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During a turbulent career that spanned four decades, his plays were considered so disturbing and offensive that censors banned one of them, with the innocuous title of "Family Album," for 21 years, and the premiere of another prompted an irate spectator to draw a gun. Yet Nelson Rodrigues, once derided as "a degenerate in suspenders," was clearly the progenitor of the modern Brazilian theatre, and with the 25th anniversary of his death approaching (Mr. Rodrigues died at 68 on Dec.21, 1980) , his status is now that

of a cultural hero.

"For starters, Nelson Rodrigues is a national treasure, not only Brazil's greatest playwright but also one of the best in the world," said the film director Bruno Barreto, one of a multitude of contemporary Brazilian artists who counts himself an admirer of the dramatist. "I am certain," Mr. Barreto said recently, "that if he had written in English, he would be as important as Tennessee Williams, O'Neill or Pinter, such is the universal, timeless and subversive quality of his work."

All the subjects now regarded as the hallmark of his oeuvre, even the racial undercurrents that people in this supposedly colour-blind society have always been reluctant to acknowledge, are on display in "The Woman without Sin." Over and over, in works with evocative titles like "Forgive Me for Your Having Betrayed Me", "Cute, but a Tramp" or "All nudity shall be punished", Mr. Rodrigues would find himself returning to the themes of sexual repression, hypocrisy, rage and deception, along with obsessive jealousy, shame, self-loathing, guilt and physical decay."

Mr. Rodrigues, who came from a family that owned a down-at-the-heels newspaper, was brought up in lower-middle-class neighbourhoods in the less than fashionable Zona Norte area of Rio de Janeiro. His private life was as complicated as that of one of his characters: tuberculosis and other health problems plagued him constantly; a son was jailed during the military dictatorship in Brazil; and though he married only once, he had stormy relationships with several mistresses. Nevertheless Mr. Rodrigues not only enjoyed the controversies that his plays inevitably aroused in Brazilian society but courted them, arguing that "nobody creates anything in art that doesn't have a dimension of bad taste." In the late 1940's he said his goal was to invent a "theatre of the disagreeable," and to the very end of his career, he said, his viewpoint remained that of "a child who sees love through the keyhole."

"My plays have an aggressive moralism," he wrote in "The Flower of Obsession," a collection of aphorisms and essays. "In my texts, desire is sad, pleasure is tragic and crime is hell itself. The spectator goes home terrified by all his sins, past, present and future. "In an age in which the sexual behaviour of the majority is like that of a mongrel dog, I transform a simple kiss into an act of eternal degradation".

Perpetually under financial pressure, Mr. Rodrigues also wrote novels and short stories, as well as thousands of newspaper columns.