The Sailor
O marinheiro by Fernando pessoa (1913), 1989
The Sailor, a one-act drama, originally appeared in 1915 in the first issue of the avant-garde magazine Orpheu, a landmark publication of Portuguese modernism.
In an ancient tower a maiden dressed in white lies dead in her coffin while three young women keep vigil over her body. The play takes place at night, under candlelight and a ‘vague remnant of moonlight’, creating a mysterious, naturally symbolic atmosphere. In this space of immobility, one woman recounts a dream she had about a sailor from distant lands who is unable to return to his homeland. The sailor dreams of having lived in an imagined homeland, becoming confined to his own dream, just as the three women reckon with the line between reality and imagination.
Rendering of the staging of The Sailor in Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
For this 1989 set, I forced the perspective of the coffin. Facing towards the back of the stage, it then runs the young woman's hair downwards along the floor in a snake-like arrangement, a river flowing into the foreground.
The conclusion that everything is a dream makes the three sisters dilute into a single voice in which the individuality and consciousness of the characters dissolves. This, in turn, suggests a fifth person in the tower who may be the author, who directs the speech and commands, like an invisible force—a dream within another.
