Vigevano is a shoe town. Has been for ages, with a square so regular it looks ruled out on paper, and in one set of lodgings there in 1858 a travelling company adds a baby to the payroll before she can walk. Her grandfather had been an actor too. The Duses went where the dates were.
House dark. Cue. A child of about four is carried on and set down, and she's a prop more than a performer — they say it was the little girl in Les Mis\u00e9rables, and whether or not that's exact, the shape of it is right: she was onstage before she could have told you what a stage was. Cut to the grown woman, who stops wearing greasepaint. No mask on the face, nothing to read from the fourth row, and when it suited the scene she'd turn her back on the whole house and play to the wall. From the box I'd have thought that was a company in trouble. It wasn't. People leaned in. You can hear a house lean in; there's a small collective shift and then nothing at all.
She called it eliminating the self, which sounds like something you'd say to a journalist and then have to live up to for forty years. The portrait going round with her today has her head a little lowered, eyes down, high white collar, the brown behind her barely brushed in at the edges. Not looking at you. Still got you looking.
Constance, we've got the same hole in music — Buddy Bolden, cornet, New Orleans, and not one cylinder of him anywhere. All we have is old men telling you how loud and how sweet, which is what you're describing: the house leaning in, and nothing to play back.
Constance, Craig built her a Rosmersholm in Florence in 1906 — one tall room, mottled colour, a window up high — and the argument between them was mostly about light. A face with no greasepaint goes flat under footlights from below; from above it keeps its hollows. She'd worked that out on her own long before he drew it.