Teatro Grande

The Teatro Grande (‘great theatre’) was the name by which people here knew the playhouse that stood opposite the Palácio de São Lourenço (‘St Lawrence’) and occupied a large part of the square known as Largo da Restauração. It was built around 1780, and its demolition was ordered in 1833.

Miguel dos Santos Coimbra and José Rodrigues Pereira applied for the emphyteutic lease (aforamento, perpetual lease for an annual quit-rent) of a plot of land beside the fortress of São Lourenço, measuring 170 palmos in length and 60 in width, for the construction of the Casa da Ópera (opera house). The ‘master of works’ (capitão-mestre) reported that there was no objection to granting this concession. On 10 April 1776, therefore, a lease contract on the terms requested was concluded at the government secretariat, the grantees undertaking to pay an annual quit-rent (foro) of 5,000 réis (old Portuguese money of account; 1$000 = 1,000 réis, 1:000$000 = one conto = 1,000,000 réis).

The construction of this theatre was slow because of the great expense it entailed, due above all to the ample proportions given to it, although so vast a playhouse was hardly necessary in a place as small as Funchal. It was the largest theatre in Portugal after São Carlos, and its building cost around eighty contos, which 150 years ago was an enormous sum.

We do not know the exact year in which the building work on the theatre was declared finished, nor when the first performance was given there. We do know, however, that a few years after its completion, and after a good many performances had been given in it, it remained closed ‘for a long time owing to discord between impresarios and authors’, as the poet Francisco Manuel de Oliveira says in a note in his book of verse Colecção Poética. Oliveira further tells us that, after some repairs, it reopened on 29 January 1786. Among other pieces, a verse Prologue was performed, whose speakers were Discord, Funchal, Good Taste and Decency, from the pen of the same poet.

By a ministerial order (portaria) of the governor and captain-general, Dom Diogo Pereira Forjaz Coutinho, dated 1 July 1790, José Nicolau Teixeira de Vasconcelos e Câmara was appointed minister to the ‘Casa do Theatro’ at a time when a ‘Companhia Cómica’ (comic company) was performing there under the direction of the actor Pedro Baquino; this minister exercised very close superintendence and supervision over all the company’s activities. The theatre continued to operate for some years, until it fell prey to a fire that partly destroyed it on Maundy Thursday in one of the last years of the 18th century. When this island was occupied by British troops for the first time, from July 1801 to January 1802, the Teatro Grande served as a store for those troops’ provisions and equipment, by which time it was already in an advanced state of ruin.

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It was later rebuilt,’ says Dr Álvaro Rodrigues de Azevedo, ‘at the expense of the property owners and merchants, the government assisting them only by granting an annual lottery whose first prize was three contos (one million réis) de réis. When the royal family and the court fled to Brazil in 1807, a large part of the singing and dancing company that worked at the São Carlos theatre in Lisbon came to this island of Madeira under a three-year contract. The management was in the hands of the wealthy property owners Henrique Correia de Vilhena and Nuno de Freitas da Silva, who suffered losses of more than eighty contos de réis: the first went bankrupt as a result, and the second faced lawsuits and distraints. After its rebuilding this theatre had ninety boxes, forming four tiers, three hundred seats in the stalls and one hundred in the gallery.

For many years various Portuguese and foreign companies performed there. In 1821, O Patriota Funchalense (‘The Funchal Patriot’) tells us, the ‘Companhia Grotesca’ of the Italian Fabri played at this theatre; it consisted of three men and women, who sang operettas and performed various ballets. The following year the same theatre held a gala performance at which a symphony composed by Father António Francisco Drumond was heard, and a drama in three acts entitled A Festa do Olimpo, by the distinguished Madeiran Manuel Caetano Pimenta de Aguiar, was staged.

Then came the turbulent times of our civil wars. The theatre was closed for long periods, and whenever it opened temporarily to the public, political demonstrations broke out at once, sometimes leading to disturbances of the peace in which armed troops had to intervene. In the end it was these displays of partisan factionalism that sealed the theatre’s fate.

The Teatro Grande was demolished in 1833, not in 1832 as Dr Álvaro de Azevedo states. It is much to be regretted that Funchal was thus deprived of a playhouse as vast and as finely decorated as this one was; the act can only be accepted and explained by the despotism then exercised by the absolutist government during the bloody civil war that was ravaging the country at the time. The reasons given for the demolition were that the theatre adjoined a fortress and hampered the defence of the city, that the street facing the governors’ palace needed widening, that the entrance to the palace should be embellished, etc. All of these make up a series of futile arguments, worthless as a justification for the violent and arbitrary measure of destroying a building of the importance and size of that magnificent playhouse. We have already given the true reason for the demolition elsewhere. On some performance nights, supporters of constitutional ideas took advantage of the large gathering of spectators to voice their liberal sentiments and spread the principles they professed, this propaganda spreading from the stage to the stalls, even though it amounted to a sacrilege against the established institutions.

The governor and captain-general of the time, Dom Álvaro da Costa de Sousa Macedo, was moved by a spirit of rectitude and justice, and conciliatory tendencies could be seen in the acts of his administration. Even so, there came a moment when he let himself be carried away by the despotic demands of party politics. Yielding to the entreaties of his fellow partisans and bad advisers, he ordered the Teatro Grande to be razed to its foundations. It was the second largest playhouse in the country and had been built more than fifty years before. Simply closing the theatre would have saved it entirely from complete destruction.