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Festival operetta's not over until the cleaning ladies sing
By Louise Jury, Evening Standard 05.11.09
“Very witty”: four real-life cleaners star in The Merry Widow
Real-life Polish cleaning ladies get the chance to do more than shake a brush when they star in an international arts festival in Chelsea today.
The four women — Agnieszka Malek, 28, Halina Graser, 44, Maria Zardzielewicz, 62, and Alicja Talmacs-Soszynska, 54 — were all working as cleaners in Austria when Polish director Cezary Tomaszewski found and cast them in his production of Franz Lehár's high-society operetta The Merry Widow.
After its sell-out performances in Europe, he is now bringing the work to London where he thinks the political significance of his casting will resonate at least as strongly as when the piece was first performed.
He said he wanted to transform the reputations both of Polish immigrants and of operetta, an art form that was often looked down upon. “I wanted to give power back to both of them,” he said.
“In the Seventies and Eighties, Polish people went to Austria before they moved to England.
“I moved to Austria nine years ago to study and everyone seemed to have Polish cleaning ladies. I thought there must be thousands of them and it would be nice to find them and show a different side that no one knows. They turned out to be very witty and very sexy.”
Only Graser and Malek had done any performing before getting the roles. But the reaction of audiences has transformed their lives.
Tomaszewski said: “It has raised questions for them. For the women who had performed before, their dreams started to be active again.”
One has returned to cleaning but in a theatre. The others look set to continue performing after their appearances in London and a further run in Austria.
There are two performances of The Merry Widow at the Chelsea Theatre today.
