'Clavells': (withered) flowers of an April in Lisbon

A man and a woman meet again fifty years after the Carnation Revolution . He carries a bouquet of flowers; she has just cremated her husband. The three of them—she, he, and the deceased—lived the lyrical illusion of that April 25, 1974. For a moment, it seems that nostalgia will prevail. The audience is asked to sing along to José Afonso 's " Grandola vila morena ," the musical codex of the Armed Forces Movement that overthrew the Salazar dictatorship.

Never before has nostalgia been a mistake. A trap to avoid the second part of that uncertain April glory. We usually evoke the heroic sequences of freedom leading the people or the assault on the Winter Palace from revolutions; we don't remember the guillotine or the gulag as much. And she, Violeta, is going to remind him, Javier, how the left they sought to embody was a "you move so I can move in"; the fraternity they advocated was a hollow euphemism to embellish the ruthless struggle for leadership in a Party that demonized dissent. There was no place for women in that "democratic centralism," even though their male mentors boasted of being feminists. That explains why Violeta is more interested in the second part of the utopias that engender monsters than in the refrain of "terra de fraternidade."

Emma Riverola works with that sourdough of disillusionment in "Carnations." Abel Folk is the climbing, possibilist politician who masks the silences, lies, and partisan grudges with the beautiful lyrics of the Portuguese April. Silvia Marsó is that Violeta who believed what could have been and wasn't, until her political career was cut short by the patriarchal hierarchies of a fake progressivism. Both will have to confront a past that both united and disappointed them: the bitter transition from idealism to pragmatism. Marsó and Folk, who have been working on the play since its Toledo premiere in 2024, create an atmosphere of complicity that lends credibility to their confessions.

These 'Carnations' by Riverola would rot in nihilism if they did not vindicate hope, the last refuge of the disoriented left half a century after that Portuguese April.