Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at the National, or, I'm Sorry But the Premise Just Gets More and More Unbelievable

Note: This is a review of the only preview on Saturday 19th September 2026. The Press Night took tonight (Monday 21st September 2026).

The starting point of this play is that 74 years ago (1954) a woman saw her female friend Catarina killed at a demonstration while her soldier husband looked on and did nothing. In consequence the woman killed her husband in front of their children. She then bound her family with a tiresomely lengthy command to kill a fascist every year. So far, moderately reasonable. But we are then asked to believe that since then 73 fascists have been despatched, their corpses buried in the cork orchard by the time the play commences. I mean I know there have been successful serial killers, but seriously? It becomes even more unpersuasive when we're told that at some indeterminate point within the 74 years the original killer was arrested and tortured, and yet the annual killings have continued unchecked. So the police have failed to solve the original murder (of a soldier...in a dictatorship), failed to connect a suspect they have arrested to any of the other murders committed while she's still alive (still mostly in a dictatorship) and then failed to solve any of the other murders or in any way connect them to this family. Finally, we are asked to believe that the female member of the family who is turning 26 at the moment the play opens and is thus about to commit her first murder is the first killer in 74 years to express doubts about the whole enterprise. 

As the above details are gradually revealed I found the whole thing less and less convincing, but what crowns it is the failure of author (and director) Tiago Rodrigues to achieve anything approaching equal weight for the two sides of the argument (except by a 30 minute cheat at the end). I'm afraid I thought the doubter had the best of the argument throughout - and there's an especially revealing moment when her mother finally gives in and throws a chair, nearly always a sign that text and direction have hit a dead end. I'll also note that at the time I couldn't make out why 26 is the age at which a family member has to make the first killing - it dawned on me the morning after that that must have been the age of the matriarch at the time of the original murder but if that's clearly explained in the text I missed it.

The play does occasionally achieve some tension in those long first two hours - but it isn't properly earned. As I've remarked on other occasions, having a gun on stage one cannot be sure won't be fired will always generate tension. And then we come to the last half hour. It's preceded by a ludicrous massacre scene - I could find two possible explanations - a) that this mad family all end up shooting each other or, more persuasively, b) that the security services have tracked down the kidnapped fascist's phone and surrounded the place. The fact that it doesn't seem to occur to any of the family as they interminably argue that such an outcome is a significant risk only further undermines the play's conceit that they've successfully carried out 73 previous murders.

But the play does at this point have an unearned counterpunch. We are then subjected to a 30m Farageist monologue. It's first worth noting here that the context of the monologue is not clear. It's delivered by the fascist who has spent the last two hours not being executed. But we are not told if he is playing the same character or a different character delivering a speech the first fascist has written (we are told earlier that the kidnapped victim is a speechwriter). It is further not clear if the speech is being delivered prior to or after the kidnapping. If the speech is being delivered after the kidnapping then Rodrigues is completely ducking the question of whether the experience of being kidnapped and nearly killed has made any lasting impression on the planned victim. If the speech is being delivered before the kidnapping then Rodrigues is asking us, unpersuasively, to react to the speech as if none of the previous two hours has occurred.

As the monologue dragged on I increasingly looked around me and was somewhat puzzled that most of the audience still seemed to think they should be paying attention to this. Needless to say although all the apparently deceased family get up one by one and group themselves to the side of the stage, none of them ever interrupts him (I did wonder if they might shoot him but they don't). The device is clearly intended to try belatedly to strengthen the killers' side of the argument, and if we'd all been brought into that auditorium under coercion, or if there was some coercion keeping us there (apart from having paid for the privilege and in my case having never yet been driven to walk out of a show), then it might have had some meaningful weight. But there is no such coercion. Continuing to reflect on it afterwards, it also isn't a convincing theatrical take on what might happen in reality. We'll come on to what it has and could provoke in the confines of the theatre in a moment. So imagine a Farage or Trump speech in real life (acknowledging that it may be different with the Portuguese far right and there is a problem of translation) - as it stands people are all either there because they've chosen to attend, or because it's their job as journalists to be present. Usually there is crowd reaction, applause etc. But Rodrigues takes all that out - again falsifying the set up on stage as part of, it increasingly seemed to me, an attempt to provoke his audience (for fear the two hour debate has failed to do so).

And indeed, that last 30m was I think the closest I've ever come in my theatre-going career to heckling. And I was interested to discover that at past performances there has been sustained heckling. I was amused to find this report of a production in Germany. I don't condone the extremes of the audience response but the apparent incredulity about it of those involved in the show & German critics is really something - I might gently suggest that it was as likely to be a reaction driven by boredom, or anger at having shelled out money for the thing, as by being unable to distinguish between "fiction and reality". As the speech went on, and on, I was also tempted to take my headphones and book out. What finally restrained me to my usual response to live performance that has lost or annoyed me - cleaning my glasses, counting the lights in the lighting rig, giving the performer hard stares - was the feeling that any more forceful response (heckling, walking out) was to give an unearned victory to the show. I wonder if Rodrigues thinks that we're all ignoring the stuff that Farage and his Portuguese equivalents are saying but I just don't think this is persuasive - now other politicians certainly are ignoring it or giving into it but they're rather unlikely I think to be in the audience for this show.

There's one other point worth making here. Brecht is frequently referenced in this show. In the finest performance of his Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui that I've seen a speech again plays a key role. That is a much shorter but far superior scene where you start by laughing at the Hitlerian Ui and by the end of the scene find yourself made horribly complicit in his success. There was far more powerful comment on how fascists come to power in the staging of that one scene at Chichester than in this very long 2h30m without interval evening. 

I was interested afterwards to discover that this show was originally staged back in 2020. It is set (I presume this is unchanged from the original) in 2028 and is quite explicit about that at one point with a reference to how long it has been since the pandemic. While the far right party is now in a coalition government in Portugal the play, again I presume unchanged since 2020, fails to engage with the detail of how this position has been reached and didn't convince me that Portugal in 2028 would be as it is represented here. Rodrigues's text is also guilty of box ticking - there's a huge number of contemporary issues given passing reference but even if we accept the argument that the Portugal of 2028 is in the control of a fascist government there is really no sense of how, on any of these issues, these killers are being personally impacted. There's a particularly bizarre moment in this regard when the mother of the 26 year old is pointing out that the fascists want to end same sex marriage and appeared (but perhaps there were things missing from the subtitles) to be claiming that she was in a same sex marriage herself - as far as I could see this came completely out of the blue, was never referred to again and I just did not believe it. 

The sad thing about all this is that the ensemble is strong, and there is some effective movement - though the pacing is not sharp enough, and the set is moved about too slowly and too often. I was so fed up I didn't stay as I would normally do to the end of the applause, but at least while I was still watching although some people stood they did not do so immediately and it was not unanimous. When I got home and was endeavouring to explain the thing to my partner she suggested that it had energised me. But the energy is a creation of that half hour cheat at the end - like putting a gun that might go off on stage having a fascist speak for 30m unchecked by anybody else in the ensemble can't not get a reaction. But the first two hours I found increasingly unconvincing, boring, and finally quite funny (and an as it turned out false relief from the unpersuasive arguing). The remainder of the week long run is sold out but there is absolutely no need to queue for returns. The first two hours are a badly lopsided argument, and if you want to watch a far right speech I suspect there are plenty available for free on YouTube.