Petra Caruana Dingli (‘Two shocking rejected plays’, The Sunday Times of Malta, June 30), seems to be an avid follower of the absurd, a master spinner, and an ardent practitioner of the kind of journalism where stories are shot from the hip without any research or follow-up.
Had she given me the slightest of courtesy before writing her sad story about my plays, and called me, she would have found out that:
Min qatel lil Daphne Caruana Galizia? (Who killed Daphne Caruana Galizia?) was never, repeat, never, written. It was a play I had commissioned (no I was not the intended author) inspired by the book How I killed Margaret Thatcher by Anthony Cartwright, written during Thatcher’s premiership. (The UK government tried unsuccessfully to ban it). Min Qatel lil Daphne Caruana Galizia was satire, where the infamous blogger was to be found dead followed by a hilarious whirlwind investigation. Both parties come under suspicion until the curtain falls on the revelation that she had choked on her own bile. That was the plot to be.
The Manoel Theatre was informed that I was developing this play and they immediately had reservations. At this time no one had read anything. There was nothing to read! Still, on the merit of the title alone, the national theatre refused to have anything to do with this proposed production.
The author was taking his time in delivering and I insisted to read the 10 pages he had prepared. (It takes a year of development to finish a script.) What I read I did not like, and I decided to stop the development. The author was paid up to that stage of development and the matter died there.
So much for accurate journalism! Have you seen the hit show The Good Fight? The title’s sequence features an exploding image of Donald Trump. The show eviscerated Trump during its three seasons with subversive plots galore. Also, a recent production of Julius Ceasar in New York, where all characters appeared in modern dress and located in the White House instead of Rome, portrayed the character of Ceasar as Trump, with orange wig and red tie. He is of course murdered on stage. There are many other examples.
Then, last year, 2019, a year after I left Valletta 2018, I wrote the satire Ix-Xiħa. I was called to meet Kenneth Zammit Tabona at the Manoel. During a very pleasant conversation he told me how much he liked the script (as did other members of the board) and in a very pleasant manner he suggested that I remove all real names and rewrite the way I was making fun of Maltese aristocracy, which he found insulting. A day later he rejected the script. The reason he gave me was that in his view, the Maltese public is not ready for this kind of theatre.
Ix-Xiħa is a scathing, hilarious send-up about Maltese politics, targeting both parties. One of the main characters is a blogger. We had tried, unsuccessfully, to do this in a previous commissioned production, Sibna iż-żejt. It was not one of our best, far from it. In it was a cartoonish representation of Caruana Galizia and the irony of it all, I cut that scene after the first night. It just did not work. Żejt made fun of the Joseph Muscat premiership and ended with a violent coup d’etat by the Nationalist Party. Hmmmm.
I insisted on finding a political satire and when the search proved futile I decided to write it myself. Ix-xiħa is much more than the subplot featuring the blogger character. Following the death of a rich Maltese aristocrat, her four adult children discover that she had left her millions in the hands of her maid for her to decide how the inheritance was to be divided... You’ll have to come see it to see what happens next. Yes, one of the characters is based on Caruana Galizia and the satire is scathing, in your face, and shockingly familiar.
Petra did not read Ix-xiħa, and yet she accuses me of collusion with the government in an attempt of planting hate against Daphne. Oh well, now you know. How absurd is that?