Theatre
A play happens once, in one room — and then lives on in the people who were there. This is the salon's theatre room: productions from Turkey, Portugal and across Europe from the last twenty years, each with the question it left behind. Every question opens into the Sparks, where members answer from their own seats.
Notes from the salon — not reviews, but memories. Each ends with the question the play left us, and each question is waiting in the Sparks.
Stefano Massini, dir. Sam Mendes · 2018
National Theatre, London
Three actors, a glass box, and 160 years of one family's rise and collapse. A play about capitalism told as a bedtime story — funny, intimate, and quietly devastating.
“What family story of yours explains more than it should?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Complicité, Simon McBurney · 2015
London / international tour
Every audience member wears headphones; the Amazon rainforest is built out of sound alone, inches from your ear. A play about a photographer lost among the Mayoruna — and about what listening actually is.
“When did truly listening to someone change what you believed?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Tiago Rodrigues · 2013
Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, Lisbon
Ten volunteers learn a sonnet by heart on stage while Rodrigues weaves in his grandmother — a reader losing her sight, choosing the last book she will ever read. A play about memorising words so that no one can take them from you.
“Which words have you learned by heart — and who gave them to you?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Tiago Rodrigues · 2022
Avignon / Teatro Nacional D. Maria II
A family that has killed fascists for generations gathers to initiate its youngest — who refuses. A Portuguese play that asks, without flinching, whether violence can ever defend democracy.
“Which inherited tradition would you refuse — and which would you defend?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Gogol, with Erdal Beşikçioğlu · 2008
Ankara Sanat Tiyatrosu, Ankara
One actor, one chair, and Gogol's clerk slipping out of the world. Beşikçioğlu's solo performance became a phenomenon in Turkey — proof that a single voice, held long enough, can fill any hall.
“When has one person's voice alone held a whole room for you?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Latife Tekin, adapted by Hakan Emre Ünal & Nezaket Erden · 2018
Tiyatro 11, Istanbul
A girl moves from a village to a shantytown and befriends 'Dear Shameless Death'. One actress plays the whole neighbourhood. One of the most loved independent Turkish productions of the last decade.
“What did the city ask of you when you first arrived?”Answer in the Theatre Spark →Turkey, Portugal and the wider European stage — productions and companies worth remembering, chosen as conversation starters. When one of them speaks to you, bring it to the Theatre Spark.
Europe
Portugal
Turkey
A line, a silence, an actor's pause you still think about — the salon would love to hear it. Members write in their own language; the page translates for everyone else.
