Since its creation in 2013, your show By Heart has been touring the world. Can you tell us how it came to be?
The starting point was autobiographical, even genealogical. Ever since my childhood in Portugal, I’ve always had a very strong link with my grandmother. It expresses itself in our shared love for books and for reading. As she grew older, my grandmother learned that she was going blind. So she gave me a mission: to choose a book for her to learn by heart before losing her sight completely. As soon as she told me about it, I knew that, one day, I would share that story. I didn’t know how it would end then. I just had the intuition that it was a major event in my own life, that it said something about the essence of my approach to theatre, by bringing together questions about the job of the actor and this love for reading.
In By Heart, your grandmother is a sort of central character, alongside authors from different times and places…
My grandmother was raised and lived in a secluded village, away from the world of knowledge. Which was a sort of double solitude. It’s the village of my childhood. By asking the audience to learn a poem by heart, I’m proposing to perpetuate my grandmother’s act, to perpetuate her voice. She only left her village twice in her life, but since the creation of my show, she’s visited several continents, for over 350 performances! She was still alive when the show was created. I was in France the night she passed away. I thought about stopping the tour, but there were still a few dates left. I left for Madrid, thinking the show would be meaningless, that it would be too violent a shock to even perform… But something of her act of reading, of her filial love, survived. The play became a metaphor for our mutual love. Although I perform it less often these days, every time I do, I feel her presence, and I see how much By Heart continues to be meaningful for the audience. It’s the only show for which I’ve continued to appear on stage as an actor since 2015. To perform it for the 77th edition of the Festival d’Avignon in the Cour d’honneur—which will be my first time there—is a powerful symbol. It’s about sharing my vision of the world with the audience, the artists, and my team, during this magical moment that is the Festival d’Avignon.
In By Heart, several writers gather around a sonnet by William Shakespeare: Boris Pasternak, Ossip Mandelstam, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, or George Steiner, who passed away in 2020…
Over the course of the play, I try to lead the audience, or rather to lose them, in a literary labyrinth. This labyrinth is a reflection of the research I had to do to accomplish the terrible but wonderful mission that was choosing a final book for my grandmother. Lost in this maze, I was on my way back from her house when I remembered that interview I’d discovered when I was with Belgian company tg Stan, with which I almost took my first steps as an actor. On the set of a Dutch TV show, Win Kayzer was interviewing intellectual George Steiner. Among many anecdotes, recollections, readings, and reflections, Steiner explained how learning a text by heart is an act of love for the authors. I then decided to write to that great intellectual, a story I tell in my show…
You’re performing the show in French, with a translation of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30. Which translation did you choose ?
For the French creation of the show, years ago at the Théâtre de la Bastille, I used a translation from 1912, by Charles-Marie Garnier. Although it can sound a little archaic, I liked it because of Garnier’s precise work to turn the original meter into alexandrines. A poem is mnemonic; it’s a capsule to help you remember a whole world. But, and this is a scoop, for the first time, I’m going to “perform” a new translation. It’s by the famous duo of translators Françoise Moran and André Markowicz. They did the translation for my 2021 production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. They decided to translate all of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I feel all the more honoured because it was a performance of By Heart which inspired them to do so. I therefore had to learn by heart a new, unpublished translation!
By Heart is an experience, the creation of an unexpected community as the show almost “invents itself” right before our eyes…
There are ten chairs on the stage. The show can only begin once ten spectators are sitting in those chairs, with me as the eleventh. Those ten people slowly transform thanks to literature. The effort to learn by heart becomes visible. I see the idea that to learn a poem by heart might create a momentary community but also a real collective as a love letter to the transformative power of theatre, but not a proof of it. Ever since I started performing this show, I’ve never once felt like I was repeating myself or growing tired of it as an actor. It’s about experiencing something together, without anything to domesticate those ten participants. Each of them realises as the show unfolds that their learning this sonnet by heart comes with some responsibility. By Heart is something of a collective challenge, which I always experience in its mixture of vulnerability and freshness. Learning a poem allows us to experience the unpredictable nature of the theatrical act. And to see, as we so rarely can, the exercise of memory in the process of being created, thanks to the power of poetry. To perform this show in the Cour d’honneur is to address it once again to my grandmother, in a space bigger than her village, with an audience ten times the size of its population…
By heart plays a key part in your evolution as an artist. Isn’t it a sort of self-portrait, through the memorisation of a sonnet by William Shakespeare?
In this show, several different layers come together: poetry, theatre, the freedom of expression of authors faced with totalitarian regimes. Learning something by heart isn’t a political project. However, it can be a tool of resistance, both literary and biological, against aging. In any case, it’s proof that there is a future, as it has been and still is in our most desperate moments. Many people who know my work could jokingly say: “If you see Tiago Rodrigues’s By Heart, you don’t have to see anything else, everything’s in there!” Maybe it’s true! If I had to give a historical dimension to my passport, it would be By Heart. In this show, you’ll find all the necessary information I need to be allowed to cross a border. It brings together all the questions I ask myself and is an expression of the way I think about theatre. I agree with Heiner Müller when he says that theatre allows us to communicate with the dead. During every performance, I enter in a conversation with Ray Bradbury, Boris Pasternak, but also my grandmother and my father. And I’m lucky enough to be able to work with William Shakespeare. It’s a two-lane transmission. The first is invisible, though almost palpable: it’s my grandmother’s gesture, who “imprinted” in me this love for books. It’s also true of a scholar like George Steiner. That first transmission comes from our ancestors, alive or dead, through literary works or not. The second transmission is directed towards the audience, towards other generations. And then there’s this relationship of vulnerability which requires a complicity with the spectators, both on stage and in the room. It’s the very essence of my work, that is, the belief in the unpredictability, in the very real but very fortunate danger of theatre. I’m looking for it, triggering it, so that there can exist a great freedom on stage. Which I do through a deep admiration for the text and the unlikely marriage between respect for the writing and the freedom of the actor. This instability means that By heart may or may not go well. It’s a different experience with each “performance.” And in that sense, it’s a manifesto about the way I do theatre. It’s like a calling card for my career and my vision of the stage, that is, a mixture between the poetical, the political, and the personal. I’ve explored the personal sometimes without restraint, I’m aware of it, mea culpa! Except with By heart, this journey alongside ten people in front of an audience, all together, elevates this artistic and political dimension, to reach the highest level of intimacy. The ending of that show is, in that sense, one of the most powerful ways for an artist to bare their soul. I realise it anew every time. I’m surprised to see how I’ve forgotten where it can take me. It can be hard to contain my emotion.
Interview conducted by Marc Blanchet and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach