Performance 

5th and 6th of December | 9pm

7th of December | 7pm

Teatro Ibérico

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Fernando Pessoa met Ophélia Queiroz — his “waspish little muse” — at the Félix, Valladas & Freitas office in Lisbon, where he worked as a commercial correspondent. She had just joined the firm at 19, known as the girl who could type “on every typewriter.” The writer quickly developed a platonic affection for the “petite, pretty, and above all, spirited” young woman. Their courtship began during a power outage at the office, when Pessoa, taking advantage of the unusual darkness, slipped Ophélia a note asking her to stay in the building. When he finally ran into her in the shadows, he invoked Hamlet and exclaimed, “Oh, dear Ophelia!” And so began the amorous prologue between Pessoa & Co. — his heteronymic entourage — and his Baby, little Baby, unfolding in a two-act affair: first from March to November of 1920, followed by a nine-year hiatus, then briefly rekindled between September of 1929 and January of 1930. At the close of that first chapter of their romantic entanglement, Pessoa wrote a letter to Ophélia on the 29th of November of 1920, bringing their zigzagging affair to an end. In that letter, the figure of Pessoa begins to emerge — intoxicated by alcohol and haunted by the unfinished, ungraspable vastness of his literary work.

 

RIDÍCULAS CARTAS thus emerges from a careful curation of correspondence — selected from the vast catalogue of infatuated epistles exchanged between Fernando Pessoa and Ophélia Queiroz — to open up a laboratory of fictions.

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VENUE

Teatro Ibérico - Rua de Xabregas 54, 1900-440 Lisboa