I was listening to the rendering of the passion extract from the Gospel of St Luke (Chapter 19: 28-40), during mass, last Palm Sunday, at the Divine Mercy Sanctuary in San Pawl tat-Tarġa, Naxxar.

As the celebrant and the two accompanying readers started to read the narrative, in my memory I recalled moments in my life when I was involved with the Passion of Our Lord.

Good Friday procession

In Victoria, Gozo, the only Good Friday procession that was held in my childhood was that organised by St George’s parish.

My younger brother Anton and I – and later our youngest brother Giovanni – used to take part in this procession carrying cushions with a cross on them, a lantern fixed to one-and-a-half metre long stick, and as a ‘knight’ in front of the effigy of Our Lady of Sorrows.

I used to feel in the seventh heaven when, a week or so before Holy Week, I used to go and see the bodies of the Passion effigies placed in the church and have their papier mâché hands, feet, and heads fixed in place, and dressed up with real rich, velvet, colourful clothes.

I can still hear the sound made by heavy iron chains, tied to bare feet, being drawn all along the way of the procession, by devout men wearing ‘Ku Klux’-like hoods in order not to be recognised. It was said that these men used to do this as a penitence for a grace received.

Il-Passjoni

In my boyhood, I used to attend daily religious lessons at St John Bosco’s Salesian Oratory, in Victoria.

When the actors’ group started to rehearse director Dun Alwiġi’s script of Il-Passjoni (The Passion), I was ‘chosen’ to play the part of one of those who, during the trial of Jesus, shouted ‘Sallbu. Sallbu’ (‘Crucify Him. Crucify Him.’). It was in 1953, and I was 11 years old.

A scene from the 1953 production of the play Il-Passjoni.

I remember how, during the acting, I shouted and held a staff in my right hand shaking it towards the sky, as I was asked to do, from an open space in the hanging scene, at the back of the stage.

The play was very well received by all those who paid for a seat for one of the three or four performances held. Unfortunately, some of the commuters, after the end of the Passion acts, still expected to see the ‘farce’ or ‘comic act’ that brought to an end the usual plays; and Toni ‘Tal-Morella’ – an excellent comedian – was not allowed to take part in the Passion play because even just his appearance on the stage would make people laugh.

Dun Alwiġi’s Passion play was put up again during Lent of 1961. This time I was 17 and was given three different roles in the play: that of the apostle St Andreas in the first act representing the ‘Last Supper’, again as part of the mob shouting for Jesus’ crucifixion, and as a Jewish soldier in the act where Christ was crucified on Mount Calvary.

The acting of Vincent Grech as Jesus was so realistic and impressive. I still remember how life-like was the vest he was wearing, coloured like naked skin, with blood stains to look like Jesus divested of his clothes before being nailed on the cross.

Extraordinary also was Toni Mizzi’s role of Judas Iscariot in both his acting and rendition of speech. Among other remarkable actors there were Ġanninu Cremona in the role of Pontius Pilate, and his brother Ċikku in the role of Caiaphas.

As in other Salesian oratories, no female actors were allowed to take part. However, Emma Mizzi was photographed looking like Jesus’ sorrowful mother, to be reproduced on the front page of the brochure of the play.

Diego Fabri’s Processo a Gesù

I had known Joe Friggieri – today a University of Malta professor – from a long time before.

A photo of the author (standing, left) in the role of Caiaphas in Diego Fabri's play Processo a Gesu.

One day, he asked me to take part in a play he was directing: Italian playwright Diego Fabri’s Processo a Gesù – first performed in public in 1955, and which had been denounced as “an offence to religion and instigation to social hatred”. I was ‘offered’ the part of the High Priest Caiaphas. A month after the performances in Malta and in Gozo, I learnt that the part I played was meant to be played by renowned Maltese actor Charles Arrigo who declined to take part after the then very recent passing away of his father.

I was proud to play the part in which I had a soliloquy – the first I ever had in my short life as an amateur actor. However, I still wonder if the Gozitans enjoyed the play. I am sure they were more than surprised to see some people – among them a ‘prostitute’ – who, in the second act, rose up from among the sitting audience and went up on the stage to take part in the acting.

Zeffirelli’s opus and Robert Powell

Another picture of the Passion that came to mind were scenes from the film Jesus of Nazareth by eminent Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, in which the main role of Jesus was brilliantly played by British actor Robert Powell. I had been captivated by his acting throughout. His solemn rendering of the ‘Beatitudes’ and the ‘Our Father’ still reverberate in my mind.