Teatro Brasileiro de Comédias and Centaur Theatre: similarities and dissimilarities

Theatrical activity in Brazil until the first half of the 20th century was related to the dominant class, whose mind, committed to the idea that professional theatre could be carried on only in countries like France, Italy, England and the United States, prevented professionalism from developing in this sector of Brazilian culture. The argument was based on the idea that it was much more interesting to bring European and American productions to the  country than to stimulate the development of native professional groups. Contradictorily, it was a member of the dominant class and a foreigner – the Italian Franco Zampari – who took the decision to change this situation when in 1948 he founded the Teatro Brasileiro de Comédias, better known as TBC, with the aim of establishing professional theatre in Brazil. In 1969, making use of the same sort of argument as Zampari, Maurice Podbrey – also a foreigner from South Africa –, allied to members of the dominant class from the Province of Quebec, founded the Centaur Theatre in Montreal. In spite of more than two decades separating the creation of  these two theatres, and their different locations, there are more similarities between them than one could imagine as well as many predictable dissimilarities. This paper aims to examine these similarities and dissimilarities in the process of the creation of these two theatres.