With staging and dramaturgy by Bruno Bravo, artistic director of Primeiros Sintomas, and starring Ana Brandão, the play focuses on the maid Zerline, the central character of the fifth chapter of the novella “The Innocents,” written by the 20th-century Austrian author, widely considered by experts as “one of the greatest modernists of all time.”
Zerline is an old maid, a key figure in one of Broch’s works (1886-1951), which presents a “compilation of poems and narratives on the degradation of values of the decaying aristocracy and rising bourgeoisie in Germany, between the wars, foreshadowing the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe,” as noted by Primeiros Sintomas.
“The literary vigor of this fifth chapter, which brings to the forefront the character of an old maid and her story, told to a constrained and almost mute interlocutor, has given rise to a now-classic monologue,” told in an “unexpected love story.”
A love story that, according to philosopher Hannah Arendt, “is one of the most beautiful in all literature” and her “favorite,” featuring a woman who is a maid.
The play unfolds within a “love triangle, lightly inspired by the characters of Don Giovanni,” in which “the enigma of Zerline lies in the words spoken by those who have no right to them,” as mentioned in a note from Primeiros Sintomas.
“A woman who is old and young, free and submissive, victim and executioner. Evil is not far away. Detached from the original book, this is a story enveloped in shadows, omens, and bleak futures,” adds the company led by Bruno Bravo.
Zerline is “distant from the instinctual matrix for whom the erotic strategy has become a discursive strategy,” states a synopsis of “The Maid Zerline,” published by Difel in 2002.
“But body and discourse are both ways, although different, of knowledge and Zerline’s exercise consists precisely in the laborious translation of instinctual knowledge into intellectual knowledge,” the presentation adds.
“Between one and the other, as the only mediator, stands her language, in whose ‘rudimentariness’ she seeks the systematization of values that assist her conversion from ‘erotic being’ to ‘ethical being.’ As a residue of this transformation, the axial value of her movement emerges: guilt.”
Not the guilt of Zerline, who “remains always external to the world she observes and narrates, but that of a society that exempts itself by accepting to assimilate and inscribe body and guilt.”
And it is precisely the externality to the system that endows Zerline “with the capacity to be both judge and executioner,” assuming an “extreme, absolute” position as rudimentary and limiting as her language.
“Both stem from a greater and first value: the intense transfer of experiences, which in their intensity can only be innocence,” concluded the presentation of the book published by the former Difel.
At CAL, “The Ballad of the Maid Zerline” will be on stage until October 19, with performances from Monday to Saturday at 9:00 PM and on Sundays at 7:00 PM, except on October 14 and 17.
With music by Sérgio Delgado and lighting design by António Vilar, staging assistance is provided by interns João Bravo and Margarida Lopes Batista.
Written in 1950, “Zerlina” was previously performed by Eunice Muñoz, in a production directed by João Perry premiered in 1988 at the Teatro da Trindade in co-production with the National Theatre D. Maria II, which also hosted it in 1993.
In February 2019, director João Botelho staged Broch’s text, starring Luísa Cruz, with set design and costume by Pedro Cabrita Reis. The play was performed at the Belém Cultural Center, originating from work carried out in the 1980s for the National Theatre D. Maria II, by António S. Ribeiro and José Ribeiro da Fonte, based on the translation by Suzana Muñoz.
