The Apocalypse according to Fernando Pessoa and Ofélia Queirós: in a parallel Portuguese/English text

Paulo Borges - philosopher, critic, poet and playwright - turns his attention, in a drama, to the emblematic figure of Portuguese literature, Fernando Pessoa.'Ghost busting and myth breaking may arise from a fascination with the paranormal... or the paranoid. Pessoa acolytes without number have pursued obsessively the phantasms of not only an iconic Fernando but also of "his" Ophelia. A corrective swerve is here proposed - "É a Hora!" and about time, too - by the eminent philosopher and political thinker Paulo Borges. For the author of this horizon-shifting play is a critic profoundly immersed in the Tagus of Fernando Pessoa's writing yet an unerring navigator returned to the healthy air and solidity of the riverbank of a different, albeit apocalyptic vision. At the historically anchored Cais das Colunas, an imaginary Lisbon quayside encounter of the lionized poet and his supposed one true love is performed through theatre, music and dance, interlaced with hardly paralleled and pervasively knowledgeable literary citation. Dedicated Pessoans and curious onlookers alike will marvel at the light-touch erudition and the cunningly subversive wit of a specialist able to rise above mere literary criticism to produce and to stage an iconoclastic projection, here in the original Portuguese and in a first English translation, of "Um Outro P.......". Another Portugal? Another Pessoa? Certainly, a rivetingly other Performance.' Bernard McGuirk