FringeReview UK 2026

Caterina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

National Theatre, London and Festival d’Avignon Productions

Venue: National Theatre, Dorfman

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Some family traditions grow stale. And some stay horribly fresh. At 26 Caterina must kill her first fascist, the 74^th, who’ll be planted out under a cork tree as usual. It’s an annual family ritual. Caterina though has doubts and these have consequences it takes two-and-a-half hours to unravel. Portuguese dramatist Tiago Rodrigues’ Caterina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists and plays for one week at the National Theatre Dorfman directed by Rodrigues till September 26. It’s presented in Portuguese with Daniel Hahn’s English translation and Patricia Pimentel’s surtitles.

A Festival d’Avignon production (Rodrigues is artistic director), it caused some walk-outs on its 2020 premiere because of a speech, not (apparently) because anyone has objections to killing fascists. Despite there being no interval (there is a merciful NT policy though) there’s been none at the National.

In a week when the far-right slash a refugee dinghy, you wonder at the diffidence that falters (a phrase by fascist Ezra Pound as it happens). As cos-playing patriots remind us, candles and linking arms didn’t work in 1940, and they didn’t work with every other dictatorship, including Salazar’s in Portugal. Though this is just the kind of ‘patriotism’ dinghy-slashers prefer.  Rodrigues’ play asks the dangerous question of just how much – as liberal-acting boiling frogs – we can take. There’s no spoilers here incidentally.

We’re at a remote country house near Baleizao. It’s the summer of 2028 and a 50-year-tradition centres round the coming ritual. F. Ribeiro’s shack can be elegantly dismantled, sometimes with people still perched on a wall. A tree grows though it, suggesting a stand-off between natural permanence and ritual, and its breaking apart. Along with the plotline, the house itself emblematically shudders apart. Lit diurnally by Nuno Meiro and with Jose Antonio Tenente’s costumes suggesting not much will have changed by 2028 except everyone wears long skirts, we traverse a day in the possible death of a fascist.

Fascists indeed have been elected, some music is already banned. So Pedro Costa’s music enjoys sly moments and his soundscape – particularly of swallows – an eerie sliver of nature. This renders the silences both comforting and sinister.  The overall feel is of transcendence guyed. Vocal and choral arrangements by Joao Henriques underscore the seraphic absurdities and Sofia Dias’ choreography seems to recall jerky memories of freedom.

Especially when nearly all characters are also named Catarina Rodrigues focuses on one. Young Catarina (Beatriz Maia) centres the action with slowly unfolding objections. Maia exudes doubt, and Catarina’s measure of courage to go against a family that places a gun in her character’s hand. Maia shows what it means to grope towards dissent.

Catarina’s family are naturally non-plussed.  Isabel Abreu as Catarina’s mother disowns her daughter for hesitating. At least for a while. Abreu’s adamantine performance, with shades of other Hispanic matriarchs, is flecked with a skirling ferocity. Catarina’s doubts are mere casuistry, and articulating doubt a luxury Abreu’s character won’t allow. For her, vengeance and justice are the same, and her views on freedom of expression are equivocal. Rodrigues certainly inflects differing values in the family. You begin to see cracks.

António Fonseca embarks on a philippic: what a world of late-capitalist “choice” looks like in 2028, working hand-in-black-glove with fascism. A world of premium healthcare looms for Fonseca’s Caterina: one not far from the dystopic future of many European countries, including our own. A world (as we later learn) of racial purges, the “freedom” to stamp out freedom of expression from the “ideological” free press, and promoting “Christian family values” aka suppression of women and scapegoated minorities: all feed into techno-feudalism, helmed by tech bros and AI.

Inevitably there’s casualties we already recognise. They make Carolina Passos Sousa’s defence of freedom to protest almost quaint. The UK’s – and Europe’s – recent suppression of political protests and climate action embraces the UK’s unique contribution: sentencing such people as terrorists. Still Passos Sousa’s a vegan; except when it comes to fascists. That might have landed more as she tends a wounded swallow.

João Vicente’s Catarina is the one who would rather prefer to go into business with fascists, but can they ever be trusted? Marco Mendonça’s Catarina (who wears headphones to zone out of the ritual) makes occasional pronouncements about fire.

The cast is completed by António Parra whose cooking is derided by Abreu. Some hierarches are never explained; it’s enough that they’re there. Yet Parra – in a lyrical, airborne performance seemingly free of the heaviness elsewhere – is the one who tends the land; and land here seems equated with anti-fascists. Yet of course this is literally about blood and soil every time a fascist is buried.

Throughout out all this till towards the end, Romeu Costa as the Fascist confines himself to nods and brief answers. That is till the last 24 minutes. At which point I was tempted to leap onto the stage. Judging by audience reaction, I wasn’t alone.  That of course is Rodrigues’ point. One underlined by characters’ comedic references to Brecht, Mother Courage (one character has never heard of him), and an obvious Brechtian alienation joke running through Caterina.

If as Pound says “it all lies in the not-doing/all in the diffidence that faltered” Rodrigues has shown perhaps what not-doing might lead to. He’s well aware his paradox is made in a luxury of democratic choice. Once that choice is removed, he suggests, where will our scruples lie? Perhaps with us in the dust if we’re passive. Yet his study of a family riven with its own contradictions doesn’t allow that a culture of resistance is any less perilous.

This is perhaps reading more into Rodrigues than he wants to present. The drama itself is drawn-out, doesn’t repay its two hours 33, especially its last 24 minutes: which could have been curtailed for practical and aesthetic reasons alone. It’s a slow build, intelligent question-mark, but doesn’t dot it fiercely – or comically – enough. At one level, it’s just dull. Rodrigues has opted for a predictable dramatic ending (not the epilogue though) that perhaps gets him out of jail free, but not the audience. Nevertheless, who else is asking these questions and infuriating audiences Europe-wide? Rodrigues is on to something fundamental to the future in a way no-one else is. Compelling, and yes infuriating.

Voiceovers Nadezhda Bocharova, Claudio de Castro, Pedro Moldao, Paula Mora. Choreography Sofia Dia and Vitor Roriz, Weapon Co-ordinator David Chan Cordeiro, Translation Daniel Hahn, Surtitles Patricia Pimentel.

Production Teatro Nacional D Maria Il (Lisboa), Executive Production Festival d’Avignon

For the National Theatre Producer Tracey Low, Production manager Kate Chapman, CSM Jo Nield, Project Draughting Alan Bain, Props Buyer Monika Zweirzchowska.

Published September 25, 2026September 25, 2026 by Simon Jenner