Reviewing Maltese theatre

Paul Xuereb is hardly the right person to review my recent book It-Teatru f'Malta (PIN, Kullana Kulturali, 2003). His declared "exasperation" (The Sunday Times, June 1) is readily understood: Xuereb is one of those reviewers who cannot be objective. His particular social entrenchment and his networks prohibit him from understanding what it means to evaluate theatre from any perspective that restores theatre back to the people.

Besides, his long-standing attachment to the Manoel Theatre is betrayed in personal apologies and positions. It is unfortunate that people like him tend to give the impression that they have staked their claim on our theatrical institutions.

It-Teatru f'Malta, I declared very clearly in the introduction to the volume, is not meant to be another innocent chronology of facts, dates and persons associated with the theatre scene in Malta and Gozo. It is meant to be a critical appraisal of dramatic activity rooted in social reality, with all due commissions and omissions presented to readers who are prepared to be engaged in arbitral evaluation.

The book attempts to focus not only on the significance of socially concerned theatre, but also to deal boldly with deep-seated cultural, economic and psycho-collective features that led to the huge rift between social categories. The Manoel Theatre almost always represented (with very few exceptional timeframes and penetrations) an active, exclusively constructed establishment, from the times of the Knights to the present. The sociological strategies as well as the cultural objectives of the Manoel almost always belonged to a dominant clan, more intent on holding on to its own specificity than anything else.

It is obvious why Paul Xuereb is so defensive when it comes to the operations of the Manoel Theatre. He supports the elitist quality of that institution which, I suspect, will go down in future history as a neo-colonial appendix of cultural performance in Malta. Xuereb would have written a completely different review had I chosen to forget that the incumbent administrator of the Manoel Theatre, namely Tony Cassar Darien, has accused the institution of having no vision and no strategy and that it should be paragoned to the legendary naked monarch.

Xuereb would certainly have been more pleased had I not shown in my book that the Manoel Theatre represents cultural submission, not least through the imposition of English as the language of high culture. The history of the Manoel Theatre is one long series of trends that privilege the selected few and make the general public uncomfortable to have access towards that entity.

When he is not writing in public, there is another side to Paul Xuereb. Things happening at the Manoel can anger him purple. He should know what I am referring to and he should also know who turns him rabidly on within that institution. I behaved rather well in my book and forfeited an opportunity to expose Xuereb's own anger at the administration. I also restrained myself and did not divulge the advice he gave me about how best to save the Manoel Theatre from its predicament of mediocrity and malpractice.

A cursory look at the index at the end of It-Teatru f'Malta shows that the Manoel Theatre features in no more than 12 pages of main body text out of a total 204, and yet that was enough to commit Xuereb to one of his most rambling, prejudiced and high-pitched reviews he has produced in recent years. In his delirium he commits several errors.

For instance, when I wrote in my book of "the death of living Maltese theatre" I was quoting Rev. Norbert Ellul Vincenti, the drama reviewer of The Times, but Xuereb missed the reference. Xuereb also suggests that I could have missed the study on "official public spectacle in 18th. century Malta" (Melitensium Amor, 2002). I did not.

The material quoted by Xuereb, submitted in a well-researched paper by William Zammit, refers, inter alia, to religious ceremony, awesome manifestation of Catholic triumphalism, the Grand Master's possessi, the calendimaggio, the coccagna, Carnival, the opening of the Manoel Theatre in 1732, the holding of balls as well as serious and comic drama by the administrators of the Island, the exaltation of the Grand Master and the evocation of grandeur. Mr Zammit wrote interestingly about "institutionalised aggrandisement through art", a theme that I treated too in my book, although referring to different sources.

Moreover, Xuereb seems to expect me to take into account that the Manoel is "Malta's main purveyor of classical music". Obviously, classical music was never part of my remit for a volume on theatre in Malta, and the series Kullana Kulturali has taken that sector into account. Still, even when it comes to classical music, the Manoel has been accused by other researchers of ignoring or trivialising at best, Malta's national musical repertory, giving a distorted representation of our authentic cultural inheritance (The Sunday Times, May 11, 2003, p.39).

What is most unethical in Xuereb's review is that he could not resist the temptation to personalise issues. He is clearly irritated by the fact that my book never mentions the so called "excellent people like Chris Gatt", a close friend of his and a colleague who rubs shoulders with him on the Board of Management at the Manoel. Xuereb has been deliberately myopic, for I gave due credit to all the alternative groups that I could research, including Chris Gatt's own Teatru Anon, also featured in a number of captioned photos.

Beyond that, I can never share Xuereb's enthusiasm for Gatt's presumed "excellent" theatrical and managerial "talents". The instances when I required Gatt's input as a "technical person" were extremely disappointing. I learned at my own expense that as a stage-man, he prefers to extend his loyalties only to those in his nearest orbit. This story can be confirmed, I suspect, by others who experienced the same predicament.

The couple of productions I have seen devised by Gatt have been extremely poor, including his recent The Knight of Malta, now generally acclaimed as one of the biggest flops financed by the Manoel Theatre (and therefore by public funds) in recent years. It amazes me that Paul Xuereb would wish to stake his credentials on theatre works that have become notorious for poor quality and sensationalism.

The Knight of Malta was hyped as a package of love, sex, obsession and lust, with contemporary political interpretation and set in modern day Valletta. It turned out to be a puerile bit of confusion, inducing patrons to leave the stalls half-way through the play, and earlier, in a consistent procession. The idea for unearthing The Knight of Malta came from Xuereb himself.

Another case in point is the much hyped Vagina Monolgues, locally reduced to a series of infantile, sexual demos meant to shock the totally uninitiated. Chris Gatt's production of that "shocker" (admittedly of sizable box-office returns) consisted in three females sitting for two boring hours on bar-stools, reading from a script, fluffing their lines notwithstanding and soliciting the audience to shout c*** in chorus or relish the sounds of Swieqi women wrapped in sexual ecstasy. The "c(o)unting of female blessings", according to Xuereb, is proof that Maltese Theatre "is alive and kicking", like it has never been done before, "enlarging the frontiers of theatre to other countries". More exercises in illusions, here. Amen.

It appears that Paul Xuereb has become completely oblivious to all the experimentation that was happening in Malta in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, as inspired by the likes of Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Kantor, Littlewood, McGrath, Fo and Barba. Xuereb contends that it is only now that "Maltese theatre"(sic) breathes deeply. It confounds me that he can make such a gratuitous claim, especially since one of our leading playwrights, Oreste Calleja, has been lamenting, for the past five or six years, the death of local drama.

Xuereb ignores that the theatre makers who mattered, in the past 30-35 years, were following scrupulously and passionately what was happening with avant-garde theatre aesthetics and with theatre as social action on mainland Europe and elsewhere. He also completely forgets to mention agit-prop theatre in Malta from the mid-Eighties onwards, when the Nationalist Party launched an unprecedented theatre programme that drew audiences in huge thousands in open spaces and other venues.

Also omitted in Xuereb's biased review is any reference to the massive initiative called Politeatru, a five-year (1987-1992) cultural enterprise for the working masses and one of the main strategies employed to neutralise violent elements within the Malta Labour Party. Because of his political short-sightedness, it should be said that Paul Xuereb can never draw up the balance of authentic theatre research in this country. His position is too narrow, has no grip on socio-historical truth and actually shrinks away from anything that is remotely "politically" committed. It does not surprise me that he has the nerve to ask, in his review, what can the Manoel Theatre do to engage the public in relevant, radical theatre, a theatre that reflects their own narratives.

My book contextualises socio-political and aesthetic experiments and describes the rise of powerful alternatives in the past that have now been largely submerged by other frivolous, commercial interests. Being exclusively committed to safe, post-colonially informed showpieces and socially top-drawer preferences, Xuereb dutifully dumps vital reference to recent theatre history.

On the other hand, his review insists that theatre in Malta has done great technical leaps. This contention is as absurd as it is misleading. It would tend to condemn the Manoel Theatre (last month declared by its administrator as "an internationally acclaimed world centre"!) to the amateur, primitive infrastructure that characterises the institution to this very day.

Against Paul Xuereb's gratuitous claims for "Maltese theatre", even Tony Cassar Darien, as administrator of the Manoel, has gone on record for describing Maltese dramatists as amateurs with literary pretensions. He also derides the Francis Ebejer national drama contest, describing it as a damp squib. It should be said Cassar Darien sat in the driver's seat of the Manoel Theatre School for Drama for years and saw it collapse and scrapped from the Manoel in the Nineties.

Yes, indeed, what could the Manoel Theatre do for the local stage!

Clearly, I do not share Paul Xuereb's unmitigated opinion on how "Maltese theatre is alive and kicking". To start with, one should make a very clear distinction between "Maltese theatre" and the recycling of imported stuff that is often staged to appease an alienated, undemanding public. The local scene is littered with such activity but that says absolutely nothing about the development of indigenous theatre.

For a very long time, the Manoel Theatre was entrusted with special funds to instigate the development of local drama. Instead, it sabotaged its own drama training programme and passed a severely punctured bucket to the Education Division. To my knowledge, Paul Xuereb never raised a finger in protest.

I am pleased that Xuereb is subscribing to the idea proposed by the board of experts from the Council of Europe in view of the need to have the Manoel Theatre sanction special theatrical projects in the native idiom. That is exactly what I have been proposing in the past three years. I have to repeat, ad nauseam, that what I have been proposing is not a national drama company, but a national drama programme, exactly on the lines being proposed by the Council of Europe. But Xuereb should have pointed out that the Council of Europe Report does conclude that eventually, Malta should establish a permanent drama company or even companies.

Since Xuereb complains that the experts' report has not been made "public", I must point out that the report was duly passed on to the press as soon as it was made available, in September 2002. Copies were handed out to all the members sitting on the Arts Council and of course, people like Paul Xuereb are in possession of the document. For wider consumption, the report was placed on the Government's official Website.

The experts' report also recommends strongly that theatre in Malta should be used "for social empowerment and for combating social exclusion". The European experts recommended, among other things, that funding be made available for theatre groups "to provide socially-oriented productions addressing social issues and other kinds of outreach activity". Of course, this must be the type of theatre Xuereb hardly believes in, but which is a mainstay with European cultural policy.

Paul Xuereb could not resist trying to denigrate It-Teatru f'Malta in all possible ways. He even refers to my last chapter as being "near-hysterical". Let me point out what constitutes such "near-hysteria". The last chapter tackles the following:

(i) a reference to Norbert Ellul Vincenti's plea to have a Maltese theatre that builds a national conscience;

(ii) quotes from the report of experts from the Council of Europe, also cited by Xuereb in agreement;

(iii) a reference to Joe Friggieri's recent trilogy of socio-political drama as an example of committed, relevant theatre striking at home truths;

(iv) a quotation from columnist I.M. Beck, lamenting that after all, in spite of all the hype and beliefs to the contrary, Manoel Theatre audiences are not necessarily educated;

(v) the social codification of Maltese theatre based on the recent production of http://www.mattewcallus.com by Bartolo-Marshall-Farrugia in a venture undertaken by Bronk Productions;

(vi) reference to the ill-equipped Manoel Theatre to meet professional theatre standards;

(vii) the realisation that by recycling Anglo-American pieces most of the time, Maltese actors are going into an artificial mode related to vocalic, gestural and psychological interpretation;

(viii) the positions taken by Esslin, Adorno and Horkheimer in view of mass cultural oppression, where "business is turned into a philosophy and where "rubbish is deliberately justified"and

(ix) a concluding quotation by Richard Schechner, the eminent New York researcher and critic of The Drama Review who has been auguring that throughout the 21st century, theatre would continue to reserve the right to attack institutions and other entities divulging cultural power, and to invest in liberal humour and irreverent parody.

Such material, according to Paul Xuereb, amounts to a manifestation of "near hysteria". The denigrating motive is blindingly obvious, as I could also detect from references to personalities like Guido Saliba, who Xuereb intimates that I have summarily ignored. This is dishonest reviewing: actually, my book refers to Saliba as the man under whose guidance Maltese drama made a quality leap at the beginning of the Fifties. I also wrote that with theatre artists like Guido Saliba, "Maltese theatre gained stature and vision".

One final observation I want to make relates to the style employed in writing It-Teatru f'Malta. Xuereb describes it as "vigorous" but not elegant enough. For "elegant" one can read "traditional and condescending", as preferred by the reviewer of this paper.

Combing through the linguistics of the volume, Xuereb picks on one unfortunate word, truppi, and takes it to refer to "(drama) troupes". He is mistaken, but through no fault of his this time. Actually, truppi is a misprint (unluckily there are a few others) and should be read as gruppi (groups). Given that Xuereb, in his exasperation, must have written in a very agitated mental frame, he could not perceive innocent, editorial errors of that sort.