Id-Drammi ta’ Alfred Buttigieg

by Alfred Buttigieg

published by Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2024

Since the late 20th century and especially during our own, Alfred Buttigieg has been one of the more interesting authors for the stage. Some of his single works were published when they were also staged, and now an edition of his complete stage works, edited with a fine introduction by Marco Galea, has been published in an elegant and well-printed volume.

Possibly this marks the end of his stage-writing career, leaving us an opus of works, most of which held their audiences in theatres and are often entertaining even for the reader.

One of the plays, the longest he has written, Ir-Rewwixta tal-Qassisin, is a historical piece set in 18th-century Malta, but it is made to reflect what happened to Malta in our own lifetime.

In fact, Buttigieg is interested above all in depicting Maltese society, warts and all. In his last play, L-Arrest ta’ Danny Weed, he paints a black picture of how badly Maltese police can behave, and in a later play, L-Interrogazzjoni, the situation is even more frightening. In this case of murder, the police do not even appear on stage, the nature of the deed having been concealed by the head of police himself and the minister responsible for the police.

The book's cover

The interrogation of the title regarding a double murder is in fact a fake one, conducted not by the police but by two women, who are also lovers, one of whom is the widow of the murdered man, who take it in turns to impersonate the senior policeman in charge of the case, as they restart the interrogation again and again.

Marco Galea’s introduction is excellent in its analysis of this play in which the two try to find the truth of the crime that the police have stopped investigating for unknown but presumably bad reasons, while the women are anxious to discover, for reasons related to the relationship between them, the truth of the crime.

In the last play in this volume, L-Arrest ta’ Danny Weed, the police are presented as a force acting in utter conflict with the great purpose for which it has been created.

In this broadly comical work, a man accused of possessing and selling drugs is treated in the crudest way imaginable. He is not only spoken to with the utmost contempt but the police, led by a female inspector, actually plant on him the drugs regarding which he is being accused, but while in custody he hilariously gets the better of them and absconds. It must be the most contemptuous play about police misconduct I have ever come across, and, shockingly, it is based on a real case that occurred in Malta a good many years ago.

The playwright Alfred Buttigieg

I tend to agree with Galea that L-Interrogazzjoni may be Buttigieg’s best play, and it is certainly his subtlest. It exemplifies the dramatist’s exploration of metatheatre, another exemplar of which is Ir-Rewwixta tal-Qassissin, which develops from an 18th-century student performance recreating the revolt into the reality created by it, and is still remaining, with the live appearance of the priest Mannarino who had led the revolt some 20 years before and remained alive as a state prisoner.

Buttigieg is interested above all in depicting Maltese society, warts and all

This is Buttigieg’s longest play and also his only history play. When I reviewed it in 2012 I pointed out the influence on its writing of the plays of Bertolt Brecht and of the contemporary Maltese playwright Alfred Sant. It is a complex work, and it is also a gripping play that merits revival.

The volume also includes two plays with a medical/hospital setting. Mela hawn xi manikomju? depicts four elderly women in a rehabilitation ward who are unaware that they are not being rehabilitated but being treated and cared for like patients who will never be released. It is a sad subject; only the author makes the characters so psychologically vital and makes them utter such coarse language that they will never depress an audience, even if it is clear that the medical people do very little to make these patients’ final years worthy of being lived. There is life in these characters, and this has been ignored by the people who matter most, the medics.

The other medical play, Ippermettili nitlaq, is a much more interesting play, and indeed one of the best in the volume. Like Bernard Shaw in the last century, and like the French Molière in the 17th, Buttigieg shows here he is not enamoured of medical people, especially those who place their professional success and prestige above all other considerations, such as the happiness and comfort of their patients.

L-Interrogazzjoni, staged in a Għargħur villa in 2020 in a Teatru Malta production, may be Buttigieg’s best play. File photo: Elisa von Brockdorff

The central figure in this play is a young girl, Gabriella, who is born with a very rare and very painful condition. Aged 14 but confined to a wheelchair, she addresses the audience at the start and stays on watching the rest of the action.

This action makes it clear that the young surgeon is eager to operate on the girl, supported by the father of the girl, who greatly wants to keep his daughter alive, while his wife is most apprehensive of this being done. Buttigieg balances the surgeon’s selfishness with a nurse who has a good family life and is shocked to see the very sad long-term consequences should Graziella have her series of operations.

He creates another balance by providing us with alternative endings to the play, in the second one of which Gabriella does not have her operations and is allowed to die. With the parents movingly treating the death in the accepted way that includes even being photographed with the wrapped-up child’s body, the audience must think that this is a suitable closure, preferable to allowing Gabriella to grow for some years in pain and with great physical limitations.

Dwar menopawsi, minorenni u muturi high speed is a piece on a familiar subject, that of a young middle-aged couple with a teenage son and without career success whose boredom leads them to seek excitement in sex and in the activities in which young people so often engage. It is not a subtle play but an entertaining one with an ironical ending in which the erring husband is shown in the throes of his illusion that his sexual prowess will prevail over his son’s girlfriend.

Buttigieg’s plays owe something to the hospital and police drama so popular in our time especially on television, but his own mark on them makes them clearly his own.