That we should, at this early stage of the 21st century, be censoring theatrical works that only a few hundred would bother to watch anyway is not only incredible but also an insult to this nation supposedly caught in an e-orgasm.
While the national skyline is almost daily being adorned with new uniform blocks of flats, sometimes glamorously referred to as gardens and others, inexplicably, as trendy mansions, and while buzzwords like e-government and smart this and smart that are being hurled at us with officious ease, a small group of people are still meeting inside forlorn civil service offices to decide what adult fellow citizens should or should not watch at the theatre.
The recent ban, happily condemned and contested by many in Malta and elsewhere in Europe, of Anthony Neilson’s Stitching is an instant throw-back to the dark old days of total censorship when films were horrendously scissored, newspapers inked over, books refused local distribution, plays banned by the dozen, and even harmless poetry in Maltese denied presentation at national cultural institutions.
It is a past that no right-minded person on these islands can be proud of or willing to revive. We have all had our first-hand experiences. Way back in the Seventies, during which time I had a book review column in the old Malta News, I once had to take on, both publicly and privately, the censors on behalf of a bewildered, disbelieving, Malta-based author who had just been informed that the free copies sent to him by the publishers of his new novel were not being released on grounds of morality.
The book was Clancy and the author – and friend – Frederic Mullally, who was then living in the quiet village of Gudja. Mullally quite rightly could not understand how he could have been morally offended or in any way tainted by his own writing and our official objection was eventually accepted... but not without yet another sting in the bureaucratic tail. The books were released with an inglorious rubber-stamp mark in carnival red ink on each and every one of them with the words “For personal use only”.
It is worth saying that Mullally’s semi-autobiographical book was at the same time being produced into a highly successful television drama series for the BBC.
The years that came before this bizarre piece of censorship were replete with even more sledgehammer censorship tactics. Bountifully endowed ladies on UK papers were either scissored out or blotched out with ugly splashes of black ink. Poems were also banned from presentation at the Manoel (national) Theatre on the most frivolous and condescending pretexts. The result, at least on one particular occasion, was a number of theatre seats wilfully damaged by the young protesters of the time, most of them involved in then vibrant local Sixties literary scene.
Today, all that seems to belong to the Neolithic age. Then, hey presto, up come Friggieri and Co from the awkwardly named Stage Classification Board, which I’d rather refer to as the board of censors, to present us with an incredibly rare fossil of primitive mentality. In just one sweeping moment they have taken us back to the awful days when the majority of law-abiding citizens were expected to follow the dictat and views of a chosen few who enjoyed the privilege of seeing things the rest were denied.
The “Stitching” fiasco confirms we have not moved any nearer to social and cultural maturity; we are probably caught in the same time-frame featuring the American journalist in immediate-post-War Japan when he wrote to a friend and added the note: “Don’t know if this will ever arrive because the Japanese censor may open it.” Then, a few days after, he received a note from the Japanese post office saying: ”The statement in your letter is not correct. We do not open letters.”
There was also the young lady who received a letter from her soldier sweetheart from “Somewhere in the Pacific area”. On opening the envelope she found, instead of a letter, a thin strip of paper bearing the brief message “Your boy friend still loves you, but he talks too much. Signed: Censor.”
Even the great Cervantes is metaphorically resuscitated. The French Ambassador to Spain once complimented him on the great reputation he had acquired with his Don Quixote. Cervantes whispered in his ear: “Had it not been for the Inquisition, I would have made my book much more entertaining.”
I have always believed that a censor is a man or woman who knows more than he or she thinks other people ought to know. For too many decades in world history, the censor has had the peculiar faculty of banning just what the rest wanted to hear, see and read, and it seems some here still want to retain, albeit on an irregular and clumsy basis, this system of intellectual one-upmanship.
The furore that has followed the banning of Stitching is hopefully a good sign that people are no longer ready to accept censorship in whichever form it takes, including the sad and stupid instance of theatre productions being banned at will and at the whim of three persons (as has been in this case) who seem to think they have the divine right of declaring what the theatre-going public should or should not see. In this electronic age when the Internet has finally ripped off the last vestiges of State-controlled censorship, it is simply unacceptable.
Other critics, no doubt more qualified than yours truly, of the Stage Classification Board’s decision to ban Stitching have gone deeper into Neilson’s work being proposed for the small St James Cavalier theatre. But whatever the merits or otherwise of his work, it is the stone-age idea that it should be prohibited and the Maltese public denied the right to watch it that has rightly irked almost everyone having even a mere semblance of liberal vision.