D. Maria II National Theatre

The National Theatre opened on 13 April 1846, on the 27th birthday of the queen who gave it her name. Passos Manuel had entrusted Almeida Garrett with the idea of a national theatre, and the building went up on the site of the Palácio dos Estaus, the former headquarters of the Inquisition, which a fire had destroyed in 1836. Under the Republic it was renamed the Almeida Garrett National Theatre; it became the D. Maria II again in 1939.¹

From 1929 to 1964 — almost the whole of the Estado Novo (“New State”) — the theatre was in the hands of the company of Amélia Rey Colaço and Robles Monteiro, the longest concession in its history. The company lived, in the theatre’s own words, in an “unstable balance with the regime”: a censorship commissioner had the last word on every play, and texts such as Felizmente há luar! (Fortunately There Is Moonlight!) and O Motim (The Riot) were banned.¹

It was with this company that Maria Barroso made her debut, in 1944, and she played the lead in José Régio’s Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (Benilde, or the Virgin Mother) in 1947.² At the same time she recited the poets of the opposition at recitals all over the country. In 1948, an order “coming from the police and the Ministry of Education” removed her from the D. Maria II; Amélia Rey Colaço considered it a fatal blow, one that struck at the heart of the theatre.⁴³

In 1964, hours after a performance of Macbeth, a fire destroyed the building; the walls, the Salão Nobre (state room) and the archive survived. Rebuilt to its old design, the theatre reopened on 11 May 1978, and plays banned decades earlier, such as Felizmente há luar!, could at last be staged here. Brecht’s Mother Courage, which Amélia Rey Colaço had wanted to stage in defiance of the censors, opened in 1986, in a co-production by the theatre, with Eunice Muñoz; the writer Agustina Bessa-Luís was artistic director from 1990 to 1993.¹

In 1979, the theatre’s director, Lima de Freitas, commissioned a play from Natália Correia for the fourth centenary of the death of Camões. She delivered Erros Meus, Má Fortuna, Amor Ardente (My Errors, Ill Fortune, Ardent Love) in June 1980, but the Secretary of State for Culture cut the funding and the play was not produced at the National Theatre; it was only staged in 1988, by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.⁵