A criminal prevention operation conducted by the PSP on Rua do Benformoso on December 19, 2024, led to dozens of individuals being lined up against a wall with their hands in the air for searches. Marco Martins acknowledges that this event had a significant impact on him, noting its occurrence “just before Christmas.”
The incident was described as “paradigmatic of a contemporary viewpoint on immigration,” remarked the director during a conversation ahead of a rehearsal for the play “An Enemy of the People,” inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s work of the same name, and which references the police operation in Mouraria, a neighborhood primarily inhabited by immigrants from the Asian subcontinent.
Such occurrences often spark Martins’s curiosity about a particular community, stemming from real events.
“I also knew very little about that community,” he admitted, recalling his study days in New York, where he was “astonished and offended (…) by how little those people knew about Portugal.”
During rehearsals for the play, set to premiere on December 13 at Theatro Circo in Braga, the director conducted an exercise that revealed just as New Yorkers struggled to locate Portugal on a map, so too did the Portuguese struggle to identify Bangladesh’s location.
Martins sought “people who were against the wall,” encountering difficulties due to “fear and a sense of persecution.”
However, the director and his investigative team, including journalists Joana Pereira Bastos and Raquel Moleiro, discovered individuals on Rua do Benformoso willing to take the stage, resulting in a cast that includes ten men and women from Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.
Theater serves as a platform, a space “to be seen,” observed Martins, highlighting the dehumanization marking contemporary times for individuals and communities.
“We speak as if everyone is the same,” lamented Martins, emphasizing that the police operation on Rua do Benformoso was “symbolically potent” because those people “lacked faces” and “voices” while facing the wall.
“These communities have no presence in social structures. They exist but remain on the margins. Our understanding of those immigrant communities is minimal,” he noted, pointing out the constant manipulation of their narrative, not solely by far-right groups but across the entire political spectrum.
Communities without voices face “manipulation of their identities,” constructed solely by others.
In response, Martins sought to understand these individuals “who suddenly seem to be blamed for all social issues, becoming central to political discourse, not just in Portugal but globally.”
He recounts engaging experiences with a community, stating, “We started attending birthdays and visiting people’s homes,” emphasizing that although “poorly integrated,” the subcontinent Asian individuals he met expressed a “great desire to participate.”
Martins intends to highlight the “many interpretations possible” regarding immigration’s complexity, likening it to not being a matter of “black or white” but acknowledging humanity, stressing that immigrants are humans, like everyone else, with families and lives.
He critiques the notion of “first-class and second-class immigrants,” exemplifying with individuals obtaining golden visas versus those working in restaurants or greenhouses.
“An Enemy of the People” will be performed in Portuguese, English, Bengali, and other languages, scheduled for December 13 and 14 at Theatro Circo as part of Braga Capital of Culture 25. Next year, the play will travel to Porto (Teatro Municipal Rivoli, January 16 and 17) and Lisbon (Centro Cultural de Belém, March 13 to 15).
