famous ladies-in-waiting, all four of whom were called Mary) shifts between live and recorded speech, and is expressed through repetition and variation in a manner that is reminiscent of the music of a modernist composer such as Arnold Schoenberg or Steve Reich.
Given the musicality of the script, it is appropriate that Huppert’s performance is accompanied throughout by a beautiful, bold and cinematic score by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. The dramatic momentum and pathos of the music combines gorgeously with Huppert’s highly stylized performance. In the extraordinary final section of the play, for instance, the actress performs a paradoxically controlled-yet-frantic choreography that would have been worthy of such modern dance masters as Pina Bausch or Merce Cunningham.Footnote 10
The three productions mentioned above are typical of the high-level international productions that have been attracted to Festival de Almada throughout its history. The showcase’s combination of committed internationalism and artistic ambition are a reflection of the passions of its founding artistic director. Benite was not only – as noted above – a man of the left, but also (like many Portuguese people of his generation) a French speaker and something of a Francophile. Little wonder, then, that – alongside a great many productions from neighbouring Spain – the founding director’s programmes often included work from the newly liberated African nations of the former Portuguese empire and many shows from France. The 1993 showcase, for instance, boasted Teatro Gungu from Mozambique; Serpente from Angola; and French company Théâtre de la Fronde.
From the years that I have been attending the festival, one could add such noteworthy international productions as Chilean theatre-maker Jaime Lorca’s extraordinary staging of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (2008); the Franco-Greek production Yourcenar/Cavafy, starring the superb English actress Charlotte Rampling (2010); Peter Stein’s fine, Italian-language presentation of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party for Milanese company Tieffe Teatro (2023; Figure 3); and the charming and hilarious Teatro Delusio by the ever-popular German mask theatre specialists Familie Flöz (2025).
The Birthday Party (Tieffe Teatro, Milan, 2023), directed by Peter Stein. Maddalena Crippa as Meg.
Writing on Stein’s staging of the Pinter play for the Scottish newspaper the Sunday National, I offered the following assessment:
At face value, the production looks like a fairly down-the-line, conventional rendering of this well known drama. However, as ever with Stein, intelligent directorial interventions bring another dimension to the play.
In every aspect of the piece, the director, somehow, increases the emotional volume. This is true from the exaggeratedly comic walk of Fernando Maraghini’s boarding house owner Petey to the disquieting tryst between Goldberg and the much younger Lulu (which is conducted under a white sheet, as if in a surrealist painting by René Magritte).
Stein’s genius is that he manages to enhance the emotional ‘volume’ and the colour of a play without losing any of its nuances. Boasting a tremendous, Italian cast, it is – right up to the terrifying futility of its conclusion – a staging worthy of any international festival.Footnote 11
The festival emerged, of course, from Portuguese theatre culture, and every programme has showcased companies and theatre artists of all kinds from across Portugal. The inaugural programme, in 1984, featured seven productions (a small number by the festival’s current standards), all of them Portuguese. By the following year the programme had expanded to twenty shows, including a production by the company of Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon. Benite’s own substantial contribution to the festival, as a stage director, included (in 1998) a celebrated production of The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden by the great Andalusian poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca (Figure 4). Benite’s successor Francisco – both as director of Companhia de Teatro de Almada and of Festival de Almada – has also directed a number of significant productions at the festival. His strong staging of German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s timely drama Martyr for the festival programme of 2020 is a notable case in point (Figure 5). Indeed, in tackling Mayenburg’s play – which addresses the troubling and dangerous subject of Islam and Islamophobia in contemporary Europe – Francisco displayed socio-political fearlessness and artistic ambition, both of which were founding characteristics of Festival de Almada.
The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden (1998), directed by Joaquim Benite.
Martyr (Companhia de Teatro de Almada, 2020), directed by Rodrigo Francisco.
It was, perhaps, during the Covid-19 pandemic that the principles of the festival were presented with their greatest challenge. Thanks to both the Portuguese government’s anti-Covid measures (which were introduced more quickly and more extensively, and were better targeted, than those of the governments of the UK, for example) and the focus and determination of Francisco and his team, the 37th edition of Festival de Almada went ahead in July 2020, making it the first summer festival to proceed despite the pandemic.
Speaking to me in Almada during that year’s programme, Francisco explained the festival’s outlook with regard to the pandemic:
We didn’t say ‘We’re not going to do it’, because this theatre is not ours, it belongs to the citizens … We organize the festival, but we do it with public funding. We didn’t have the right to say, ‘OK, we go home.’ That’s not what we do. Our public duty is to make theatre happen for people. I couldn’t understand some theatres that closed down in March and said they would be back in September.Footnote 12
This commitment to the public – which seems, from conversations I have had with patrons who have attended the showcase from its earliest days, to have been hardwired into Festival de Almada from the very beginning – meant that Francisco and his team remained in a condition of readiness, should circumstances allow the programme to go ahead. As it transpired, the artistic director told me, that preparedness to stage the festival (albeit in somewhat restricted circumstances) was welcomed warmly both by the political class (at both the local and national levels) and the theatregoing public:Footnote 13
For those in political power it was important to show people that it was possible to keep on with our lives, whilst keeping to the coronavirus rules, of course … When you have more than 300 people saying they want to come – at a time when people could not go out of their homes, except to go to the supermarket – it gives you a sense of the importance of this festival, of theatre, and of art in general to people’s lives.Footnote 14
Festival de Almada 2020 was staged with social distancing protocols followed assiduously. Indeed, the programme even managed to maintain an international dimension. Many international companies had to withdraw due to concerns about possible flight cancellations. However, companies from Italy and Spain undertook to travel to Portugal by road if required, and their performances did go ahead. As artistic director, Francisco deserves every plaudit he received for the careful and assured way in which he steered the festival through the Covid-19 pandemic.
Having emerged from the international health emergency in remarkably rude health, Festival de Almada has continued to fulfil its role as Portugal’s pre-eminent theatre festival. The briefest consideration of the most recent programmes testifies to the enduring success of the festival’s time-honoured model. As every year, the 2024 showcase achieved a careful balance between Portuguese and international work. A major production of Brecht’s Mother Courage Footnote 15 was a particularly notable piece of home-grown theatre. Writing in the Portuguese bi-weekly magazine Jornal de Letras, Artes e Ideias, theatre critic Helena Simões opined:
[I]t takes a great actress to bring to life Anna Fierling, the ethically ambiguous and alienated street vendor who resiliently remains in control of her cart … [and] that actress is Maria João Luís … In a character tailored to her, which she delivers with meticulous and skilful work, both in epic style and in affecting and obsessive pathos, Maria João Luís constructs, in real time and with poetic commitment, the complex dialectic between subjectivity and the laws of history, making this contradiction legible with true theatricality.Footnote 16
An extraordinary highlight of the international programme was the contemporary dance piece Full Moon, created for his Paris-based company Bureau Platô by Josef Nadj, who is, to my mind, one of the world’s greatest living choreographers. Reviewing the production for the Sunday National, I wrote:
In maintaining his festival’s welcome, [Rodrigo] Francisco has also maintained its standing in the world. That’s why he is able to continue to attract work of the calibre of (my favourite show during my nine days in Almada) Nadj’s Full Moon. Dance should, the choreographer’s official website avers, be considered ‘above all’ as ‘a site for encounter’.
Performed on the large stage of the outdoor auditorium at D. António da Costa Secondary School, this extraordinary piece – in which the 67-year-old Nadj appears, masked, alongside ten Black African dancers – is one of the most compelling, moving, humorous, and deeply intelligent dance works it has been my privilege to see. We know that our human species began (approximately 200,000 years ago) in East Africa (yes, that means you are of African descent, Nigel Farage).
Nadj’s piece – by way of its superb African performers – explores notions of an essential African dance. However, inevitably, it encounters the arrested development in African culture created by European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and subsequent postcolonialism.
All of this and more is encountered by the piece with a lightness of touch, a depth of thought, and a satirical comedy. Primarily, however, this inventive piece encounters culture, history, and politics by means of exceptional, wonderfully varied, and often breathtakingly virtuosic movement.
Full Moon is a genuinely complete choreography, a dance work that enriches the mind and the soul.Footnote 17
In 2025, Festival de Almada audiences were captivated by a Portuguese work of undeniable importance. Against the backdrop of the rise in the electoral forces of the Portuguese far right (in the shape of André Ventura’s Chega party), acclaimed Portuguese theatre auteur Marco Martins presented A Colónia (The Colony). Reviewing for the Sunday National, I synopsized the work thus:
The piece – which is based upon an investigation by journalist Joana Pereira Bastos – draws on the testimonies of anti-fascist resistance fighters (mainly members of Portuguese Communist Party) who were imprisoned and tortured under the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar and his successor Marcello Caetano. It draws strongly, too, on the accounts of children of political prisoners who received some respite from their trauma and isolation at a children’s summer camp known as The Colony.
The fascist Estado Novo (New State) tyrannized over the Portuguese people from 1933 until it was overthrown by the Revolution of 25 April 1974. Martins’s production – which was presented as part of Festival de Almada in the beautifully appointed theatre of Culturgest in the centre of Lisbon – combines testimony by survivors of the regime, with scenes played by both professional actors and teenage theatre performers.Footnote 18
Perhaps the most extraordinary element in Martins’s production was the opening scene in which wife and husband Conceição Matos and Domingos Abrantes (who are now in late old age) came on stage to give testimony. The couple – Communists both – survived long periods of incarceration and brutal torture by Salazar’s hated secret police force, the PIDE. Although I found the production somewhat uneven in aesthetic terms, my review offered the following final assessment:
[T]his ambitious theatre work stands as a memorable and emotive testament to the courage of those who resisted the fascist regime in Portugal. It stands, too, as a stark warning in a world where far-right forces (including the pernicious Chega in Portugal and the equally obnoxious Reform UK in the nations of the British state) are on the rise.Footnote 19
The toast of the international programme in the 2025 festival was the aforementioned Teatro Delusio. Presented by Berlin’s legendary puppet theatre company Familie Flöz, the show was the winner of the audience vote (which is conducted annually at Festival de Almada, and involves those productions – always a majority of those in the showcase – that could return the following year by popular acclaim). By turns poignant and very funny, this contemplation of the behind-the-scenes life of a theatre is testament to the remarkable mask-performance and mask-making skills of a company that richly deserves its international acclaim. Festival patrons who failed to get tickets during the 2025 showcase will get a second chance when Teatro Delusio returns for the 43rd edition of Festival de Almada in 2026.
Rooted in the principles of its great founder Joaquim Benite, led expertly over the past thirteen years by his excellent successor Rodrigo Francisco, this unique and brilliant showcase continues to attract some of the world’s finest theatre artists and, crucially, to maintain the closest of relationships with its loyal, intelligent, and passionate audience.
