At the start of the 1970s, when Portugal groaned under the weight of an ageing dictatorship and ongoing colonial wars, three women – soon to be known as “The Three Marias” – took up their pens as others take up arms. Together, they wrote “The New Portuguese Letters”, a work that is at once incendiary, feminist, anticolonial and erotic: an ode to liberty celebrating desire, rebellion and freedom of expression. Major international figures rallied around the work, including Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig and Doris Lessing. This reading, a striking composition of voices, music and video, is a political and artistic revelation which asks the urgent and vital question: “What is the power of words?”