Tiago Rodrigues brings his politically charged play to the Dorfman Theatre for its UK premiere, Saturday 19 to Saturday 26 September 2026.
Tiago Rodrigues is a Portuguese playwright and director who runs the Festival d’Avignon, the largest theatre festival in Europe, and ran Portugal’s national theatre before that. He writes the plays he directs, and the writing has a particular shape: a family, a ritual, an argument that the audience is made to sit inside rather than watch.
Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists is the most extreme version of it. A family gathers every year, in the same house, to carry out a killing they believe is justified, and the play spends its length letting them make the case and then handing the case to the audience. It has toured Europe since 2020 and been argued about everywhere it has gone, because it declines to resolve the question it raises and because the title is not a joke. He wrote it in 2020, before the European elections that followed made the argument considerably less hypothetical than it looked at the premiere.
The National gives it its UK premiere in the Dorfman from Saturday 19 to Saturday 26 September 2026, in Portuguese with surtitles. Eight days is the entire run — the shortest engagement on the South Bank’s autumn schedule — and the Dorfman, the smallest and most adaptable of the three rooms, is where the National puts work it expects to be difficult rather than popular.