Grandmother’s secret role in the Greek Resistance: ‘Of Forgetting’ the horror of war
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
Phil Kafcaloudes was ABC Radio National’s breakfast presenter for almost a decade. Like thousands of others affected by the global media upheaval, he was made redundant in 2015.
“The redundancy was unexpected but welcomed,” Kafcaloudes says. He had no time to be redundant; laying around on the couch was out.
Kafcaloudes’s wife, Jackie Rees, an actor and active collaborator in the play, was straight with him: ‘ You are not just going to lie around on the couch playing with your computer,’ Kafcaloudes says.
“I started writing the play the next day because of what Jackie said to me.”
Of Forgetting will have its first airing as a live reading at La Mama next month.
The play is an adaptation of Kafcaloudes’s 2011 novel ‘Someone Else’s War’ – based on the secret life of his grandmother Olga Stambolis.
The one-time actress left a fish-and-chip shop in Sydney’s Ultimo to work for the Greek Resistance against the Nazis running ops.
“I realised my grandmother was this other woman”, says Kafcaloudes after reading her diary, which is the basis of his book.
“Mrs Stan, she called herself, from Stambolis, died in 1960 at 58.”
Of Forgetting is about “changed memory”, and the play is set months before Olga’s death.
“Jackie and I were walking down a beach in Greece in 2019 when one of us said, ‘Why don’t we make it between us?’
“I’ve forgotten who said it – but it was decided to make it a memory thing – where [Olga] is forced to remember what happened in the war, “Kafcaloudes says.
Olga is a war hero but doesn’t feel like one because she had to do things in the war – as a combatant.
Covert operations – deceit and murder – even for an evidently just cause, strip away bits of the human psyche.
Jackie Rees plays Olga, who is “forced to remember the war” years later. Like the smell of death, her memories never leave and are coaxed out.
“She deliberately does not remember the war; it’s almost pathologically until her diary is sent to her by the son of a comrade – she is then forced to remember.
“What struck me was that so many Greeks on our street would not discuss the war”, Kafcaloudes says.
As the Spaniard George Santayana once said: ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’
Orga’s tumultuous family life – a marriage breakdown over the death of a child – complex relationships with her other children, and her mysterious absences from family when she spied for the Allies – coalesced.
Kafcaloudes says that his grandmother finally ended up working for John Emil Peurifoy, the United States diplomat and ambassador to Greece, sent by President Truman to prosecute the war against the communists in the Greek Civil War. Olga was now hunting down those once her comrades in the fratricide and original theatre of the Cold War, Greece. She spied for the Allies against the Nazis, but “things got very confused during the Civil War”.
“Olga worked for Peurifoy, and I really don’t know what she did for him, but given her spy background, it could have been anything.
“Everyone was forced to take different sides depending on their side.
Forgetting began as a one-hander, but “over the last four years, it turned it into a three-hander.”
Kafcaloudes has assembled an impressive team with director Gary Young OAM and an ensemble led by Jackie Rees, including Kellie Rode and Grant Piro, to bring Olga Stambolis’s mnemonic landscape to life.
“They play about 18 characters each that come in and out”, he says.
Jackie Rees, known for her roles in Nine, Me and My Girl, and Light in the Piazza, was nominated for a Helpmann Award for Phantom of the Opera and has appeared in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Call of the Wild, Neighbours, and Waterloo Street.
Kellie Rode was in the original Australian cast of Come From Away and starred in The Rocky Horror Show, Sideshow Alley, and MAMMA MIA!, earning a Green Room Award nomination for Virgins. In New York, she performed in Atlantis and Fidelio.
Grant Piro, with over 100 productions to his name, has won multiple Green Room Awards and appeared in TV shows like Janus, SeaChange, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and UTOPIA, as well as films like Bad Boy Bubby and Crocodile Dundee in LA.
Of Forgetting is directed by Gary Young OAM, who is known for productions like Mamma Mia, Hello Dolly, and The Mousetrap. He also served as Associate Director for Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, with original works including Tilly and Jekyll and collaborations like Ship of Fools and Monster.
The live play reading at La Mama in Carlton runs from September 10 to 12.
The original article: belongs to NEOS KOSMOS .
