It is a busy time for the experimental theatre group Aleateia. In between performances at Evenings on Campus and Dramafest, in August they will also present a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Meanwhile, their artistic director Simon Bartolo is also busily working on a Scottish-Maltese collaboration on a theatre production which will be staged at St James Cavalier shortly.

Simon not only directs the plays but also writes his own scripts. Nevertheless he has an unusual way of doing this. “The way I work, I don’t even give my performers the whole script. I give them bits and pieces to see what they come up with and then after each rehearsal I go home and rearrange the script to suit what they’re doing during the workshops. In fact before I start working with the performers, I never write the ending. The ending always comes a few weeks before the actual performance,” he says.

In his view drama is a power struggle between characters, he explains. “When I write I have in mind an idea about which characters are the stronger ones but I never know who’s going to win. It’s a discovery, until the end.”

So crucial is the actors’ say in the play, however, that sometimes they turn the whole thing over and a weak character becomes very strong because of the way the actor plays him or her. “At that point I continue writing and changing according to how the actors are playing the lines,” he says.

For Simon, in fact, actors are empowered and responsible, just like artists. “I never play with puppets.”

Aleateia sets out to question the rigid rules of the director/performer relationship which exists in traditional Maltese theatre, says Simon. “In my hopeful way it should be a model for the way people live their lives,” he says. “I feel that in Malta there are too many people trying to tell us what we should do, politically, religiously… the adverts tell us what we should be spending our money on. It’s all getting too artificial, I think.”

So within Aleateia actors have to take responsibility for their interpretations, actions and readings. “It’s very difficult for the actors. I make them take full responsibility for what they do on stage. So for me theatre can be a model for life.”

In a way, undermining received norms is a political action, I point out. “Yes, but not political in the Maltese sense of nationalism and socialism. I’ve never written a play about the Maltese situation – it’s more the way we work, the group politics. It’s not about a political situation in Malta which we then attack.”

In fact, a look at Aleateia’s upcoming performances reveals that Aleateia is not really preoccupied with political content per se. Rather the plays tend to focus on issues of identity, personality and deviance, favourite themes with Simon.

An example is Drowning Lilies, which was first performed last year; a shorter version will be performed between 29-31 July at the MITP theatre in Valletta as part of the Evenings on Campus events. The play will also be performed between 16-20 August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Aleateia will also perform a changed version of The Waiting Room, renamed The Hollow Room, in Denmark in collaboration with Du’ theatre group in mid-October on the occasion of the Hans Christian Andersen bicentenary celebrations. Performances in Malta will be held at the beginning of October.

Meanwhile, they are also working on Marbut, their only Maltese piece this year, which will be performed as part of the Malta DramaFest between 26-28 August. It is also the only play in which Simon himself will be acting.

Simon is also writing and directing a Scottish-Maltese collaboration, entitled Most of All, which deals with cultural identity and which will be held at St James Cavalier in a couple of weeks.

The whole performance is being created out of workshops, explains Simon; for instance, he asks the performers questions about their perceptions of the two countries, takes notes and then goes home and scripts the answers. In other scenes, the actors themselves have come up with questions, resulting in some pretty outlandish lines, says Simon. The result is a very entertaining play, playing on the absurd but which brings up a lot of issues about the superficiality of tourism – thinking that you are getting to know a different cultural identity when in fact you are sampling the country’s tourism experience, says Simon.

Drowning Lilies is also about identity – although this time it is personal identity. It tells the story of two Siamese twins joined at the hip – Emiliana and Liliana who refer to themselves by a single name Lily. The play depicts the struggle between the twins’ mother – who uses the twins to make money – and an American poet who lived in the 1920s called Edmund Zanter, with whom the twins are in love.

“In almost all the literature I read about Siamese twins, it’s very rare for Siamese twins to want to separate. Usually they’re separated before they can decide for themselves, when they’re very young. They say, ‘This is our normality, we want to be like this.’”

Although on a surface level the play is about twins, it also brings up other issues of interdependence. So important was it for Simon that the actors should believe in the work, that he never revealed to them that the poet Edmund Zanter was his own invention and that Zanter’s poetry was actually his own.

Drowning Lilies is the second of a trilogy. It was preceded by Blazing Orchids – which dealt with split personalities – and will be followed by another play which will also deal with identity, says Simon.

Producing performances on a consistent basis means that the group has to work very hard, often without any help, says Simon. “If you want to do something, you have to do it no matter what. If you don’t find any help you still do it – and you work at it. We work all year round, meeting two or three times a week for three, four hours. We do workshops, play games and share our reading experiences; we come up with new ways of working which we use when we start working on a performance. So it’s ongoing…”

He says he was shocked that the group did not find any help to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, not even from the Arts Council. Nevertheless, it is important to focus on the work and not waste too much creative energy battling, says Simon. “If in the mid-1990s I had made a set of demands and did not bend at all I wouldn’t have produced all the plays we did to date. I think that art is more important.”

Aleateia’s focus on their art is evident even from their choice of logo, which consists of a circle of alternating arrows pointing inwards and outwards. The inward arrows represent the energy the group absorbs from various sources like audiences, books, music and so on. The outward arrows are the energy the group shoots out. It is an uninterrupted cycle of intensities continuously flowing in and out of the group, explains Simon.

Aleateia was formed in 1992 when three of Simon’s friends – Victor Debono, Russell Muscat and Loranne Vella – formed a group and asked him to join. At the time he was writing poetry and short stories and was not involved in drama at all.

“Victor wanted to do La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Primadonna) by Ionesco. We worked a lot on this play. After some months working on Cantatrice and Lewis Carroll’s two books on Alice, we came up with the name Aleateia. In fact the word ‘Aleateia’ is a reworking of ‘Alice’ and it means ‘truth’. In Maltese the name would be ‘vera’. Aleateia is our own version of the word ‘Alethia’ which is Greek for ‘truth’. So it’s our own version of the truth because we chose to spell it this way.”

In 1992, the newly-formed group could not afford the royalties and did not know how to go about applying for rights until Victor came up with the idea of using a scene from the play as inspiration for a new play.

“There’s a scene in The Bald Primadonna in which two characters, Mr and Mrs Martin say: ‘I met you on the train last week, didn’t I? That’s where we met, we must have met!’ And then it transpires that they’re married and the relationship between them is so bad that they keep forgetting they even know each other. So everytime they meet, they go: ‘I know you somewhere… Is that your address? That’s where I live! What side of the bed are you in?’

“So we decided to use the train scene – which is mentioned but never done – and I said I’d write it. And it was also inspired by some of the lines which the characters say in other scenes but it was a new scene which doesn’t appear in the play.”

Simon was cast as a tramp who could wrap himself in newspapers, effectively as the writer wraps himself in words. “And we covered the whole room in newspapers – the audience had to wade through ankle-deep newspapers, everything was just words, words, words. Because if there are too many words they start to lose their meaning… so that was my first experience and that’s how I started writing and directing.”

Victor and Russell departed from the group some years ago to follow other paths, while Loranne has continued training all the actors that join Aleateia.

Aleateia’s focus on their art is not achieved at the expense of audience accessibility and enjoyment which, Simon says, he bears constantly in mind.

“I do keep accessibility in mind. At the beginning I didn’t – I was young and rather radical and would say, ‘If you get it, you get it; if you don’t, you don’t.’ I still have a few such elements in my plays but, for instance, I always try to include a good story. I enjoy watching a good story. And I enjoy laughing and crying in the theatre – so I don’t see why in my own works I shouldn’t have that.”

However, Aleateia also tries to provide something for the audience to think about – without forcing them, says Simon. “So if there are members of the audience who are not in a thinking mood they can just come and laugh at the jokes and enjoy the story and move on. But if they want to come and enjoy themselves and set their brain cells working, I think that should be present as well. So I try to combine the two elements,” he says.

Moreover, he says, occasionally during rehearsals the actors themselves will point out any inaccessible bits, says Simon. Although a lot of research goes into the plays, he tries to work it into the lines, to not leave it visible. “I think the audience will feel that there is a certain depth in the work without the research being too obvious.”

Nevertheless, the programme for Drowning Lilies, for instance is filled with quotations from different researchers on conjoined twins and their psychology. “These are snippets of things which formed the way we worked on the play. So if they want to, the audience can look them up and go deeper; also they know that we’ve done our homework.”

Of course, Aleateia’s working methods set them apart from much traditional Maltese theatre which, Simon comments, is hardly experimental or controversial enough. “I would say that a lot of – not everything – but a lot of Maltese theatre tries to play safe and doesn’t take risks. I believe that if art doesn’t risk then it’s not art; I agree wholeheartedly with what Janet Winterson says in her book Art Objects: there has to be objection and rejection of what has happened before even if it was good and even if you believe in it – I don’t think you can move on unless you reject it.”

Some of the exciting, younger groups that are emerging like Du’ and Urbania, for example, are trying hard not to repeat what came before them, he says.

“I think at the moment Maltese theatre is trying to please its audiences too much – which I think is unfair on the audience. It’s like a mother who spoils her child by buying him too many sweets,” he says.

Some very good Maltese performers leave the theatre to work on television because that is the only way they can get paid for what they are doing, says Simon. “I don’t really blame them, of course because after 14 years of working really hard with Aleateia and sticking to what I believe, I don’t have a penny to show for it.”

Nevertheless theatre has given him much in other ways, says Simon. “I’m very happy because while trying to give something to the audience, it’s given us – and me – so much – in terms of collaborations, people I got to know and new experiences”.

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