The story of what might have been: Interrogating Romeo and Juliet under the Portuguese dictatorship

Abstract

In 1969, Teatro Estúdio de Lisboa performed Anatomy of a Love Story, an interrogation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for a generation politicized by their struggles against the dictatorship. This article delineates a narrative of what might have been if this incipient attempt to stage a more inclusive political theatre had prevailed, illustrating how attributions of success and failure to performances during this period need to be contextualized within the limitations imposed by censorship on the one hand, and, on the other, an evocation of a class-based popular theatre that excluded questions of gender and sexuality.