António Ferro: a Controversial Modernist in the Portuguese Theater Scene

Abstract

In December 1932, António Ferro’s interviews with the President of the Council, António de Oliveira Salazar, were published in Diário de Notícias. They were the first handbook of propaganda for the new regime, the New State. Nine months later, in September 1933, Ferro was appointed director of the Secretariat of National Propaganda, a position of enormous political and personal trust in an eminently political body, which defined him as the public relations officer of the regime. In his youth, Ferro had shown himself to be a modernist intellectual: a writer, journalist, film and theatre man. This paper analyses Ferro’s career in the Portuguese theatre scene between 1922 and 1932, looking at the role that culture, and theatre in particular, played in his public and political rise. The working hypothesis is that the theatre was an instrument used by Ferro to create a favourable public image that allowed him to achieve the political position he desired. From a methodological point of view, the main source of information used was the Diário de Lisboa, a prolific source of information, as well as the writings of personalities connected to the milieu, sources that enabled to outline more clearly the national theatre panorama and the trajectory followed by Ferro, as playwright, theatre critic and entrepreneur.