My grandma was the type of person who could turn a trip to the petrol station into a great anecdote, and she told me stories every night when I visited her. Her flat had a forceful personality of its own, jam-packed with piles of books; every square inch of wall space taken up with posters and paintings. One of the walls was entirely covered with posters from the cabarets my grandad had written in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. When she died, it turned out I only knew the half of it. Packing up the contents of her flat, I discovered that every bookshelf and every cupboard was twice as deep as it looked. Behind all of my grandma’s things was my grandad’s life: his books, his photos, and his cabaret scripts.
It dawned on me that for all her jokes about pranks and getting lost on the motorway, my grandma never told me any stories about my grandad — and I had never asked. Luckily for me, he did leave behind a four-part autobiography. After she died, I started to read it.
My grandad went by the name Ján Kalina, a pseudonym he started using while in hiding from the Slovak fascists in the Forties, but his friends called him Laco, short for Ladislav. He was a cabaret writer, a satirist, a dramaturg and a collector of jokes. He’s best known in Slovakia for his collection One Thousand and One Jokes, which was published just after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and sold out before the government was able to ban it. They did however manage to put him in prison a few years later.
Laco died eight years before I was born, and he was the only other person in my family who loved theatre as much as I do. After reading his books I joined forces with two of my best friends, who are composers, to make a cabaret about his life. Thinking about Laco was a way of staying close to my grandma without having to look straight at her — like I was standing next to her, doing something that she would have cared about. We borrowed from Laco’s shows, and wove them together with stories from my family and 10 new songs.
Our show is called Rendezvous in Bratislava, named after one of Laco’s early cabarets. After every performance, people stay behind to tell me their own family stories. It’s sparked a new project, The Great and The Grand, where we invite people to create a music theatre performance with us about their grandparents, and we’re taking it to Manchester next month.
Most people aren’t as fortunate as I am to have so much to remember the stories by, but I’ve heard about stolen motorbikes buried in the garden, deep-sea divers with buckled knees, and lost recipes for the perfect carrot cake. And in these conversations, more often than not we agree that we wish we had asked more questions while we could.
Rendezvous in Bratislava by Dynamite Island is at Camden People’s Theatre, January 24-26 then touring. cptheatre.co.uk/production/rendezvous-in-bratislava
