“Evil” Victims and “Good Villains”: Political Melodrama in Bernardo Santareno’s The Promise
by Graça P. Corrêa. Portuguese dramatist Bernardo Santareno (1924-1980) has been practically ignored by the English-speaking critics and theatre practitioners, most likely because only two of his nineteen plays have been translated into English. One of these is the author’s first drama, The Promise (A Promessa), written during the year he spent aboard a Portuguese fishing boat along the coast of Newfoundland and Greenland, immediately after having graduated from medical school at the University of Coimbra. The play was published in 1957, in an edition sponsored by the author, and produced in November of that same year by Teatro Experimental …