Augusto Boal dies on the Saturday following my father’s death a week before. He is seventy-eight. Boal is Brazilian, he went into exile around the time of the anti-revolution, the military coup, of 1964, following Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Argentina. Boal shares the characteristic with my father of never patronising, treating those who ‘don’t get it’ with a big smile, and an ‘It’s OK not to get it.’ Boal is the inventor of a truly non-representative theatre, with all the paradoxes that go along with that, in theatre of the oppressed and later in his work with legislative theatre. He dies of respiratory failure at the Hospital Samaritano in Rio de Janeiro. He returned to Brazil after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1985 but continued to travel widely and teach and delight with his ebullience and energy and pragmatism. He is missed, globally.
{ 2009 05 04 }
