The timing couldn’t be more appropriate. At a time when we are witnessing the emergence of new radicalism and extreme positions, Paulo Castro returns to the political theater—which has marked his career—with Edward Bond and “Choruses After the Murders.”

In the present day, we revisit the recent past, overwhelming in terms of human rights and freedoms, in the traumatic and still insufficiently discussed relations of Portugal as a colonizer, a symptom of a society that tends to manage itself in duality: oppressors and oppressed. But nothing is that simple… In Bond’s play, the British playwright imagines a world of violence to come, 50 years later (the play is from 1998), as a result of an escalation of military domination. The symptoms of this militarized, oppressive society that devastates human freedoms can now be revisited in “Hello My Name Is,” a one-man show written for actor Rashidi Edward. In this one-man show, we see a man who takes on multiple roles — he is the person who mourns someone who has been murdered and then immediately becomes the soldier who shoots to kill — using Edward Bond’s poetic language to draw attention to the place each person occupies in the dynamics of tyrannical power games, of which the recent history of the former Portuguese colonies is just one example. We are all involved in the fate of humanity, Paulo Castro tells us in this play, which marks the return to Portugal of the radical and disruptive creator who founded the Stone/Castro company in 2002, sharing the artistic direction with dancer Jo Stone, and making Adelaide (Australia) his base of operations from 2006 onwards.