Jorge Silva Melo

Some think that a certain contemporary theatre began in 1956 with John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger". The repertoire and the group of Authors we've been producing for the last two and a half years at A Capital owe a lot to the founding gesture of scheduling this play by an unknown writer and handing the direction to a very young Tony Richardson. The man who dared was George Devine in the English Stage Company working at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Whatever one may think today of Osborne's play, it was "looking back in anger" that all this started.
And if we've presented at A Capital texts by Jon Fosse, Sarah Kane, David Harrower, David Greig, Arne Sierens, Heiner Müller, Bertolt Brecht, José Maria Vieira Mendes, Stephen Greenhorn, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Xavier Durringer, Spiro Scimone, Duncan McLean, Judith Herzberg, Don Duyns, Karst Woudstra, Gregory Motton, Francisco Luís Parreira, Gerardjan Rijnders, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Mark O´Rowe, Brian Friel or Athol Fugard it's because we want to inherit from George Devine these founding words: "The urging need of our time is to discover a contemporary style where dramatic action, and dialogue, and acting, and design are all combined to make a modern theatre. Much successful effort has been given to the dramatists of the past, but no attention has been given to the future. This should be a theatre where all the experimentalists of the modern era may be seen. From Büchner, Pirandello, Strindberg, Wedekind, Cromelinck, Giraudoux, O'Casey, Lorca, Brecht, and so on. These are all hard-hitting, uncompromising writers, and their works are stimulating, provocative and exciting. They belong in a vital modern theatre of experiment where the intention is often as important as the achievement." (1956)
Yet I don't want to "look back in anger".
I don't want to know why we've spent so many months discussing "surgical" and immediate works in the building with the Councillor for Culture if, in the end, the (sudden) decision would be different.
I don't want to know why we met at A Capital in June with the Secretary of State for Culture and the Town Councillor to find out if the amount of money then made available would be recoverable or no.
I don't want to know why, in a letter from the Ministry of Culture of August 23, it is said to me that "contacts with the Council of Lisbon will be made in order to request the City Council to provide for the conservation works (...) necessary to the activity of your production company."
I don't want to know why (always in the knowledge of the Ministry of Culture which, until 2002 and for several times, told us of its intention to support these expenses which it was agreed surpassed our range of activity; and the present Minister had already started to analyse the situation with the Town Council) we bolted doors, cleaned gutters, bricked up entrances, got rid of many of the leaks, installed an alarm system, put locks, unstopped toilets, emptied by hand more than half the debris from the building in Rua do Norte, replaced glasses broken in the storm of October last, paid damages caused by the falling of those glasses.
I don't want to know why I gathered budgets urgently requested by the Minister Augusto Santos Silva in the end of 2001 and again asked for on August 16, this time with alleged superior authorization; and at the City Hall, new budgets for further works on the roof.
I don't to know why we have presented to four successive Ministers a plan of immediate works, a plan for which we were always told the response had to and would be quick.
I don't want to know why I was asked at the City Hall, on August 14, to schedule an urgent meeting with architect Pedro Maurício Borges in order to discuss the main areas for an imminent intervention that wouldn't go against the envisaged larger works.
I don't want to know why my question "should I continue to schedule productions at A Capital in these conditions?" was always affirmatively answered by the City Council, as well as by the Ministry and IPAE [the Portuguese Institute for the Performing Arts]; less than three months ago, I made the same question to the Secretary of State asking for a swift reply.
I don't want to know why Teatro Taborda (which belongs to the City Council) didn't accept my proposals for 2002, claiming that I had "my own venue".
I don't want to know why since April 22 (and in the knowledge of the MC and the Council) the process for definitive licensing of the venue was taking place, as reads a letter from IGAC [which regulates cultural activities] of May 7.
I don't want to know why, on August 29, at the exact same time that the City Council police was shutting down the building, I was at the Town Hall with the Councillor for Culture and the Responsible for Cultural Premises discussing a phased exit from A Capital, and why I was never notified of the immediate evacuation, as senior partner of the company.
I don't want to know why the Mayor of Lisbon, on the 4th of July (when he visited A Capital) ended the tour by shaking my hand and saying "congratulations".
I don't want to know.
Because I don't want to "look back in anger".
"Take care of the living and bury the dead" is what Marquês de Pombal may have said after the earthquake in 1755, a motto made famous by a pompous painting showing at the City Hall which should guide us yet today.
Yes, we'll take care of the living.
And bury the dead and their intricate paper work.
That is what I agreed to with the Councillor for Town Planning, Eduarda Napoleão, and that is what I expect from her.
Yes, we'll go for three months to Braço de Prata in the East of Lisbon.
Yes, we'll settle in the old OGMEE [army engineering workshops] of Belém, in the West of Lisbon.
Yes, we'll try to present the shows elsewhere.
Yes, we'll try to keep to a repertoire we're proud of.
Yes, we'll try to be with the audiences that cherish us.
Yes, we'll try to negotiate the money we need with the banks.
Yes, we'll sign a protocol for the use of the premises in the East of Lisbon as was promised to us on September 6.
Yes, we'll sign a protocol for the provisional use of the OGMEE in the West of Lisbon, as was promised to us on September 5.
Yes, we'll try to correspond to the friendship of the hundreds of people that signed a perplexed text addressed to the Mayor of Lisbon.
Yes, we'll try to be up to the expectations stated by key names of European culture that have joined us.
Yes, we'll keep going.
No, we won't give up.
But there is a very old American novel that one day we (very young) found in 1965. It's a book written in 1929 by Thomas Wolfe and it's called "Look Homeward, Angel." Light as angels, going from Braço de Prata to the City Hall, from the old Army Engineering Factories in Belém to A Capital in Bairro Alto, from the Ministry to the Belém Cultural Centre, with no belongings, weightless as migrating birds, with the lightness which, looking at the sky one evening, Sophia de Mello Breyner pointed out to me ("look, watch the birds, they fly so far and carry nothing... but as for us its cars and more cars just to go to the Algarve"), wobbling we will go, to find what can be rescued from friendship and from theatre.
But we will always be looking homeward, to that derelict building in Rua Diário de Notícias, Bairro Alto.
There we want to
1. build an Arts Centre that can gather artists with different experiences, and containing working areas and performance areas;
2. build the foundations for a contemporary repertoire from which Portuguese theatre has been kept away;
3. build a place where actors are not denied access to the production process;
4. build a place where the spectator can be interested as much in the intention as in the achievement;
5. build a new place, an MC/City Council partnership, with a book of specifications, a management nominated every three years by competitive examination, common management and clear accounts;
6. build an Authors' Theatre in it's modern configuration. Where the actors are not restricted to the function of mere interpreters.
7. work and live.
That is the Home we'll vigilantly keep watching, the home to which one day, and I quote Racine ("dans un mois, dans un an"), we'll return, when at last we'll name it after the dearest of our actors and call it Teatro Paulo Claro.

Jorge Silva Melo
September 12, 2002