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The profile · researched 7 November 2026
Two years of arguing with Portuguese: Gregorio Duvivier's O Céu da Língua reaches the Jockey
A solo comedy about the Portuguese language, written by Gregorio Duvivier with its director Luciana Paes, that has grown from a three-week Lisbon run in November 2024 into a tour its producers put at more than 350,000 spectators across 60 cities and ten countries. Two Rio dates close out November 2026.
A sketch comedian goes back to the dictionary
Gregorio Duvivier reached a mass Brazilian audience as one of the five founders of Porta dos Fundos, the sketch collective set up in 2012 with Antonio Tabet, Fábio Porchat, Ian SBF and João Vicente de Castro, which turned YouTube into a parallel broadcaster for Brazilian comedy. From 2017 to 2023 he fronted Greg News on HBO, a weekly satirical monologue produced by the same collective. He was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1986, read literature at PUC-Rio, and has published poetry throughout — a double career that explains a good deal about the show he is now touring.
The direct seed of O Céu da Língua was neither sketch nor satire but a bar-room format: Um Português e Um Brasileiro Entram no Bar, an improvisation series that put Duvivier opposite the Portuguese humorist Ricardo Araújo Pereira and let the pair argue about the language they share. The gap between Brazilian and European Portuguese proved a reliable comic engine, and the show built from it keeps the premise — the language itself is the material, not a vehicle for jokes about something else.
The production also marked a return to the stage after roughly five years away from new theatre work, and it put Duvivier in the hands of a first-time stage director: the actress Luciana Paes, who co-wrote the text and directs it.
Lisbon, November 2024
The show opened at Teatro Aberto in Lisbon in November 2024, timed to the year of commemorations for the 500th anniversary of Luís de Camões. The run sold out and extra sessions were added, drawing around 7,000 spectators in three weeks — a figure the production has quoted ever since. Both Observador and Expresso placed it among the best plays of 2024 in Portugal.
Choosing Lisbon first was not incidental. The text treats Portuguese as a single contested object with two homes, and it is funniest where the two diverge; opening in Portugal with a Brazilian performer made the premise the event rather than the subtext. Duvivier has described the form as the child of stand-up comedy and poor circus, while Paes has called it a kind of prank stand-up — a comic persona used to smuggle in a literature lecture.
It crossed to Brazil three months later, opening at Teatro Carlos Gomes in Rio de Janeiro for a run from 6 to 24 February 2025, then moving to Teatro Riachuelo Rio from 20 to 23 March 2025.
What the piece actually does
The spine of the show is a case that poetry is already embedded in ordinary speech, and that this is a source of unintentional comedy. Duvivier builds from dead metaphors in everyday Brazilian Portuguese — the roof of the mouth, the potato of the leg, treading on eggs — towards Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Eugénio de Andrade and the lyrics of Caetano Veloso, on the argument that popular song did more to democratise poetry in Brazil than any anthology.
It is not a straight celebration. Reviewing the performance at the Guairão during the Curitiba Festival on 8 April 2025, Paulo Camargo described a piece that honours the Camões anniversary by taking the language apart, exposing fractures tied to colonialism and violence, and shifting register from formal recital into political stand-up, mock lecture and manifesto. The same review credited Duvivier with handling language physically, twisting phonemes and sabotaging clichés, moving between erudition and street speech, and read the staging as an idiom laboratory rather than a recital.
Paes directs it with deliberate economy. The set, by Dina Salem Levy, is minimal; Ana Luzia de Simoni lights it; Pedro Aune plays a live double bass score that works against the text as often as under it; and Theodora Duvivier, the performer's sister, runs projections that throw fragments of the words being discussed into the room. Costumes are by Elisa Faulhaber and Brunella Provvidente, with production by Pad Rok.
The numbers and the prizes
Portugal got the show back for a twelve-city tour between 17 June and 1 July 2025 — Faro, Coimbra, Caldas da Rainha, Beja, Braga, Porto, Lisbon's Centro Cultural de Belém on 24 and 25 June, Águeda, Vila Real, Paredes, Setúbal and Leiria — with additional sessions added in Braga and Setúbal and two more Lisbon dates on 3 and 4 July after the first sold out.
In Brazil the run has been close to continuous. A Rio season at Teatro AXIA Casa Grande ran from 30 April to 17 May 2026 at R$160 full price; Curitiba's Guairão took it on 22 and 23 June 2026 with late sessions added; a nine-state tour of the Northeast followed through the middle of the year; Porto Alegre had it from 3 to 5 September 2026; and it returned to São Paulo's 3,214-seat Espaço Unimed from 7 to 11 October 2026, tickets R$50 to R$200. By that São Paulo run the production was citing more than 350,000 spectators in 60 cities across ten countries.
The awards have followed the audience. Duvivier won best actor in a play at the 2025 Prêmio Bibi Ferreira, where the production was also shortlisted for best play, best direction and lighting design. It took a dramaturgy award at the 20th Prêmio APTR, won text and production categories at the 2026 Prêmio RJ de Humor, and picked up nominations at the 36th Prêmio Shell.
Where it stands in November 2026
The show is being marketed now on its second anniversary in theatres, and the two dates currently on sale take it somewhere it has not been: an arena. Brava Arena Jockey, at Praça Santos Dumont in Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro, hosts it on Saturday 28 November 2026 at 21.00, gates at 19.00, and Sunday 29 November 2026 at 16.00, gates at 14.00 — the theatre booking inside a venue season otherwise built on music.
A single further Brazilian date has been announced beyond that: Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte on 3 December 2026, with tickets from R$120. Nothing newer has been confirmed for Portugal.
The open question for the Rio dates is scale. Everything in the staging — the near-bare set, the single double bass, the projected words, the conversational pivot from joke to lecture — was built for rooms of a few hundred to a few thousand, and the Curitiba review read its force as partly a function of proximity. An arena crowd is a different instrument.
The show, now
A single performer, no support act and no interval: Duvivier alone with a lectern-and-microphone setup on a near-bare stage designed by Dina Salem Levy, lit by Ana Luzia de Simoni, with Pedro Aune playing a live double bass score from the side and Theodora Duvivier projecting fragments of the words under discussion. Running time is billed differently by different venues — 70 minutes on the production's own record, 85 for the October 2026 Espaço Unimed run in São Paulo, 90 at Teatro Riachuelo and the Theatro José de Alencar — so an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half is the realistic range. Age guidance is 12 and over at most venues, 14 and over at some. The shape is cumulative rather than a setlist: everyday Portuguese idioms taken literally for laughs, then dead metaphors, then grammar and spelling-reform jokes, then Camões, Pessoa, Eugénio de Andrade and Caetano Veloso, with detours into advertising language and political euphemism; the register shifts from recital to political stand-up and back, and the Curitiba Festival review in April 2025 described Duvivier physically mangling phonemes and sabotaging clichés as the central comic device. Demand has consistently outrun the first announcement — extra sessions were added in Lisbon, Braga and Setúbal in 2025, and in Aracaju, Curitiba and Florianópolis during 2026. The two Rio dates on 28 and 29 November 2026 are the show's first in an arena: Saturday at 21.00 with gates at 19.00, Sunday at 16.00 with gates at 14.00, at Brava Arena Jockey in Lagoa.
Researched from arteview.com.br · foyer.digital · escotilha.com.br · infoteatro.com.br · almanaquedacultura.com.br · observador.pt · e-cultura.pt · theatrojosedealencar.cultura.ce.gov.br
Pictures
Photographs from Wikimedia Commons, credited
Sergio Savarese · CC BY-SA 2.0
Sergio Savarese · CC BY-SA 2.0
