São Tomé and Príncipe / All works
Theatre
Tchiloli
Not translated into English
Anonymous · 1880
Synopsis
During a hunt, Prince Carloto, son of Charlemagne, kills Valdevinos, nephew of a marquis, out of jealousy over his wife. The marquis demands justice, and the emperor must choose between the love of his son and the duty to judge: witnesses, lawyers, ministers and a secretary follow one another in a trial that the São Tomé troupes have fleshed out with interludes in prose. The text mixes the old Portuguese of the verses, modern Portuguese and Forro, to the sound of bamboo flutes and drums.
Context
The text comes from the Tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua and the Emperor Charlemagne, written in the sixteenth century by Baltasar Dias, a blind poet of Madeira, printed in Lisbon in 1665, and from the romance on the same subject published by Almeida Garrett in 1851. Its arrival on the island was long dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries; the work of António Ambrósio and Paulo Alves Pereira places it around 1880, the first attested date. Courtroom interludes in prose were added in the middle of the twentieth century, and Fernando Reis published the text in 1969.
Who it is for
Popular open-air theatre, performed by troupes of masked men over many hours; it is the performance, more than the text, that makes the work.
Prizes and reception
A dozen or so troupes still perform it, and one of them presented it in Paris in 2006, at the Maison des cultures du monde.