Actor playing far-right activist shouted down and pelted with fruit during Catarina, or the Beauty of Killing Fascists
An actor at a theatre in Germany was at the weekend shouted down, pelted with fruit and subjected to an attempted stage invasion as he delivered a final monologue in character as a far-right activist.
The violent scenes came on Saturday during the German premiere of the Portuguese playwright Tiago Rodrigues’s work Catarina, or the Beauty of Killing Fascists in Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia.
The provocative, prize-winning play from 2020 tells the story of a family with a macabre annual tradition: to avenge the murder of farm worker Catarina Eufémia, a real-life resistance martyr shot and killed in 1954 during the Salazar dictatorship, they kidnap a “fascist” each year in order to execute him during a family feast.
Over the course of the play a generational conflict breaks out between bloodthirsty parents and their more squeamish adult daughter about what means are justified to defend democracy. At the end of the last act, the year’s chosen victim, a far-right party functionary, delivers a 15-minute monologue laying out a nightmarish extremist agenda.
