A rhinoceros in the room: Interview with Hugo Rodas

Abstract

At the age of 82, theater director Hugo Rodas addresses, in this interview, the interference of individualities in collective creation and the inherent difficulties of working with a company such as Agrupação Teatral Amacaca (ATA) – crowded to the point of conceiving smaller groups within it. He revolves memories seeking to clarify the intentions involved both in the first production of Rhinoceros, with Teatro Universitário Candango (Tucan), in 2003, and the remake presented by ATA, in 2019-2020, whose compositional process was anchored in the dissection of the first version’s video recording. About the project of filming Rhinoceros, twice postponed already because of contingencies of Covid-19 pandemic, Rodas debates the use (or not) of visual effects and of the rhino’s heads Ionesco predicted in the play’s stage directions, whilst he makes an important distinction between filmed theater as mere register from that one that pursues a more cinematic look.