RAPPORT FRINGE ... MARGINAAL VERSLAG ... FRINGE BERICHT
Reviewing fringe theatre, film, art and performance in London and internationally credits
home
|
about
|
news
|
gossip
|
venues
|
brighton
|
dublin
|
edinburgh
|
film
|
features
|
interviews
|
awards
|
fashion
|
recipes
|
drinks Monday 5 January 09
|
newsletter
|
links
|
contact
Your ideas on sponsorship? details
A World Sans Frontières
My birth town is Bari, on the heel of the Italian boot. I left 13 years ago, but mentally far earlier. Bari is a fairly average mid-sized city opposite Greece and Albania, divided from them by a strip of the Adriatic Sea. It's a maritime town, a big commercial harbour with a strange repellent reek and a not-so-healthy coastal line, with few industries, a burnt-down theatre, unattractive blocks of flats - but with a cute typically Italian, all-over-whitish old town, where unfortunately you need to be always on the alert against mugging. There's a famous Romanic Basilica dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Myra, the patron of the city, built in the Middle Ages to receive the relics of the saints from Myra in Licia. Many populations crossed and occupied Bari - Islamic invaders, Byzantines, the Spanish. In the last twenty years, Albanians have been crossing the sea in thousands to find refuge
When I was eight, my family moved to a rural hilly area, about thirty kilometres away. Borgo Lagogemolo is a resort village, full of holiday-houses people use in the summer and over weekends. We were on top of a steep hill, living there all year round - and for most of the time, it was only us there. Looking back, the emptiness of this ghost village surrounded by unbridled forest and populated by stray cats was an incredible playground for me and my sisters. They say loneliness is the best environment for breeding artistic moods, especially melancholic ones. I played with my sisters and wrote poetry - starting at the age of 8. I watched my father's relentless efforts as a sculptor, and my mother - between us and her day job, she occasionally wrote plays and book reviews. It should have been the idyllic place for anyone loving the idea of a return to organic nature, a bohemian life. I suppose at the start I saw it like that too, a pastoral, peaceful place. As a child, I didn't miss much of the impolite, unapologetic loudness of Italians who would come on holiday in the summer from the city and neighbouring towns. But as a teenager that changed - I pined for a bit of life outside, a life that wasn't on the written page, a life where you have to communicate with strangers, look them in the eye. I think that's why I ignored my teachers' advice to do classics and instead studied languages. There are still a few scars from this upbringing: a melancholic longing for big airy spaces, loneliness, and an allergy for the pastoral aspects of the countryside - though ironically I've ended up living in rural Hertfordshire. So when I was 18, I left. I suppose I could have moved to Rome or Milan. But my distrust extended to the whole boot-shaped peninsula, and I moved to England. This was probably due to a fascination with the romantics - Shelley and Keats especially, though I was disappointed that these poets spent many years in Italy. I loved their gloomy landscapes, the extravaganzas of Beckett, the silences of a Pinter. Or perhaps it was just a fashionable thing to do for most Europeans. I wanted to study, and possibly become an academic. But things don't always go to plan. My first mistake was to study English Literature and Chinese; a combination of a totally new language with another one I barely knew from textbooks. Another was not to question whether my family could afford it. Another - I was just eighteen with hardly any experience of life. Finally, I should have learnt to drink and survive it. If you couldn't do this - as a student living in the UK with other students in the 1990s - you were either going to find yourself on your own, or with your face down the toilet after the first night out. So I was penniless, friendless, alone, illiterate. And after twice getting rejected from Cambridge, I ended up in a second-class university (anonymous) where some of the people had never even heard of Marx and Engels. I know that sounds snobbish, but you can't expect anything different from someone who had lived most of her life on books, breathing poetry and eating flower petals. Of course I realise now that if I'd been a bit more carefree - like any other 18- or 19-year-old - I could have achieved more with less pain (and less self-indulgence). But I felt I had no voice. I was torn between languages. I couldn't write and, apart from academic papers, I didn't - not a single line, even to my best friend in Italy, not even a diary. One thing I didn't expect was to find other people like me from different countries, facing similar things, sharing a linguistic and cultural backlash. But as soon as I moved into all-women YWCA dormitory, I met a lively international community. When I went to China for my year abroad, the bond with another kind of international community was even more solid. Along the corridor in the hall of residence for Western students in Beijing, there were lots of languages - Japanese, French, Korean - and the smell of all different kinds of food. It was the end of the 1990s, a time where you could breathe a sense of bohemian nonchalance - no student loans, ipods, mobile phones. I wonder how much of it is still left, or if it was an illusion. London was the heart and soul of an international young community and I believe that all stopped with the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York. I feel that ever since, we have been looking at each other with bleak suspicion, and no longer in the eyes. The nineties and these first years went hastily. Eventually my situation gradually improved and I was lucky. Despite a mediocre degree I managed to enter University of Edinburgh for a Master in Chinese literature. I spent there two years working in an independent cinema and biking across the meadows. I think it was in those years that I started to find my voice back again in a different language, this time, English. I wrote poems again. While starting a PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of London University, I realised I wanted to write. I had some experience to draw on - I'd travelled round Britain, through jobs as cleaner, telemarketer, sale assistants; lived in run-down shared accommodation, with fleas, rats, some good and not-good people. I couldn't express it in poetry. I ventured into theatre - it seemed to be the easiest and the most difficult thing to do - via courses at the Soho Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. I have since written three long plays and a few shorts. I can't say that's easy, but I do feel I now have a voice - and a vision about a world sans frontières in a language sans frontières. END (c) Mary Mazzilli 1 August 08 The Wrong Sleep by Mary Mazzilli runs 11-15 August 08 at 15:00. Etcetera Theatre, 265 Camden High Street London NW1 7BU. Camden Fringe Festival. £7.50. Box Office 020 7482 4857. Website www.camdenfringe.org. Director - Sharon Enav. Producer - Agnes Costa-CorreaFringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2008