Three Fingers Below the Knee

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

***

Is there such a thing as the art of censorship? This patchwork performance from director Tiago Rodrigues and his company Mundo Perfeito takes a vast cache of censored material – the redacted lines of classic plays and the lofty or guileless notes of individual censors during almost 50 years of António de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship – and uses it to give an elliptical history of the nation, a culture seen through black slats of marker pen. Even the censors seem nervously aware that their erasures are far more revealing than concealing.

Two actors, Isabel Abreu and Gonçalo Waddington, begin the performance in their underwear, surrounded by rails of ersatz period costumes and faux-antique furnishings that have been shrink wrapped for their own protection. Stage directions and dialogue flit across a collage of documents in the background, as though they once carried the threat of moral staining: "Miss Julie enters looking surprised"; "They embrace"; "They kiss"; "They undress".

Rodrigues’s production is, of course, theatre about theatre (discussing Brecht, O’Neill, Beckett and others, it’s almost theatre about the programme of the Dublin Theatre Festival); underscored by an almost arbitrary three-act structure and a sequence of parodic performance styles. They start off understated but as the censor reports become fixated with female sexuality, Abreu’s body is mapped out in angry red lipstick to illustrate acceptable hemlines or strict no-go areas.

Sharing the writing credit with “several censors of the fascist regime”, Rodrigues concentrates on the mission drift from decisions made for ideological reasons to those made on the grounds of taste. Plays are dismissed for their length, their difficulty, their limited appeal, or because – unlike these censors – a Portuguese audience would simply not understand them.

Rodrigues’s purpose is twofold: to associate conservatism with censorship while underlining the subversive power of theatre beyond other art forms.

This is where the main problem lies. Theatre fans and makers will find it stirring to hear censors elevate the impact of the medium (“Theatre is different,” one of them says about the mass distraction of film or solitary pursuit of literature. “Theatre is really happening”). But, Free Theatre of Belarus notwithstanding, this position feels nostalgic, even self-congratulatory.

The hilariously performed histrionics over Beckett (“I don’t get the purpose of it!”) put it best, resolving in the gratifying words: “It’s a terrible work, but I do not find any reason to reject it.” Is it coincidental that this production seems to become ever more goading as it continues, exhausting its ideas as though daring anybody to wish for cuts? In that gesture, there seems to be more envy than concern – for a time when theatre was dangerous and distrusted, for a time when theatre mattered.

Ends Saturday