One Suitcase: Four Stories

The stage is an Italian kitchen – but one in the suburbs of Melbourne rather than Calabria.  Drying herbs and salamis hang from the overhead drying frame.  A big pot of sugo (sauce) stands ready.  Piles of tomatoes, an aubergine, some zucchini.  A big lump of pasta dough waits to be rolled out.  The audience sits at big wooden tables – each table equipped with its own pasta dough, a board, flour, a stick rolling pin, bunches of parsley, bottles of wine and cutlery in a box.  

Linda Catalano, who has welcomed each of us at the ‘back door’ of the theatre - because the back door is for family and friends - is warm, full of energy and funny (she used to do stand-up).  As we are served antipasto, she begins to tell her ‘four stories’ - and to teach us how to make her Zia (aunt) Taglia’s sugo and passata (tomato puree) , and her Nonna’s (grandmother) lasagna.   Under instruction, someone at each table sprinkles flour and rolls out the dough…

The immigrant stories of Ms Catalano’s grandmother and her aunts are broadly familiar (the long distance engagements by letter, the proxy weddings, the misleading photographs, the arrival at Port Melbourne with that eponymous one suitcase and not much else), but as Ms Catalano tells them, we feel the emotion and the drama and we ‘oohh’ and ‘aahh’ in all the right places. 

The stories are intimate but operatic via the tiny details that convince, laced with irony, a mix of hard-headed realism, endurance, heartbreak and aching romance.  Each of her aunts was, or becomes, of course, in the embellished telling ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’.

The stories are given more life and specificity via Penelope Bartlou’s visual flair.  The characters in the stories – the lovers, the meddling parent, the man married on the rebound – are represented by kitchen utensils and vegetables, set upright in the pasta dough.  An aunt is a pasta cutter.  A very handsome suitor is a juicy red chili.  An obstructive Mama is a fat lump of mozzarella. 

It’s a simple idea, but perfectly judged.  The device grounds the stories, keeps them in the kitchen, so to speak, and Brendan Jellie’s lighting keeps up with Ms Catalano’s sometimes improvisational telling.

The show came about when Ms Catalano, who had treasured these stories – simply as stories – for years, shared them with Ms Barltau.  Ms Bartlau’s great ability (or one of her abilities) is the invention of images that resonate and add layers to mere words.  One Suitcase: Four Stories is simpler, more direct, than other Barking Spider productions (this is their 54^th!), but it hits its mark.

Each table’s lasagna pasta is not always successful and Ms Catalano, the stand-up comedienne, has fun teasing them, but the whole audience is spared the consequences of their sad attempts.  Nonna’s genuine Calabrian lasagna, oozing tomato sugo, dripping and crackling with cheese, comes to each table with Zia Fiametta’s salads and a good red wine.  As we tuck in, another story.  And as Ms Catalano wraps it up and sends us out for coffee and cannoli, she grows wistful at these tales of hardship, patience, romance and marriages that last for fifty years.  A beautiful image: her Nonno and Nonna, in their eighties, sitting side by side.  He peels and slices an apple: a slice for her, a slice for him.  Our storyteller wonders if there is such a thing in our modern world for her…

A small and simple show, perhaps, but one that upsets your expectations, pulls you close to its stories and packs an emotional punch. 

Michael Brindley