Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Baltazar. Once? No, twice. Twice upon a time, there was Baltazar, a mute but not deaf little boy, growing in a lost region of a “small, sad country”, surrounded by silence on all sides. That country’s name is Portugal, and the region could be anywhere in that country, where once “poverty was the norm”. More than a decade since its first performances at the Teatro São João, in the midst of the Carnation Revolution’s 50th anniversary, Dura Dita Dura is more crucial than ever. In this puppet show for all ages, written by Regina Guimarães and staged by Igor Gandra, we are led back to the oppressive atmosphere that for half a century stifled a country where the walls had ears and there was no “lenience for the sin of disobedience”. As for the little boy, he “never opened his mouth to complain”. However, no tale ever ends as it begins, and now the time for Baltazar to speak up again has come. We are all ears.