THEATRE: Hazel Friedman
Isnt poverty, illness and death worse than waiting for a boy to ask you to dance? The answer is NO! This plaintive soliloquoy, spoken against the backdrop of the Greek Cypriot Club in Bedfordview, encapsulates the agony of Mira (Irene Stephanou) and just about every other teenager who wishes to be everything anything other than herself.
Thats why Meze, Mira and Make-up (food, fate and make-up) is not simply about a Greek woman attempting to come to terms with her cultural identity although South Africas Greek community would be well advised to attend the play. But if youve ever sobbed along to the lyrics of Janis Ians At 17 (At 17 I learnt the truth that love was made for beauty queens) and not merely the songs of George Dallaras youll identify with the plight of a woman who, try as she might, cannot conform to a cultural or feminine stereotype.
In this biographical one-person play directed by Vanessa Cooke, Stephanou is both poignant and hilarious as Mira, the nice Greek girl growing up in Roodepoort who yearns to be blonde, meet boys, eat pancakes for breakfast and chocolate cake for tea (instead of feta and baklava), and whose only source of solace is an imaginary relationship with the Vincent Van Gogh. Depressed, insecure and longing for acceptance, she imagines him as a fellow outsider to whom she can turn when the baklava sticks in her teeth, the Greek shop-talk chokes her and when shes forced to play the wallflower at weddings.
Sometimes Stephanou is too plaintive. Her meanderings through the agonies of adolescence are a little well worn and her imaginary interludes with the painter of cyprus trees slightly pruned. But despite the refrain of pain permeating the show, Meze, Mira and Make-up is no self-pity play. Stephanou uses comedy not simply as a form of make- up (I laugh, therefore I am); it IS her make-up (I am, therefore I laugh).
Although humour inevitably masks loneliness, it is also her most effective vehicle towards self- acceptance. This is brilliantly (and acerbically) articulated in her mimicry of female make-up rituals, Greek dancing and her recollection of her years spent at Wits drama school. She mimics the Greek way Friday night movies at the Ster 1000, weddings at the Cypriot club, the breast-beating family tragodias (tragedies), and food obsessions with both irony and affection. And her outrage at the subjugated role of women in traditional Greek society is a rallying call to all women who refuse to fit the mould.
She is simultaneously Medea, Iphigenia, Maria Callas and comedienne extraordinaire. Yet she is also unafraid of standing skinless before her audience. And when she bares her psyche with irrepressible joy and pain she puts all the beauty queens in the world to shame.
Meze, Mira and Make-up runs at the Laager (Market Theatre) until March 9