Tiago Rodrigues brought his politically charged play to the Dorfman Theatre for its UK premiere, Saturday 19 to Saturday 26 September 2026.
The National Theatre gave Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists its UK premiere in the Dorfman on the South Bank, from Saturday 19 to Saturday 26 September 2026. The play is by Tiago Rodrigues, and the run was eight performances.
Rodrigues is a Portuguese playwright and director who now runs the Festival d’Avignon, the largest theatre festival in Europe. He previously ran Portugal’s national theatre, which first produced this play, and he writes the pieces he directs.
He wrote the play in 2020. It imagines a family that has killed fascists as an inherited tradition for more than seventy years, gathering each year in a house near Baleizão in southern Portugal.
Catarina, one of the youngest, is due to kill her first fascist, kidnapped for the occasion, and finds she cannot, or will not. The family argument that follows never settles what a fascist is, or whether democracy’s own rules can be broken to defend it.
The play has toured Europe since its premiere, in Daniel Hahn’s English translation. At the National it was performed in Portuguese with surtitles, in the smallest of the house’s three rooms.