We Came To Lisbon – Committee
We Came To Lisbon – Fragments of a City
Welcome to the first Lisbon Players online film directed by Jonathan Weightman. To enjoy in glorious HD full screen, please press play at 21:00 and click the button on the bottom right of the screen that pop ups. Then sit back, relax and enjoy the show!
Programme
You can either view the programme online or download a PDF copy for posterity using the button below. If you use the online version you can return to this screen by using the minimize button on the programme screen bottom far right.
Those Who Came ~
About The Movie: This film is a very selective documentary about some of the people who have passed through or settled in Lisbon over the centuries. The story was originally designed for a two-person reading at the Menina e Moça Bookshop in Caís de Sodre, was then adapted for a promenade performance with small groups in the British Cemetery and finally, when this also seemed to be too risky because of the pandemic, was reinvented as a screenplay. It was inspired by, but not based on, Rose Macaulay’s 1946 book They Came to Lisbon. 
The British Cemetery Lisbon: Non-Catholic dead were not permitted to be buried in Roman Catholic cemeteries so the Protestant and Jewish communities had been pressing for the creation of their own cemetery from the 17th century onwards. In the 18th century, while building the Basilica of Estrela, Dona Maria I donated a piece of land to the British, Jewish and Dutch communities to bury their dead. From 1816 the Jewish community created their own cemetery on a piece of adjacent land. This land is now part of a property development and is seen briefly in the film. 
Philippa of Lancaster: The English Plantagenet Philippa was the daughter of John of Gaunt and ruled Portugal with her husband Dom João I from 1387 until 1415, when she died in the plague. She was intelligent, interested in science and astronomy, and devout, a friend of Chaucer and the mother to the so-called Illustrious Generation, which included Henry the Navigator. João was a bit of a philanderer.
Henry Fielding: Seen by many as the founder of the English novel, Fielding is perhaps the most famous person to be buried in the British cemetery. He came to Lisbon for his health in 1754 but died on October 8th of that year. The Mrs. Fielding depicted here was his second wife. She had been his first wife’s maid and there was a certain amount of outrage that Mr Fielding had married out of his class. 
Sister Kitty Witham: The English Catholic nuns were on the run from the Protestant reformation in England for nearly 300 years – from 1594 to 1861. They eventually set up their convent in Lapa. Sister Kitty was from a modest English family and had the misfortune to be caught up in the 1755 earthquake. The testimony here is from a letter home to her mother in England. 
William Beckford: Beckford first came to Portugal in 1787 at the age of 26. He stayed in the Lisbon area on at least two more occasions and was responsible for the original Palace of Monserrate and gardens in Sintra. He had multiple talents and as a writer left one of the best bits of travel writing about Portugal, Recollections of a Visit to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha (1835). Franchi, ten years younger, was born in Lisbon as his father, a musician from Naples, was attached to the court of Dona Maria I. Franchi himself was an accomplished singer and harpsichord player. Franchi later married a Portuguese woman and had two children but died in London, still in Beckford’s service. 
Calouste Gulbenkian: An Armenian businessman and art collector who ended up in Lisbon, greatly to its benefit due to the establishment of the Gulbenkian Foundation. 
Cecil Beaton: A fashion photographer and theatre designer who was, rather improbably, sent to Lisbon as a war photographer in 1942. 
George Borrow: He was a writer and bible enthusiast who was hired by the British and Foreign Bible Society to take the New Testament to Spain and Portugal. He later developed an interest in the Romany people and even translated the Bible into their language. By his own account he was not very successful at spreading the Bible in Portugal. 
Casablanca: As capital of nominally neutral Portugal, Lisbon became an important point of departure for those fleeing Nazism. Ingrid Bergman managed to catch the flight to Lisbon at the end of the 1942 film Casablanca. 
Lord Byron: An English Romantic poet and aristocrat who visited Portugal shortly after Beckford. His negative impressions of Lisbon were partly attributed to his being publicly rejected by a woman he fancied outside the São Carlos Theatre. 
The Duke of Wellington: The successful defence of Lisbon from the armies of Napoleon during the Peninsular Wars (1807-1810) was largely attributed to the military strategies of the so-called Iron Duke, who was not known for his amiable personal qualities. 
Madonna: Madonna Ciccione moved to Lisbon in 2017 so her adopted son could pursue his football training at the Benfica Academy. She had a number of run-ins with the authorities and locals about car-parking and using horses for a photoshoot in a palace. Her Madam X tour was a hymn to her adopted city. The Queen of Pop is now said to have left Lisbon. 
Lisbon Players: The Lisbon Players association is a non-profit theatre company that operated from March 1947 until December 2019 from Estrela Hall which is part of the Estrela site, which includes the British and Jewish cemeteries. Pressures of property speculation and abandonment by British and other authorities have obliged the company to quit the theatre building and temporarily relocate to Encarnação while seeking a more permanent new home.
Donations
Theatre is and always has been about telling stories that explore what it means to be human . However in these tumultuous times, the human condition is being exposed in all its terrifying vulnerability off stage. There are an increasing number of stories of people who being caught in the merciless wake of the economic consequences of the pandemic, are unable to put food on the table for themselves or their families. They need all the help they can get at the moment. Therefore The Lisbon Players welcome any donations you can make, a part of which will be donated to charity organizations such as Caritas doing their valiant best to help those in need, a sadly increasing number by the day.Click here to change this text