Pino Scicluna’s Gwerra, Familti u Ommi is another interesting and entertaining product born of the actor/director’s mixed extraction – Maltese father, Giuseppe, and an Italian mother, Ada.

The long monologue explores how war affected Scicluna’s mother’s family’s activities, just as his previous play (performed last year) was about his father’s unpleasant experiences during the war. This was when, as a known Italian sympathiser, he was interned by the British and exiled to a camp in Uganda, where he spent a number of years.

In this new piece, Scicluna brings to life a gallery of characters, including his maternal grandfather, a chef by profession. The latter had some unnerving war experiences in the Great War as an infantryman in the Italian army.

There’s also a comical Italian general, conspicuous for his grandiloquence, incompetence and readiness to make his men reluctant heroes. The long and farcical account of Scicluna’s grandfather’s experiences in the trenches, which included trying to cut through barbed wire with absolutely useless clippers, ends with the man being wounded and flung into the camp latrines.

Covered with ordure and streaming with his own blood, the man becomes Scicluna’s symbol of war which he sees as just a quantity of s**t.

This strongly anti-war line is followed up in the presentation of World War II, in which Scicluna’s maternal uncle, Aldo Zanini, served as an officer in the Italian army, but was spared the disasters of the Greek and North African campaigns. Much of the time, he was serving in Sardinia, a fairly quiet spot during that war.

According to Scicluna, Zanini’s one heroic moment was when, following Italy’s armistice in September 1943, he told a German officer he would “see him in hell first”. This was in response to the officer stating that the next day the two would not be playing bridge as they normally did, since Zanini would have to ask his men to surrender their weapons or risk being shot.

Scicluna says that Zanini’s face at that moment of heroic anger became somewhat diabolical. What he did not say was that Zanini and his men were lucky to have found a German opponent who was less than formidable, as otherwise they would truly have suffered the fate of a number of Italian military men elsewhere, who were executed when they refused to give up their weapons.

Zanini was clearly a great source of information for his nephew Pino, but never discussed the war at home, preferring to speak to Scicluna in the relative privacy of a tram ride.

Clearly, Italians who had been associated with Mussolini’s regime preferred to keep mum about themselves, save with a close relative or two.

Scicluna’s information about post-armistice Italy is mainly about the dangerous activities of the partigiani, men and women with a whole range of political leanings, from diehard communists to those who were followers of Badoglio, the general who had signed the armistice with the allies.

Physically agile, he has great expressive ability and can be a tragic figure one moment and a grotesque clown the next

Scicluna is right, of course, about the Italian fleet having sailed into Malta’s harbours after the armistice, but I greatly doubt whether Badoglio actually came to Malta to sign the armistice document.

Scicluna and his fellow-director, Maria Capato, have made the production constantly lively and picturesque. He uses authentic Great War and World War II Italian army helmets for his characters and brings to life the variety of people and beliefs among the partisans by depicting them as wearing different, and symbolically significant, garbs. He leaves the audience with the impression that the partisans were better fighters than the men in the regular armed forces.

He ends his monologue by repeating his comment on war being just a load of s**t in a farcical way, when one of his characters sees the Americans airlifting huge quantities of toilet paper to their troops...

The monologue is dedicated to Scicluna’s mother, now in her 90s, as an act of pietas.

Many, like me, will surely have been moved as I was by Scicluna’s strong family feelings, symbolised by a few family documents attached to the minimalistic set.

On the night I saw the production, he got a family member to read out a certificate testifying his grandfather’s excellent catering for a big meal attended by both the Duce and the Fuehrer.

Despite his hatred of war, Scicluna sees that his beloved grandpa is given a commemoration of his professional success, even if the celebrities he served were the two great villains of World War II.

Scicluna the performer continues to gripe, as he did as a young actor when he created the character of Ġaħan in Ebejer’s Il-Ġaħan ta’ Binġemma (1985).

Physically agile, he has great expressive ability and can be a tragic figure one moment and a grotesque clown the next. This show was well worth seeing at least as much for his acting ability as for the liveliness of his script.