Our Readings at the Monastery bring to a close a long journey through texts by writers born in each decade of the 20th century. In O amor é mais frio que o capital [Love is colder than capital] it is said: “The only real thing is a collapsed reality”, words that may act as a motto for the works we will read. Together with Um coro engana-se redondamente [A choir is roundly wrong], it forms the entrance diptych into the impish, aphoristic theatre work of German author René Pollesch (1962-2024). Idiosyncratically political, it interweaves dramatic theory and pop culture, confuses conventions and meditates on means of critical resistance to society and theatre itself. Plasticina [Plasticine], by Vassily Sigarev (b. 1977), brings us into the mental space of Maksim, a young orphan who attempts to survive in a chaotic underworld. In a sequence of twenty movements, we accompany the last eight days of his life, a tale of loneliness in post-communist Russia. In Love, symbolically set by British writer Alexander Zeldin (b. 1985) in Christmas eve, we share the space of a reception centre with four homeless “families”. Equal in dispossession, they “wait among ruins”. In December, we will return to contemporary Portuguese dramatic writing, and read texts by several domestic authors who were born during the 20th century’s final decade.