More than ever, this work encapsulates the theatrical concept of Portuguese director and playwright Tiago Rodrigues, for whom all of this is nothing more and nothing less than a human assembly, a place to meet, share ideas and spend time together. Always leaning towards horizontal collaborative work, before the pandemic he came up with the idea – along with the actors and actresses of Geneva’s La Comédie (the production company for the show, where it premiered in February of this year) – of working on the humanitarian tasks of organisations like the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders. Perhaps he sought to understand this drive to action without compensation, this wanting a better world while knowing it’s not possible to change it, this intimate impulse whose satisfaction is found in feeling like you are helping, assisting and there for those desperately in need of humanity more than others.

Last year, Tiago Rodrigues left his post as the director of the D. Maria II National Theatre in Lisbon, which he had held since 2015, to become the first non-French artist to run the prestigious Avignon Festival. Before diving headlong into this iconic and enormous management job, he completed Dans la mesure de l’impossible, a staging in the abyss in the heat of a tent where the stories struck fast and furious like drumsticks on a kettle drum (literally, Portuguese musician Gabriel Ferrandini is pounding out the beat along with four actors from the work). With stage direction and playwrighting reduced to their sheer essence, apparently simple but supported by the superposition of narrative layers, the audience becomes a witness to stories purposefully not located geographically, both plausible histories (those of the Global North) and impossible (those from the Global South). With fury or with poetry, or with both, all the stories move us but are not watered down with forced sentimentalism. That would reduce the power of this encounter, the true purpose, an encounter that transforms. ‘If you want to make a piece about a forest – explains Rodrigues – you’ve got to tell the story of a tree: the audience will return to the forest on its own.’ If you’ve seen other works by this Portuguese artist such as By Heart, Bovary, Anthony and Cleopatra or Sopro, run towards the forest once again. If this is your first tree, then sit back and enjoy this unrepeatable first time.