“We are made of the stuff of dreams… our life is surrounded by sleep..William Shakespeare, The Storm, Act IV, Scene I, translated by Fernando Pessoa
Time has a particular cruelty: it passes through everything, but not through all things in the same way. It ages bodies, erases places, transforms memories and, strangely, spares certain words. Perhaps theatre is one of the forms we have invented to disobey it: for a few hours, someone repeats what was written decades before, and what belongs to the past becomes present again.
Few pieces have defied time as... The Mousetrap. And few Portuguese actors have challenged him as much as... Ruy de Carvalho. Perhaps that is why there was something especially beautiful about their meeting that April night at the Coliseu do Porto.
The story begins in 1947, when the BBC broadcast Three Blind Mice, a short radio play by Agatha Christie intended for the celebrations of Queen Mary's 80th birthday. Later, the author developed it for the stage, added characters and changed its name to The Mousetrap, in reference to the play within the play of Hamlet.
The stage version premiered in 1952 and arrived in London's West End on November 25th of that year. Christie estimated it could remain on stage for about eight months. He was wrong by more than seven decades. The Mousetrap It became the longest-running theatrical production in history.
The very history of rights seems to have been written by Christie. She gave them to her grandson Mathew Prichard for his ninth birthday. The boy wanted a bicycle. He received... The Mousetrap. Few gifts will appreciate so much over time. And there's a delightful irony: the film rights have been sold, but the contract stipulates that the film can only be made six months after the original production finishes in the West End. As the play stubbornly refuses to finish, the cinema continues to wait.
Even more extraordinary is the pact established with those who see it. In the end, the public is invited to keep the secret. Entire generations have agreed to do so.
I will do it too.
Regarding history, therefore, only the essentials. We are in the classic territory of whodunitA group of people, a guesthouse in the English countryside, enough snow to cut off connections to the outside world, and the growing suspicion that nobody is exactly what they seem.
Paulo Sousa Costa's staging perfectly captures this universe. Dark wood, heavy wallpaper, red curtains, sofas, lamps, paintings, doors, and staircases construct an England that is simultaneously comfortable and unsettling.
And yet, we could almost feel the cold outside.
Beyond the curtains, we imagine whiteness, wind, falling temperatures, disappearing paths. The snow doesn't need to be in front of us to become a presence. The more hostile we imagine the outside world to be, the smaller the distances seem inside. What should protect us also begins to imprison us.
That's one of Christie's clever tricks: transforming comfort into a threat. Danger doesn't need to come from a strange place. It can sit on a sofa, talk to us, and wait.
Similarly, a mousetrap doesn't need to look like a mousetrap to work.
From then on, we too entered the game. A glance lingered too long. An answer came too quickly. A door opened. A seemingly insignificant phrase gained importance. We built a theory, destroyed it, and started another. The Mousetrap It does not seek to be a treatise on the human condition. Rather, it is a theatrical machine of enormous precision. Christie places the gears before our eyes and amuses herself with our conviction that we can discern which ones actually move the clock.
The staging allows this machine to function, balancing tension and humor without artificially modernizing what remains effective precisely because it belongs to that universe.
But that night there was another piece within the piece. Another relationship with time on stage.
Its name was Ruy de Carvalho.
At 99 years old, time naturally shows in his voice, sometimes more frail, and in his movements, which are more deliberate. But it would be a mistake to confuse these signs with a loss of stage presence. Ruy de Carvalho continues to dominate the stage.
Perhaps even in a more fascinating way.
There's no need to chase after the audience's attention: wait for it to come to you. You know the second you should look, the exact duration of a silence, that almost imperceptible interval before a sentence where the audience doesn't yet know it's about to laugh.
A glance. An expression. An inflection. Almost nothing.
And the Colosseum laughs.
In this play, it is precisely in the humor that the actor's enormous talent becomes apparent. There is something simultaneously fragile and mischievous about him, a kind of merely apparent innocence that Ruy transforms into comedy with extraordinary economy of means. His voice may be lower, his movements more deliberate, but the stage still knows who is in charge.
And this doesn't stem solely from the affection we inevitably feel for one of the greatest figures in Portuguese theatre. To confuse the audience's reaction with indulgence would be to diminish the actor. It's a craft. Decades on stage transformed into a kind of physical memory: knowing where to stop, when to speak, when to leave a sentence hanging, and above all, when to do absolutely nothing.
And chance offers a coincidence almost too perfect not to be mentioned. 1947 was the year of Ruy de Carvalho's professional debut and also the year of the first BBC broadcast of... Three Blind Mice, the short radio play by Agatha Christie from which would be born The Mousetrap. Almost eighty years later, those two stories continue to grow side by side, with frequent encounters.
I left the Colosseum thinking less about solving the mystery than about that encounter.
A writer can survive in words. A painter, in the still gesture of a canvas. A musician can remain eternally young in a recording. Theatre has chosen a more fragile form of eternity: it needs to happen. It needs a body, a voice, a stage, and someone standing before it. And, when the lights go out, only the memory of having been there remains.
That is precisely why it moves us so much.
At 99 years old, Ruy de Carvalho continues to take the stage, command a room, find silence, and provoke laughter. The Mousetrap, More than seven decades later, it continues to close in on new viewers every night.
Agatha Christie wrote a mystery for which she found a solution. That night, she left us with another, far more difficult one: how can something that lasts only a few hours remain within us long after it's over?
The theater responds without words. The curtains open, a life is lived, the curtains close. And, somewhere between the opening and the closing, something remained.
As brief as a night. As eternal as what remains of it.
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