A Chest Full of Tales

It’s past midnight. The house has gone quiet. Everyone is asleep. Except for two. Filio and Anneta have made the big decision: tonight they are going to creep up to the attic. Because up there is an old trunk. And that trunk belonged to their grandmother from Smyrna.

What’s inside?

The two little explorers go up as quietly as they can — which is not all that easy — and at last they open the forbidden trunk. And then a whole world, and another age, start to come out of it. Old dresses that beg to be worn straight away. Strange hats. Scarves, gloves and umbrellas. Yellowed photographs of people who were once young. And, hidden among them, the most precious object of all: their grandmother’s diary. The pages open and the attic changes. The photographs come to life. The clothes find new owners. The two actors change faces and roles, and old folk tales from Smyrna begin to spring out, one after another.

Why, we wonder, did the dog and the cat become eternal enemies? What happened to the fisherman who lay down in his boat, looked up at the sky and decided he would count every single star, one by one? How can a would-be bridegroom get married when a witch has put a curse on him and given him the gift of… an enormous head? And what about that spoilt daughter who doesn’t want to sew, doesn’t want to embroider, doesn’t want to work, and has generally decided that life is much better when everyone else does the work?

Filio and Anneta read, play, dress up and get more and more tangled up in the stories. Every object that comes out of the trunk becomes the start of a new adventure. And behind the tales, something else slowly begins to appear too. The grandmother herself. The city where she grew up. The people. The neighbourhoods. The memories that passed from Smyrna to Greece, and from one generation to the next, in photographs, words, songs and stories that someone took care to remember.

With theatre, original music, songs, transformations, comic scenes and video, the performance brings children close to the rich world of the folk tradition of Asia Minor without turning History into a school lesson. Historical memory comes on stage through the most familiar door of all: a family trunk. The children laugh at the heroes’ misadventures, help the two protagonists, follow their transformations and travel from a present-day attic to the stories of another age. Through the photographs and the diary, the grandmother becomes the invisible third protagonist of the performance.

Because an old trunk can hold far more than old things. It can hide a city. A family. And stories that have waited for years for some child to lift the lid and hear them again.

Organised performances for schools.
The performance can also be staged at your school.
Information – Bookings: 210 8656004

The performance is also available to schools as a live stream.