Thursday saw the handing down of a judgement by a court on a libel case filed by actress and activist Pia Zammit against the newspaper it-Torca.

The paper had published pictures of her in a parody Nazi uniform costume; pictures which were taken backstage at a performance of the famous World War Two comedy Allo, Allo!.  The newspaper suggested that the actress had made light of Nazi symbolism, publishing comments by an anonymous ‘educator’ who said that Zammit’s image had been offensive to the victims of Nazism.

In the decision, Magistrate Rachel Montebello disagreed with the argument that the newspaper knew of the production as it had reviewed it ten years prior, and that the parody in the production was obvious.

It-Torca’s lawyer Mifsud Bonnici meanwhile told the court that “The controversy is not that she sympathises with Nazism but the use of it in comedy. Silly things about matters of great importance are insensitive.”

Montebello backed the argument and threw Zammit’s libel case out, ordering her to pay all the costs of the case.

The judgement drew widespread derision from the theatre community. It was described as a dangerous decision which could have wide-reaching repercussions on the theatre industry and the very right to free speech.

The derision is well-founded.  Freedom of creative expression is at the core of theatre and it is the fact that theatre brings up uncomfortable subjects is what makes it so powerful.

Artists have spent years fighting for freedom of speech and fighting against censorship in this country: this judgement and its failure to distinguish between the actor and the character being played risks taking that fight back to square one.

However, there is a bigger picture to this matter.

Let us not kid ourselves: nobody ever had any doubt on the fact that Pia Zammit is not a Nazi sympathizer – not even the people who wrote the story in the first place.

This story was published at a time when Zammit was one of those at the forefront of the activist scene fighting for justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia and against the Joseph Muscat administration.

Without delving into the political argument over what she said – it is clear that upon seeing this, people started to trawl through her social media profile (and maybe that of others, who knows) in the hope that they would find something that they can use to their advantage.

Lo and behold, a decade-old picture of her backstage in a costume before a production holding up two swastikas which were also part of the costume was unearthed.

This picture was then used by the newspaper in question – it-Torca, the leanings of which are fairly obvious to everyone – in a deliberate attempt to ridicule her and to discredit her on the basis that her activism was against the newspaper’s own leanings, and in the hope of intimidating others who may have been thinking of following her example.

Those well-versed with the history of theatre will know about the Theatre of the Absurd movement.  This is a movement which built itself on the ignorance or distortion of conventional plots, characterisations and themes in order to convey the irrational and illogical nature of a present-day reality.

We’ll leave it up you to draw the parallels.