The Malta Drama Centre is commemorating the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth (1812-1870) with a number of performances showcasing students in the primary and intermediate levels.

Dickens, who at the beginning of his cultural life was also an actor, had a difficult childhood and, in fact, many of the children he depicts in his novels exhibit definite autobiographical traits.

The performances at the Drama Centre will draw an audience made up of parents and friends of the young drama students, as well as external drama students. Based on a number of dramatised biographical elements and short extracts from such renowned works as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and the Pickwick Papers, the performances also include dramatised dialogue and passages set to music.

Lizzie Eldridge, one of the tutor-directors, who is involved with a group of teenage drama students, describes the project thus: “Our students are exploring themes, both as they are impacted by life and as they are represented in Dickens. These scenarios still have contemporary currency: the break-up of the family unit, institutionalised children, present-day poverty and how this impacts children’s welfare and development, to highlight some of the themes Dickens deals with. The groups are giving shape to all that they have learnt and researched about Dickens, which is being integrated into the basis of a series of dramatic improvisations that will be presented in March.”

Commenting to the press, the Drama Centre’s co-ordinator Mario Azzopardi stressed that it is important that students animate the novelist’s life and the characters Dickens has created: “He is not only a literary artist but a courageous social observer who took upon himself the role the media should have been carrying out, especially where the well-being of disadvantaged children and young people are concerned.”