Sidetracks’s Don Mamouney and Carlos Gomez’s revived their production of ‘The Bookkeeper’ for this year’s Carnivale. ‘The Bookkeeper’is a dramatization of the life and times of enigmatic 20th Century writer Portugese writer Fernando Pessoa.
When Pessoa died in 1935 he had left a trunk containing some 25,426 items,.a huge collection of poems, fragments, plays and journals, variously typed or scrawled in three languages in notebooks, scraps of paper, serviettes, the back of envelopes and even used envelopes.
Pessoa led a classic double life. In the daytime he led a dull, conservative life as a bookkeeper in a busy office, at night in his flat he let his imagination run wild at his writing desk.
‘The Bookkeeper’ was directed with plenty of vigour by Carlos Gomes. The set was simple with the main part of the set comprising the office, and then a little to the right, his little flat.
The cast gave good, energetic performances. Arky Michael played the energized Pessoa, and the rest of the cast, Adam Hatzimanolis, Georgina Naidu and Silvia Ofria, were his work colleagues who played a large part in his dreams.
