An Englishwoman in the Philippines. Mrs. Campbell Dauncey
hope to-day, I had better leave off writing and end my letter.
LETTER X.
A FILIPINO THEATRE—CARABAOS
Iloilo, January 22, 1905.
We went a night or two ago to a performance at the theatre—a Filipino performance in a Filipino theatre. I daresay it sounds strange to you to hear of a theatre in Iloilo, but you see this is really a very large town, and then all the people are musical, and they have plenty of time to rehearse. They get together little dramatic clubs, the chief one of which is not far from here, “as the crow flies,” though I think he would be a very keen crow for theatricals if he flew there as straight as he could. We heard this performance, an operetta, being rehearsed night and day before the performers considered it ready for the theatre. The rehearsals that went on until the early hours of the morning were those we cared least about; but we were really interested to hear them going on all day as well, for no one in the Dramatic Club apparently had any other occupation in life. At least, this seemed to me strange till I had become better acquainted with the Filipino character.
To get to this show, we set off after dinner, driving in a hired quielez with a disturbing cockroach somewhere about it, and soon came to a squash of all sorts of carriages and carts in one of the broader streets of the town—and a squash of vehicles driven by Filipinos is something no human mind can imagine without experience. We escaped alive, and went in at a big gateway into a courtyard, passing several stalls lighted with flaring naphtha, where native women sat behind flat rush trays containing cakes and sweetmeats, tumblers of coloured drinks, and ordinary ginger-beer and lemonade bottles. This, though I did not know it at the time, was the buffet.
Inside the courtyard another high gate, decorated at the sides with palms and paper roses, and very dimly lighted, led to the door of the theatre, a big, crazy-looking building, and here stood two inconceivably stupid and self-satisfied natives bullying everyone, and making a hopeless and baffling muddle of the tickets. Why they did this I can’t think, as everyone passed into the place alike, whatever their ticket was, and scrambled up a broad wooden staircase, very steep and rickety, or else went about the ground-floor, every man looking for his own seat, and getting turned out of it by the next comer.
The “boxes” were little pens railed off, containing six chairs with no room for your knees, and in and out of these and up and down the precipitous staircase jostled a crowd of Filipinos, Mestizos, Chinamen, and Spaniards, with little dark women in gaudy camisas, wearing flowers in their hair and diamond brooches. Here and there an American was patiently and persistently trying to gather information in his own language, while he took some female relation in a white cotton dress upstairs and then down again, to keep her quiet.
I was so amused by these proceedings that I really felt as if it did not matter whether that was all we saw, but, nevertheless, we toiled up the staircase at the promptings of an obliging Filipino with one eye, very soon found our box, and settled down to wait for the friends who were to join us.
In about two minutes, however, we were engaged in an endless discussion with a little mob of “brown brothers,” who declared quite politely that we had no right there, as the box was theirs. So we moved off and tried the ground-floor again; found another box with our number on it, empty; sat down again, put fans and programmes on the opposite chairs, and began to look about.
But we were shifted again, so this time we tackled a native selling programmes, and asked him where our box was, and why the little pens all seemed to have the same number; and he, in very broken Spanish, at last made us understand that the numbers were repeated six times, once on each side upstairs and down. This was a wonderful effort of lucidity for a Filipino, and really helped us a good deal. So we toiled upstairs again, feeling sure that we knew all about the theatre now, and determined on a shot at the sides. On the way there we were delighted to see that the people who had turned us out of our first box were being ousted in their turn, but by this time we had begun to giggle, and were too helpless with heat and laughter to take much notice of anything. At last we got into a box from which we were never evicted during the rest of the evening, though some people did come along with a programme-seller to back their claim, but we showed fight, and they went away again.
The theatre, a long, wooden building, appeared even more ramshackle from the inside than it had from the outside, and infinitely more dangerous, for the electric light was supplemented by Japanese paper lanterns, which looked the last word in incendiarism; and, when one considered the packed mass of faces all round, it was wiser not to let the imagination dwell on that steep wooden stairway, which was all there was between us and the next world.
The floor of the building was arranged with rows of chairs facing squarely, by way of stalls, surrounded by a row of the boxes I have described, where the chairs went sideways. Above jutted out a broad balcony with a similar row of boxes, and above that again, jammed under the ceiling, was a dense crowd of poor people, standing on what was really only a ledge with an iron rail; and they looked positively more like huge black and white flies clinging to the ceiling than anything else.
Everything looked as if it must fall down or break up, but no one seemed to be worrying about their doom, in fact all the faces were remarkably pleasant and jolly.
The stage was a fairly large one, with a row of electric footlights, which waxed and waned and waxed again at their own sweet will, and quite regardless of the needs of the performance. In front of the stage, on the floor-level, was an orchestra of natives who really played very well indeed, and they and all the men in the audience were in white, which looks very quaint until one’s eye is accustomed to it.
The piece performed was an operetta called “La Indiana,” a rather confused story about some old Mestizo with a white beard, whose son had secretly married an Indian, which is the word the Spaniards use for the Filipinos, and is employed by the Filipinos themselves as well, when talking Spanish. Well, the old father informed his son, an appalling, gawky, young Mestizo in a black morning coat, pepper and salt tweed trousers, and a very bright blue tie, that he must marry a white (Mestiza) girl of his, the father’s choosing. On hearing which, the hero sang a song to the effect that he would abandon the Indiana, and had a long duet with that personage to explain that they would just say nothing at all about being married. Then all the chorus came in again, the old father blessed the hero and the “white” girl, whereupon the Indiana, a frightfully ugly Filipina with a fine voice, sang a long and frenzied solo with her hair down—and then the curtain fell.
I thought there must be another act, and was very much surprised to find that was the conclusion of the story. But evidently, to the native imagination, the plot was complete and the ends of poetic justice satisfied. They did not really act and sing as badly as I had expected, though, when one came to think of “La Indiana” as a public performance in a theatre, it really verged on audacity. No attempt at scenery or dress was made, the whole action taking place in a bare, worn, old “set” of a room, the usual stage room, unlike anything else on earth, and the only attempt at costume was the substitution of very ugly old European blouses for the camisa, which was a fatal mistake.
We left after the first piece, though there were to be two more of the same sort, for it was very dull and depressing. There is nothing in these Filipinos, you see, for they have not the melodious voices of negroes, nor the faultless ear of Spaniards, nor the fine physique of Chinese, nor the taste of Japanese—they are simply dull, blunt, limited intelligences, with the ineffable conceit of such a character all over the world, and when they break out into a display such as “La Indiana,” all these deplorable qualities show up in the glare of the white light that beats even upon an Iloilo stage.
Yesterday we went for a delightful drive out along the Jaro road, off which we turned a little way beyond the town, and went down a rough, sandy track to the banks of a broad, half-dried-up river, not the Iloilo river, but another parallel to it, or a branch.
Конец