Another evening at the theatre

One of my favourite ways to start any blog entry is a reference to the past - when I was a boy..... when I lived in Elland and what not. I don't quite think of my time in Spain in the same way. Although we have been here for close on ten years now all the Spanish stories seem fresh. So I wasn't going to blog my visit to the theatre yesterday evening until I realised that it was four years ago that I last smelled greasepaint in Torre del Rico.

I met Barry and Carole (remember us as barrel) when I delivered a lot of furniture. I seem to recall that they had a lot of space to fill in their house cum converted bodega and I spent hours if not days fastening together Mexican style flat pack furniture. Nowadays we just say hello and catch up when we pass in the street in Pinoso but Facebook keeps me up to date with their comings and goings. It was because of Facebook that I realised that Carole would be on stage on Saturday evening. She's a member of a group called Asociación de Mujeres Rurales Torre del Rico or the Rural Women's Association of Torre del Rico. Maggie and I last crossed the border into Murcia to see her in a play in the village in August 2010.

We've meant to go every year but somehow things have got in the way so, even though there was no Maggie, I wasn't going to miss it again. The setting was the same. There were no tractors passing this time but otherwise it all looked very familiar and appealingly amateur in the sense that it felt community owned.

It was good fun. I was alone of course and, as always, startled to be surrounded by so many Spanish people. I kept my head low in the hope that nobody would speak to me and I bolted as soon as the cast had taken their final curtain call. It was like being in Culebrón as the audience assembled. Lots of greetings, hand shaking, kissing and smiling. It was the same as the show started. I heard whisperings behind me along the lines of "Is that Mari Carmen on stage?" Friends amongst friends I thought as the actors on stage struggled to stop themselves from laughing as they delivered double entendres, forgot their lines or consistently and purposely repeated one of the character's names incorrectly. It was full of Spanish that I didn't understand, word play type Spanish using lots of the local diminutive and even more local terminology but I see that in 2010 I reckoned  I understood about 25% of the dialogue. It was definitely a lot higher percentage than that last night - unless of course Carole tells me there was no word play or double entendre in any of it!

I was really impressed with Carole's Spanish. Back in 2010 it was definitely a double memory test. Not only did she have to remember her lines she also had to remember the strange word forms of a foreign language. Last night the pacing and delivery made me pretty sure that she understood her Spanish lines completely and only had to remember them. Good stuff all round.