Bacchantes, witches, secretaries… Since the dawn of time, it has been in the forest that women have settled the score with the patriarchy, beaten up kings, sensualised with goats and slaughtered lumberjacks. In short, they restore balance to the world.

Set in the fictional town of Big Bone “before Windows 95”, As Secretárias [The Secretaries], by the American feminist collective The Five Lesbian Brothers, tells the story of five women who work in a large sawmill. Confined to a sterile office where they feed the macho fetishes of the employees and their boss, the women create a secret cult whose putative mission is to brutally redress gender injustices in the company. Premiered in New York in 1993, the text now arrives in Portugal, in a show that recovers the aesthetics of slashers and television fiction from the 1980s and 90s, putting forward a rigorous and uncomfortable study of the insidious infiltration of patriarchy into women’s professional and interpersonal world. — Maria Inês Marques

This performance contains scenes with violence and smoking on stage.