The D. Maria II National Theatre, at the north end of the Rossio, in July 2022.Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0
Santa Maria Maior
D. Maria II National Theatre
The national theatre, in the Rossio. Maria Barroso made her debut here in 1944 and was José Régio’s “Benilde”; in 1948, an order from the police and the Ministry of Education took her off this stage. The company that ran it worked under censorship until the fire of 1964.
The National Theatre opened on 13 April 1846, during the celebrations of the 27th birthday of the queen who gave it her name. Passos Manuel had entrusted Almeida Garrett with the idea of a national theatre, and the building went up on the site of the Palácio dos Estaus, the former headquarters of the Inquisition, which a fire had destroyed in 1836. Under the Republic it was renamed the Almeida Garrett National Theatre; it became the D. Maria II again in 1939.1
From 1929 to 1964 — almost the whole of the Estado Novo (“New State”) — the theatre was in the hands of the company of Amélia Rey Colaço and Robles Monteiro, the longest concession in its history. The company lived, in the theatre’s own words, in an “unstable balance with the regime”: a censorship commissioner had the last word on every play, and texts such as Felizmente há luar! (Fortunately There Is Moonlight!) and O Motim (The Riot) were banned.1
It was with this company that Maria Barroso made her debut, in 1944, and she played the lead in José Régio’s Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (Benilde, or the Virgin Mother) in 1947.2 At the same time she recited the poets of the opposition at recitals all over the country. In 1948, an order “coming from the police and the Ministry of Education” removed her from the D. Maria II; Amélia Rey Colaço considered it a fatal blow, one that struck at the heart of the theatre.43
In 1964, hours after a performance of Macbeth, a fire destroyed the building; the walls, the Salão Nobre (state room) and the archive survived. Rebuilt to its old design, the theatre reopened on 11 May 1978, and plays banned decades earlier, such as Felizmente há luar!, could at last be staged here. Brecht’s Mother Courage, which Amélia Rey Colaço had wanted to stage in defiance of the censors, opened in 1986, in a co-production by the theatre, with Eunice Muñoz; the writer Agustina Bessa-Luís was artistic director from 1990 to 1993.1
In 1979, the theatre’s director, Lima de Freitas, commissioned a play from Natália Correia for the fourth centenary of the death of Camões. She delivered Erros Meus, Má Fortuna, Amor Ardente (My Errors, Ill Fortune, Ardent Love) in June 1980, but the Secretary of State for Culture cut the funding and the play was not produced at the National Theatre; it was only staged in 1988, by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.5
When and why Maria Barroso was removed from the theatre: in 1948, on the orders of the police and the Ministry of Education, according to the Mário Soares and Maria Barroso Foundation and the National Culture Centre (which follows Leonor Xavier’s biography); the Assembly of the Republic says she was accused of reciting subversive poetry; the English Wikipedia places her removal around 1946, after a performance of “The House of Bernarda Alba” in Coimbra.
The day of the 1964 fire, which the theatre’s history page does not give.
The day of the opening and the day of the queen’s birthday: the theatre’s history page says in one sentence that 13 April 1846 was the “day of the 27th birthday” of D. Maria II, who was born on 4 April 1819, and in another that the theatre opened “during the celebrations” of that birthday; this entry follows the second.
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Sources7
1História. Teatro Nacional D. Maria II — consulted on 3 October 2026
