Paul Xuereb finds TNT Theatre Britain’s stripped-down production a fresh take on the classic Gulliver’s Travels.
Despite the reasonably good publicity for TNT Theatre Britain’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the Salesian Theatre’s popularity with Sliema people, there were not even decently-sized audiences for this inventive and amusing show’s two performances.
Paul Stebbings makes his multi-role need a strength in getting the audience’s laughter again and again
Surely, even today’s young and middle-aged theatre-goers know something about Jonathan Swift’s great satire on human beings and human society.
Few schoolchildren in my time lacked a knowledge of Lilliput and Brobdingnag and the way in which a gigantic Gulliver in the land of tiny humans, and a tiny Gulliver in the land of giant humans coped with staying alive there and learned to take fresh – and appalled – looks at the men and society of the England from which this sea captain and surgeon had left on long voyages.
Paul Stebbings’ clever stage adaptation of Swift’s great book covers not just the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag but also his visits to Laputa, the flying island, and marvellously of all, to the land of Houyhnhnms, where a race of intelligent horses rules an underclass of base and bestial men known as Yahoos.
The production is cut down to a bare minimum. There is no set to speak of and the whole cast consists of two men and two women. Except for Nick Whitely, who plays Gulliver, the cast members perform a whole variety of roles, and Stebbings makes this multi-role need a strength in getting the audience’s laughter again and again. All four cast members are not ordinary actors but also singers and people adept at walking on stilts.
This last skill is needed in the first two episodes. In Lilliput, Gulliver goes on stilts while the other three, who are Lilliputians, go around on their knees to further emphasise Gulliver’s largeness, while in Brobdingnag the other three go on stilts.
The production is interested at least as much in the satirical contents of the events as in their show qualities. In Lilliput, Britain’s main political parties are made fun of; the two parties are divided solely by whether they cut the boiled eggs they ate at the big end or at the little end.
The Cabinet Ministers are vain egoists who have no compunction about ordering Gulliver to attack the fleet of a neighbouring country.
In Brobdingnag, Gulliver finds himself an object of curiosity and, like black people in Swift’s time, finds himself exhibited as an attraction at fairs and a plaything, or worse, in the hands of the giant young woman Glumdalclitch. This episode brings out all too strongly what it feels like for the member of a minority – racial or national – living in a land of people who think they are the nonpareil.
In Laputa, where men are so obsessed with the intellect they are incapable of coping with even minor practical problems, and where women are of no importance, the satire is somewhat less forceful theatrically. But it does draw a laugh or two.
Nick Whitely is a likeable Gulliver, while Jofre Alsina, Kathryn Duffy and Paula Jones create a series of vivid characters of all shapes and sizes.
My hope is that the management of the Salesian Theatre and its attractive auditorium with fine paintings by the great Giuseppe Calì himself, will go on making efforts to attract audiences for future productions.
But above all the people of Sliema should strive to make it a theatre sought after by productions and audiences. Malta needs more theatres like the Salesian Theatre.