The way she dies

Anna Karenina

When you read, you make choices. You translate what you read into the language of your life. A book like Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina could also be the collection of lives it has changed, for better or for worse. In this first play Tiago Rodrigues writes for tg STAN, he convincingly builds a bridge between the actors of the Portuguese Teatro Nacional and those of STAN.

STAN’s actors first met Tiago Rodrigues in 1997. As a very young student at Lisbon’s theatre school, he attended one of their workshops at the Centro Cultural de Belém. A year later, he was already sharing a stage with them for Point Blank, an adaptation of Chekhov’s Platonov. Since then, STAN has been working with Tiago regularly.

• Tiago Rodrigues – Director of Teatro Nacional since 2015 – was previously our guest at Kaaitheater with Yesterday’s Men (2008) and By Heart (2016). Earlier this season, he also presented Antony and Cleopatra. You will be seeing STAN again with their marathon performance of the Bernhard trilogy.

“If it is true that, like Umberto Eco says, translators are those who devote themselves to the art of failure, aren’t actors the twin brothers of translators? Doesn’t theatre face the same dilemma of trying to find its own version of the death of Anna Karenina, translating it into the here and now of a stage? If George Steiner says that translators enlarge our maps, can’t we say that actors are the people who live on the borders (not in a city, but in train stations or airports of language, the corridors of meaning)? When we look at an actor on stage, aren’t we partaking in that unavoidable failure of getting words across a border? How does she die? How does she die? How does she die?” – TIAGO RODRIGUES

"Un grand roman comme Anna Karénine est à la fois intemporel et dépendant du lieu où on le lit. A Damas ou Buenos-Aires, c’est différent." - Tiago Rodrigues dans La Libre

"Il faut comprendre à quel point c’est révolutionnaire dans ce monde, en 2017, d’être tous ensemble dans une salle de théâtre, réunis autour de gens qui parlent.” - Tiago Rodrigues dans le Vif Focus