The Portuguese-Argentine actor, director and pedagogue Adolfo Gutkin died on Saturday at the age of 89 at the Egas Moniz Hospital, in Lisbon, a family source told the Lusa agency this Sunday.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936, the playwright, who lived in Oeiras, was hospitalized for a few months in various hospitals in the capital due to health problems and died on Saturday, according to the same source.
Over more than five decades, Adolfo Gutkin’s career in theater passed through Argentina, Cuba and Portugal, crossing several political regimes, and bringing contemporary techniques to Portuguese theater.
The director and producer, who turned 89 on August 3, founded Teatro do Mundo in Lisbon in the 1980s, based at Teatro Aberto, and, later, Teatro Maizum, in addition to being the mentor of the project to create the Institute for Training, Research and Theatrical Creation (IFICT) in Portugal.
Adolfo Gutkin began as an actor in Argentina, at the Nuevo Teatro de Buenos Aires, where he played fundamental authors of modern dramaturgy, such as Bertolt Brecht, Bernard Shaw and Georg Büchner.
While still young, he founded, with Augusto Fernandes, Agustín Alezzo and Carlos Gandolfo, the Juan Cristóbal Group, later renamed La Máscara, before joining the Teatro Popular Bonaerense, one of the most active Argentine independent stages at the time.
In 1962 he moved to Cuba, motivated by the effervescent cultural environment that followed the Revolution in the country, and there he was an actor, pedagogue and director, founding a theater school in Santiago de Cuba and the Conjunto Dramático de Oriente, which he directed for several years.
In the Caribbean country, he staged works by Strindberg, Arrabal and Pinter, winning awards at the main Cuban and Latin American theater festivals, standing out for his aesthetic boldness and political perspective on the role of theater in society.
In 1969 he traveled to Lisbon, accepting the invitation to direct the scenic group at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon, having staged “Volpone”, by Ben Jonson, which earned him the Prize from the Portuguese Association of Theater Critics and the Casa da Imprensa Prize for Best Show of the Year.
During this period, he temporarily returned to Argentina, where he presented a new version of “Cemitério de Automóveis”, by Fernando Arrabal, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
The following year, he returned to Lisbon to revive “Volpone” and premiere “Melin 4”, both of which were distinguished by critics and selected for the San Sebastian International Theater Festival, in Spain, in 1970.
He became an honorary member of the Academic Association of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon, but his libertarian activity caught the attention of PIDE, leading to him being persecuted and expelled from the country in 1973.
He returned to Cuba, resuming work with Conjunto Dramático de Oriente and collaborating in the creation of a new television station in Santiago de Cuba, a phase in which he consolidated his reputation as an international director and pedagogue of contemporary theater.
After April 25, 1974, Gutkin returned definitively to Portugal in 1980 and settled in Coimbra, where he directed the University’s Student Theater, with productions that toured European festivals.
At Teatro Maizum, a company he founded in Lisbon in 1982, he directed “Um Jeep em Segunda Mão”, by Fernando Dacosta, a production distinguished by the Critics Association and the State Secretariat for Culture.
In 1981, Gutkin presented the project to create the ICCT to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, aimed at the professionalization of artistic and technical staff, with special attention to Portuguese-speaking African countries. The project, supported by the European Social Fund, came to fruition in 1982, with the playwright as its first director.
In 1994, he obtained Portuguese citizenship, and later found an opinion space on the TSF radio program called “Não Alinhados, com Adolfo Gutkin”.
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