This factor was also accompanied by the wardrobe?
AC: Yes, also followed this trend, to have the notion of time passing by.
From all these characters, which as an actor you would like to take to the stage?
AC: I do not know. Any of the two men I would like to do. I liked to have that freedom to relate independently of the weight of our education, conventions and opinions. This independence to relate almost inconsequentially. It always exist but taking it without drama.
You've changed the title?
AC: No, the title is the same. I did not translate, because I could not find anything that satisfied me in Portuguese, who gave this sophistication and elegance that had the title in English.
But when we read it with get an idea and finally the plays speaks of other things.
AC: The idea of design behind it is the concept of life. It is the core of what they do it, is a construction, in addition to the professional life of each one. The emotional life walks differently. The translator suggested me "life project" but it did not sounded good. "Design for a living" has a sophistication that is untranslatable.
How this play comes to your hands?
AC: Two years ago I staged a few short pieces of Becket. I really liked to make them, was very attached to my personal life, to a series of deaths and was a response to my pain, a catharsis and the title was also pulled out of the author, which was "tomorrow's happiness," the idea of future joyness. After that, I felt like making a comedy. I had seen two plays of Noël Coward and suddenly I read this one and I wanted to do it, after discovering that it had been written at this time. At the same time I was afraid, because it was a kind of theater that I had never done before. This comedy is difficult because it is sophisticated, not the type of great laugh, we smile and it seem odd, but the Portuguese are not very accustomed to this kind of humor. But, in Lisbon for two months we always had excellent adherence of the public.
After many plays and a wide experience, what is like the theater in the commune?
AC: It's been interesting, we are moving quite well a bit difficult in the sense that the country is also at this point. These are hush times for all theater companies, with cuts of 30% and we had to rethink and restructure the programming. We been through so much, I can only say that the theater never ends. Although all these incursions of everyday life, people always need this confrontation of man to man, the mirror, to be there, which is very inherent to men and only the theater can give you that and has almost for two thousand years. It is a ritual, a meeting, there is an exchange that actors give away and that only happens when we open the doors to the public.
Contrary to what is stated there is public that goes to the theater?
AC: It has and will not leave. It's funny, there is a phenomenon that happens in Lisbon that we noted in conversation with people from the middle, and is that public still goes to the theater. From now on, I do not know, maybe it will hurt. But in the latest months of the year we thought the audience would fail to appear, with Christmas and the end of the year, but no. People feel the need to see shows. There are micro phenomena of popularity, that in ten days play it runs out, even with people waiting outside, because they cannot buy tickets. I think there is this idea we can no longer stay at home thinking about the horror, so what we do? There is a need to respond, even if means going out to see things to occupy your mind with other concepts.
What are your next projects?
AC: This year I will not direct anymore. I'm going as an actor to be part in the next project of the commune, will be a coproduction with the Theater St. Luis, Jean-Claude Carrière, play called "The Controversy of Valladolid" in late April. Next year I was thinking of staging Shakespeare, perhaps "As you like it."
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