Part of Out of the Wings Festival

“It’s the voices, boy, the voices.”

He’s a troubled boy, haunted by his private terrors. From an early age the only refuge is his intimacy with his demented grandmother Dionisia. They are a conspiracy of two. They are complicit. Faced with a dissaproving and seemingly threatening world, they share a private universe of make-beleive games and songs.

Are genius and insanity as close as this? These two both spend their lives in different ways as outsiders. Dionisia hears voices in her madness. Fernando as a child is already inventing alter egos which as an adult become the fully fledged fictional “heteronyms” – the many writers under whose names his work is eventually published – and considered among the greatest of the twentieth century.

Writer
Armando Nascimento Rosa (Portugal)
Translator
Susannah Finzi
Director
Almiro Andrade