Fado Alexandrino

«I’m in Lisbon and in Mozambique, I can see at the same time the gouty little gardens and the straw huts devastated by machine-gun fire. » In Fado Alexandrino, António Lobo Antunes plunges us into a composite time, set in motion by the action of remembering. Five characters, servicemen who had returned from the Colonial War ten years previously, get together for dinner, an occasion to exchange reflections about an end and its mourning, a sort of Last Supper. Nuno Cardoso brings to the scene the most important novel about the 25 April Revolution, during the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. The stage becomes a huge mural that materialises, through the presence and interaction of the players and the work of the creative team, the life experiences of the characters across four interweaving times: the Estado Novo regime, the memory of the war in Mozambique, the Carnation Revolution, the Post-Revolutionary years. Fado Alexandrino is a mise en abyme of recent Portuguese History, an allegory of Portuguese fate.