The Daughter by Pavlos Matesis

Author:Pavlos Matesis [Pavlos Matesis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129093
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2011-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

In villages they played the coffee-houses mostly. Admission was in kind: eggs, bread, sausage, liver, whatever people happened to have.

Didn’t always play to sell-out crowds, either. Sometimes they performed for five spectators, or for the proprietor only. Interpretation wasn’t really a big problem; in less than a month they’d learned all the plays and all about the public as well: whatever you played, they ate it up. No problem about critics of mixed-up pages.

Tosca was their big success. They presented it as a British play, about the Allies, and the Resistance.

Anyhow, there was this one coffee-house proprietor who takes pity on Adrianna, seeing as how in the last act of Tosca, she has to jump off a wall. So one night, to keep her behind from taking a pounding with every fall into the wings, he sets up two inflated inner-tubes. So, with all the flare of a true artiste, Adrianna leaps from the wall on to the inner tubes, and comes bouncing right back on to the stage and ends up straddling the wall, which is how they improvised the perfect happy ending.

Lighting was no problem; they had acetylene lamps. Main problem was commercial success. Artistic success we had, in our hip pocket, says the now-Mrs Salome as she gobbles up cupcake number six (I was keeping pace with her, with brandy though). In lots of villages we couldn’t even put on one performance: had to spend the night hungry in the jitney. Way she described it, it made me think of the time we went hungry for three days, Signor Vittorio was on guard duty; all we had was a cup of rice, and Ma boiled it up, and mixed in some sawdust to make it look like more.

One performance, Salome goes and keels over right on stage from sheer hunger. But Tassis – he was a whizz at improvising by this time – simply slings her over his shoulder and carries her offstage like a swooning lover, and gives her a raw egg; she pulls herself together and goes back to her role.

But there were some villages where they took in extra, because they rented out costumes and evening gowns to the local rich people, for weddings or baptisms, or for memorial services; in some places memorial services were more like parties, with boiled wheat and a big cauldron of barley soup full of chopped-up innards. We ate all the barley soup we could stuff into ourselves and forgave souls for all we were worth, Mrs Adrianna confessed one time, when Greece had its first beauty pageant I think it was. Our best season was the springtime; had more spectators.

With Adrianna there was a hitch; she didn’t always remember which lines went with which play, plus she was impetuous by nature, she was always forgetting the prompter’s box and letting herself go. In this medieval costume drama, just to give you one example, she drops the sock she’s darning and enters stage right, but instead of saying

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