In his latest play, Bogħod mill-Għajn (Manoel Theatre) prolific playwright and novelist Vincent Vella presents a fictitious Maltese family that finds itself the victim of a historical situation: the internment and subsequent deportation to Africa by the British colonial authorities during World War II of a good number of Maltese known to be lovers of Italy and its culture and suspected of being subversive.
The people affected and the families they left behind felt embittered not just because the internees were sent away by ship on a very dangerous voyage to Alexandria but also because they knew powerful Anglophile Maltese had urged the British to treat the sympathisers with Italy most severely.
The play is a series of short to very short scenes and, as Alan Fenech, who has directed the work for Maleth, says, the script could have been written for cinema or television – or radio, I would have added.
In fact, that is why it did not work very well on the Manoel stage. Few of the scenes had enough breathing time to create the atmosphere needed to enable many of the characters to come to life and attract the audience’s empathy. I suspect that on the cinema or television screen the use of close-ups would make it easier to achieve these two effects.
The first scene shows a meeting in which Amadeo Diacono (Renato Dimech) vociferously and excitedly addresses a small audience about the injustice being suffered by lovers of Italian culture and speaks contemptuously about Lord Strickland who has recently died, this being 1940, the year in which Italy entered the way against Britain.
Amadeo’s brother Vittorio has been interned in Malta, and Vittorio’s wife Ersilia (Nadine Abela) is discussing with the Diaconos’ lawyer and great friend Dr Deguara (John Suda) about legal proceedings – unsuccessful, of course – to stop Vittorio and his fellow-internees from being deported.
I should add that for dramatic reasons Vella has brought the deportation (which historically took place in 1942) back much closer to the original internment.
Ersilia is also troubled by her law student son Davide (Andre Penza) who is seeing an English nurse, Beth (Jo Caruana) for she cannot bear the thought of her son’s close association with one of the hated Britons.
The young man is neither pro-British nor pro-Italian, but his love for Beth is strong and genuine.
Then something strange happens. Following Ersilia’s interrogation by British Intelligence, Davide learns that Beth, who also loves him, is being sent away from Malta on the same ship bearing the Maltese deportees to Alexandria, and he never receives any letters from her subsequently.
In despair he abandons his studies, then does the unspeakable – for his mother – by enlisting in the army.
Act One includes a couple of scenes set in 1975 that throw more light on what we have been allowed to see happening in 1940 – one of them showing the dying Ersilia in hospital with Davide (now played by Stefan Farrugia) and asking desperately for Deguara in connection with a will she has made, while Deguara at the end of the phone makes unconvincing excuses not to go.
This same scene is repeated in act two, without the interjected scene with Deguara, and now we learn what has really happened.
We now see Ersilia’s interrogation by the bluff but cunning Intelligence Colonel (Paul Barnes) in which she is blackmailed into revealing the people attending a pre-war meeting with an Italian high official in return for the promise that Davide will not be deported with his father.
Ersilia, however, does get a bonus: the colonel’s promise to have Beth removed from Malta and to have her letters from abroad to Davide withheld.
We also learn Deguara has Ersilia’s sealed letters confessing her betrayal of the pro-Italians and her action regarding Beth. When the adult Davide, who has had an unsuccessful marriage, learns all this, his cup overflows with grief.
Despite Vella’s inclusion of figures who are black marketers and a man simply called a Jackal in the cast list (who loots bombed houses and sells what he has stolen), and soldiers wearing odd-looking uniforms, the main impact the play makes is that of a personal tragedy forced on normal people like Ersilia, Davide and, of course, Deguara.
Suspecting Ersilia’s treachery, Deguara decides to forget his duty as a legal adviser so as not to let Ersilia obliterate the traces of what she has done. Davide’s life has been ruined not just by his loss of Beth but by the widespread knowledge of what Ersilia did during the war. A political play about the wartime internees has still to be written.
Fenech’s production is hampered by the set designed for it, with a large curtain obstructing part of the stage, and drawn only for the scenes laid in Deguara’s office or in the hospital.
The remainder of the stage is too narrow for most of the many other scenes, resulting in restricted movements and sometimes clumsy groupings. The clothes sometimes do not look like 1940 clothes at all, especially Ersilia’s costume with the skirt slashed up her thigh in the interrogation scene, and you could not dial through a phone call then, as the characters do, and for some years after the war.
Suda is a grave but not over-serious Deguara. The scene when he decides to ignore Ersilia’s appeal from hospital shows his psychological subtlety at its best. He and Abela’s Ersilia, a patriot who allows her maternal love to overcome her patriotism, and her hatred of Britain to overcome her maternal love – a determined woman stronger than the men around her – are the mainstays of the production.
The 1940 Davide’s performance (Penza) is weakened by his sometimes gabbled vocal delivery, a delivery that improves with age when he is played by a steadier and much more likeable Farrugia.
In the secondary parts, Renato Dimech overdoes the emotions as Amodeo, Michelle Zerafa’s English is too good for a common or garden housemaid in 1940, and Caruana’s Beth never comes to life, not just because the part is underwritten but also because, like her sweetheart Davide, she has problems with clear enunciation.
It was, in fact, a relief to take in without problems Barnes’s spee-ches as the Colonel. This is not a large part, but it was long enough for Barnes to hold my attention.
I should add that the scene of Ersilia’s interrogation is entirely in the English language and, as one would expect from Vella, written quite well too.