Mary Coustas: This Is Personal – You Gotta Find the Funny

This isn’t just ‘personal’, it’s deeply personal.  Mary Coustas tells us the story of her life – and it’s a serious, moving, funny beautifully written story that you don’t expect to find in a comedy festival.  Through her amazing talent for mimicry (we all remember Effie and her cracked vocabulary), and the pointed, economic narration, Coustas brings her Greek immigrant family – and her place in it - to life. 

We lean forward attentively as Coustas weaves a kind of spell that draws us in and includes us in her story.  Even when what she describes is quite alien to many of us, we see it, we feel it, and the vivid humanity of her characters comes across to us.  If we are inclined to laugh, say, at her mother’s stubborn beliefs, it’s affectionate; there’s no mockery or satire here.  Coustas’ deep love for her family powers her storytelling.

Her father is the author of half the show’s title: ‘You Gotta Find the Funny.’  It’s his very serious advice; it’s a survival strategy, not just for migrants to this country, but against any of the slings and arrows life can throw at any of us.  He sounds like a man you wish you’d known.  Quiet, unassuming, resilient, strong.  When young Coustas tells her parents that she wants to go into acting and comedy, her mother is appalled, but her father tells her whatever she decides, just give it all she’s got. 

Later, her well known attempts via IVF to make her own family are not nearly so easy.

I’m not entirely sure the Capitol, beautiful as it is, is the right venue for This Is Personal.  Given the intimate and touching nature of the material, and the way Coustas confides in us in such a direct way, she seems a touch isolated on this large and near empty stage, her props a single chair, a small occasional table with a telephone and flowers.  Director Blazey Best necessarily and sensibly breaks up the narrative flow with some movement centre stage – turning away for changes of character – sitting, restless standing, jacket on, jacket off, a telephone call, but these touches work, and we are held throughout. 

As for the text itself, this is far higher quality writing than one finds in a comedy festival.  The choice of detail (telling a life in sixty minutes) is rich in suggestion and allusion.  The contribution of skilled screenwriter Chris Anastassiades as script editor is probably important here.  The text is sometimes poetic, at other times undercutting sentiment by being ironic or very matter of fact.  Even, so, in structural sense, there may be perhaps, too many endings, so to speak, if only because of the audience’s instinctive sense of ‘... and that’s the end...’  But then it isn’t.  Not that that means the story does not hold, but perhaps it holds a fraction too long.

This Is Personal – You Gotta Find the Funny is unashamedly revealing but far from self-indulgent autobiography.  We discover that there is a lot more to Mary Coustas than Effie – in life and in her work.  I remember her in the second series of the television show Grass Roots, where she was the acerbic editor of a local newspaper – a character very sharp and a long way from Effie.  Here, with this show, her multiple talents are employed to tell us a story far richer and moving than ‘migrant makes good.’

Michael Brindley

P.S. This Is Personal had only four shows and its season is now over.  But it has had great success elsewhere and it is sure to reappear somewhere soon.   If it does, see it.