The Theater of Nelson Rodrigues

"I acknowledge that I’m cheating here, because this is two volumes, containing 12 of the 17 plays Rodrigues wrote. He is one of the great figures of modern Brazilian literature, best known as a playwright, but also a novelist and essayist. His plays are constantly shocking and were considered so vile when they came out, beginning in the 1940s, that he was nicknamed ‘a degenerate in suspenders’. Some are comedies, others are melodramas or tragicomedies, but they are always about the middle and lower-middle classes in Rio de Janeiro. Machado de Assis wrote a novel in the late-19th century called Dom Casmurro , all about sexual jealousy, and Rodrigues modernised that and brought it into the mid-20th century in a very effective way. As a novelist, he wrote on similar themes of sex and jealousy – exposing the judge, the lawyer and the businessman, the cream of society, by writing about what they get up to behind closed doors. He could be Pinteresque and there are also elements of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams in him. He is very Brazilian, but he would be a world figure if he had only written in English. I’d probably choose The Kiss on the Asphalt . It’s from 1960 but it speaks to us in 2010 – it’s about both media culture and a society embroiled in homosexual panic. A man is run over by a bus and a passer-by cradles him to comfort him, and gives him a farewell kiss on the lips as he is dying. This is turned into a scandal by the sensationalist press, and it ruins the man’s life. It says a lot about our global cult of media and celebrity today."