And for some reason that made me think about the woman Colette describes, Amalia X, that good comic actress of road companies, and I found myself hoping it was true, hoping it really happened, the journey between the lovers that she takes.
Then I wondered if Amalia X, who I’m not even sure existed, ever found herself playing Antigone.
For some reason I was sitting here furious with longing for her to have played all the parts, all the comic and the tragic and the Imogens and the Hermiones, I wanted her to be Hermione and Perdita at once, then I wanted her to be Prospero too. I was suddenly in love with her versatility, full of energy from imagining it.
Then I began to wonder if there was an actress alive now who was versatile enough to be Amalia X and Antigone, to play all the parts, the highs and the lows, the Consider yourself songs and the being-walled-up-till-everybody-kills-themselves, so I typed into the Google search box three or four things all together one after the other to see what would happen, I typed in Antigone first, then off the top of my head the names of a bunch of musicals with strong female leads, Evita Sound of Music Cabaret, and I pressed search.
What happened next is unbelievable: it actually came up with someone. The first thing on the screen was the name of a Greek woman (dead now, she died in the mid-90s) who played ALL FOUR in her time, Antigone, Evita, that mad pure Julie Andrews nun with the guitar, and the gorgeous debauched Sally Bowles — as well as Shirley Valentine and Shaw’s Pygmalion and Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the leads in My Fair Lady and in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, and dressed up as a boy in a Greek film musical version of Romeo and Juliet, and more. There’s one film in which she seems to be playing herself as twins, one is rich, living in a chic uptown apartment, and one is poor, living hand to mouth in a hovel, selling combs on the street and avoiding the police. One gets mistaken for the other, of course, like in Shakespeare, and Twain. The poor one looks a bit like your Nancy from the Oliver film, and at one point, like her, she sings a song in a room full of lost boys — except the poverty round her actually looks a lot like realism.
Anyway she was apparently a legend in Greek cinema and theater from the 50s all through the 60s and 70s, into the 80s, even the 90s, all through the huge changes in Greek politics, she was the Greek Monroe, Bardot, Loren, Hepburn (Katharine and Audrey), and she seems to have been like all of them rolled into one, and had a kind of Greek pastry and a doll both named after her, and had a kind of Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton relationship with her leading man, and almost with a Greek prince too at one point, I gather.
Out of curiosity I watched a few clips from some films.
What I knew immediately was how much you would really love these films.
So here’s a small present for the future from the past, from me to you with love. A lot of it is in Greek but if you type this in she’ll come up singing: Aliki Vougiouklaki.
I can just see you watching these. It gives me such pleasure to imagine it. & to imagine you imagining me here in the evenings, deep in some piano concerto, and me actually watching bits of old Greek musical from the 1960s ha ha! that gives me even more pleasure. Like we’ve swapped sides of the mirror. Aliki by the way is Greek for Alice.
When you came in just now, what I was doing was watching a bit from a film called Modern Cinderella (I think), about a girl who’s so poor she can’t even afford a bottle of milk, but then by chance and by cleverness she gets a really good job and the first thing she does is phone up the grocer she owes money to, pay her bill, and order all the groceries her family hasn’t been able to have for weeks — better than that, she orders the best things the man has in his shop, and the next scene is her whole neighborhood at a party, that’s what I was watching. She sings a song, it’s called (in Greeklish) Ypomoni.
Just a passing thought, to apologize if I seemed or seem harsh, I’m really sorry, and to explain why I didn’t want you to see the screen — i.e., I wasn’t really working, and I was suddenly unbelievably embarrassed in case you found out I wasn’t, and even worse, that instead of working I was trawling the net for things you’d love.
I’m sorry if I seem impatient. I am impatient. If I were more patient I’d sit and work this into the talk — importance of clowning, what characters do with what they’re given, empathy of observer, gift at heart of transformation story, clowns in Shakespeare, Josephine Baker and her use of comic mask, but what the fuck. Talking of what the fuck, I thought of you when I was writing about Freud’s flowers. And there was a quote from a Michael Ondaatje novel I wrote down and was keeping for this talk and haven’t used, but it really makes me think of us, well, makes me think of you. ‘She had an eager spirit. One mentioned a possibility and she met it, like the next line of a song.’
Wherever you are all the trees above your head are flowering.
You’re next door right now.
I read your letter I don’t know how many times.
I poured myself a whiskey. I drank it. I poured myself another. I went through and got my laptop and typed into the search box the words Ypomoni aliki vougiouklaki.
It wasn’t very good quality. But up came a black and white table loaded with food, wine, beer, then the camera revealed both sides of the table crammed with people, and at the end, at the head of it, were some musicians and a woman with very bright hair.
I clicked about a bit to find a better version, one not so pixelated.
The woman with the bright hair was holding a party, being hospitable, smiling, helping the people next to her at the table to food. She had dark eyes but she sat like a torch lit at the end of the long table and when the camera came up close to her like she was irresistible and it couldn’t not, she was singing along with the man next to her who was playing a mandolin thing (later I’d find out it’s called a bouzouki). Then she raised a glass to the whole table: cheers! she said, I think, in Greek, and everybody at the table said it straight back in response.
I looked up some other clips featuring this actress. In one, in blazing color, she was on the back of a donkey in a procession of people on donkeys coming down the slope of a hill through countryside below sky, rich blues and greens, and she sang a happy-sounding song all the way to the sea. In another she did a dance that made me laugh out loud, because she was such a rubbish dancer. A couple of clips later I realized that this actress had made a grace out of being a rubbish dancer, that whenever she danced in a film she did it like a human being, like someone who’s only quite good. In fact, everything she did had something both graceful and a bit gauche about it — gauche like a real person, not an actress being gauche — the way she moved her body, flicked her nose, blew her hair out of her eyes, squared herself for her next line of song or dialogue. She was charming, especially in the early footage. She was camp in a way that was innocent of sarcasm. She was passionate and funny both at once, like she could play them simultaneously because they were really the same thing. In one clip she danced round a big hanging fishing net in a restaurant then round a table in the restaurant and her skirt knocked a basket of bread off the table, and I couldn’t tell whether that was supposed to happen in the film or had happened spontaneously in the take and they’d kept it in because it was so right.