Part 1 – Campânula de Vidro (Glass Bell Jar)
A set designer and a playwright enter a stage. Within the setting of The Misanthrope, which was the play they were staging, they realise that they are able to speak without being heard. They realise that fiction is a great context for saying certain things. They realise that books do more than just take up space, they realise that history had already been written in books. They look for traces of their biographies, they try to read the words of others without making them their own. They try to understand what went wrong, and they try to understand what a set designer and a playwright are doing on stage.
A show that proposes a reflection on suicide and the difficulty of talking about mental health, through the voices of writers, characters and themselves. The stage becomes a space where autofiction is pushed to its limits and where any sentence is, by default, a confession.
The words come out sideways — they slip through the seams of fiction and hit the floor silently, lying there motionless, like dead birds or open letters. There is a moment before the sentence, a moment when one still chooses whether to speak or to swallow. Here, they choose to speak. Perhaps they began without meaning to. They say things that are not theirs, they say things that are theirs, but they appear to be read out — the voice becomes thick with other voices. Books inside the mouth. Writers pushing phrases to try to talk about what cannot be said. There are no guarantees, they do not know what ails them, they arrive and talk to whoever is there.
On stage, the body trembles slightly.
On stage, the words no longer belong to them.
On stage, there is a moment when it is no longer necessary to know if we are still inhabiting the truth or if we have already moved on.
Part 2 – Tudo Sobre a Emma (All About Emma)
Emma, the central figure in a show called Campânula de Vidro, survived the fall, but we don’t know where she is. Emma is an absence. A fragmented narrative that is pieced together through testimonies, clues, and fictional projections. We never hear her own voice — only echoes from those who saw her, lost her, searched for her. Two experts (Leonor Cabral and Vítor d’Andrade) conduct this investigation, but they are neither witnesses nor authors. What they offer are reconstructions, contradictory versions, fragments of a collective memory.
This show operates as speculative archaeology: we summon detectives, psychics, actors, and friends to map out an absence. Emma fell, survived, disappeared. The stage set becomes a living archive where the real and the speculative collide.
After all, Emma may be a fictional name, a clinical case, a dramaturgical device. She may have moved on with her life or she may be dead. Ultimately, doubt is the only fact. This show is a space where the possibility of her survival coexists with the evidence of her loss.
In the end, we hope that someone will stand up and say, ‘It’s me. All is well.’
Or not.
