Playwright, director and, since 2022, director of the Festival d’Avignon, Tiago Rodrigues wrote By Heart in 2013, when his grandmother confided to him that she was losing her eyesight and asked him to recommend one last book that she could learn by heart, for when she could no longer read. 
The Portuguese author drew on this personal episode, creating a play on the importance of transmission, on the sense of sharing common cultural heritage, and on the invisible exchange of words and ideas that can only take place through memorising a written work. Every evening, Rodrigues invites ten spectators onto the stage: the aim is to learn a poem together – as the title suggests – by heart, without any preparation and in front of the remaining members of the audience. On the basis of a story interweaving the public and private spheres, reality and fiction, Rodrigues uses a sonnet by Shakespeare and excerpts from works by George Steiner, Iosif Brodskij and Ray Bradbury in a veritable resistance training programme that will only end once the ten new “soldiers” have learned the text by heart... 
A battle waged through art and political activism, a fight to preserve memory, to challenge the passage of time, oblivion and ageing, and to combat the loss and inevitable disappearance of everything.

Show in English with Italian and English surtitles. Please note that surtitles cannot be viewed from rows 1, 2, 3, 4, 18, and 19 of the stalls