JOE VELLA BONDIN speaks to Marie Benoît

about the sorry state of theatre in Maltese and his

two award-winning plays which were published recently

In the introduction to your two plays recently published by Klabb Kotba Maltin under the title Is-Sejha taz-Zmien you comment that Maltese theatre is in a sorry state or in your own words: “jinsab f’sitwazzjoni tal-biki” – could you give your views about this to our readers.

Let me point out first of all that my comments have to do with what is normally referred to as teatru not teatrin. Teatrin continues to be relatively vibrant and includes the soap operas that seem to be the sum total of what is offered on our TV channels by way of Maltese plays. When we come to teatru the picture is as dismal as Malthusian economics. During the current theatrical season – as far as I remember and I would be very happy to be wrong – no original Maltese play was in the Manoel’s programme and in that of St James, and there was only one play in Maltese. And the picture is getting progressively worse because I’m afraid there seems to have been a tacit decision by the powers whose responsibility it is to support it, to give up on Maltese drama.

What makes you think so?

Let me give you three reasons.

In an attempt to revive Maltese drama, the Department of Culture, in the mid-1990s, introduced the Francis Ebejer Playwriting Competition which resulted in a number of significant original plays being written and produced. But one of the first moves of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts, set up in 2002 to replace the Department of Culture and supposedly to improve its work, was to drop this contest.

During the 2002/3 season, the Teatru Manoel introduced with much media flourish, a scheme to promote Maltese drama. Through this the Manoel Theatre Management Committee committed itself to produce two plays by Maltese dramatists during each theatrical season. This scheme is now dead and buried.

Our national radio stations have now stopped the broadcasting of radio plays. The majority of established playwrights practically all began their career by writing radio plays. And in all those countries where the native theatre flourishes, the writing of radio plays is actively encouraged.

In Is-Sejha taz-Zmien there are two of your award winning plays, both of them have been performed. Can you please talk about Kull gieh u glorja first of all?

What was your main scope for writing this play? What points are you making, what messages are you hoping to transmit?

The writing of Kull gieh u glorja was prompted by the Department of Culture’s announcement of the IV Edition (1999) Konkors Kitba ghall-Palk Francis Ebejer which this play went on to win. Its major theme, based on conflicts involving love/ holiness/ conscience/ power, examines the concept of saintliness. After recent events, I therefore believe the play has become even more relevant. Let me show this by quoting the words of one of my characters: “…in two millennia of fervent Catholicism when it was often called more Catholic than the Pope, my country cannot boast of a single native saint in the liturgical calendar.”

The second drama is Dawk li fuq l-igfna jbahhru. What does Igfna mean? Again what is the main theme and main message of this play?

Igfna means ships and the title of the play is taken from Psalm 106 Verse 23: “They that go down to the sea in ships.” Originally written in English for the 2001 BBC World Service Radio play Competition when it was chosen as a finalist, it examines the theme of love and responsibility. The plot evolves in a Maltese fishing village and uses the backdrop of Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities to emphasise the point that an individual’s inherent loneliness often derives from unsolicited feelings and passions.

Your work has often been labelled “controversial”. As in the play mentioned above, it treats predominantly the universal theme of the underlying loneliness of the individual as a consequence of his own needs, longings and spiritual perceptions. Can you comment further on this?

I suppose my work has been labelled controversial because it may present human issues from perspectives, which challenge normal hypotheses. But let me make one point clear. When I write, I am concerned with the telling of a story in the form of a play and I try to write a story, which is both riveting and attention grabbing.

When people go to the theatre they do not go there to be sermonised or to have messages and morals crammed down their throat. They go there to be entertained and take their mind off their countless day-to-day worries. If, after attending the play, the audience is driven to think and to ask questions goaded by what it has seen and heard, then the writer can consider that what he has written is valid. At least in my case, it is only then that I start examining the inherent implications of the story I have written. Somebody said that when a writer writes he is really writing about himself. For me, this has often been a very sobering thought.

You have accomplished a great deal in your time. You have studied music and singing and you were a leading bass until you retired in 1990. You have also written for international publications such as the prestigious Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is the leading reference work and contributed some 86 abstracts for the New York based Repértoire International de Littérature Musicale. In all this tremendous oeuvre and from your observations of life and art do you have any comments to make?

Frankly when I consider the accomplishments of other writers and researchers, I do not think mine are all that spectacular. Now, having reached what can be branded my mature adulthood (at least from the point of view of time!), I can look back with a certain objectivity on the creative energy I have exploited so far and conclude that I could have spent at least some of it in much better ways. For example, my computer file “Letters – Press” tells me that over the last 10 years, I have penned over 100,000 words in correspondence to the media, a lot of it in letters which hardly anybody has read or which have probably not influenced any decision. Other letters were written to defend my work against reviews of bigoted ignorant critics.

That is a huge amount of effort – equivalent to one novel or six two-act stage plays or 11 radio plays…

Yes, but what would have happened to these plays had I written them instead of writing to editors of newspapers? I want my plays to be produced not be left in some drawer to gather dust. It is only then that I can decide whether what I have written is valid or not. Unfortunately, I see no good future for plays in Maltese. Plays in English have squeezed out almost all space, which the Maltese playwright had, and the authorities whose job it is to put this right seem to be powerless to intervene or do not have the political will to do so.

You obviously consider that a theatre in the vernacular is important for any language including the Maltese language.

Naturally, It is the most important element of keeping a language alive and developing. The Maltese language is slowly losing its importance in Malta and English is taking over as our primary language. Anybody with a bit of sense would by now have realized this, so there is no need to elaborate.

Now, however, it will be English. And, unfortunately, English will not be the equivalent to the beautiful classical Italian, which was then utilised. All current evidence shows that it will only be some type of pidgin English.

Let me have the last word. Italian too, has lost a great deal of ground as the younger generations now prefer to see American soap operas, MTV and so on. In fact, we are fast becoming a nation that speaks three languages and all of them badly.