The Pardon Beggars, a one-hour radio play, won the regional prize for Europe in this year’s BBC and British Council Playwriting competition. This is the third time that Vincent Vella (pictured right) has been declared regional winner for Europe. In 1999 it was Ernesto Panza – the tale of an artless revolutionary, which was subsequently broadcast on the BBC World Service, and in 2005 it was Valeriana – The Titan’s Rock.

This competition is organised every two years, with this year’s edition attracting over one thousand two hundred entries. For the purpose of the competition, the world is divided into six regions with a winner from each region. Two of the regional winners are then recorded at Bush House and broadcast over the World Service.

Vella’s play takes us to 1976 when the Military Junta in Argentina came to power following a coup d’êtat, unleashing the infamous ‘dirty war’ during which thirty thousands of Argentines, including labour leaders, workers, human rights advocates, scientists, doctors, and political party leaders were either assassinated or made to disappear. The Regime was forced to relinquish power following the humiliating debacle of the Falklands war.

Many of the Junta leaders were subsequently tried and jailed but many influential sectors of Argentine society, like the military and the financial, were still closely associated with them. Several ex-Junta leaders were pardoned. In the play, the discredited old guard, realizing that they cannot rely on popular support, resort to more subversive means to resurrect the Regime and its ideals – like a phoenix from the ashes.

Solidad, the daughter of an ex-minor military officer, was born in 1974, two years before the coup. Today she is a divorced thirty-three year old university lecturer. She is a ‘pardon beggar’; one of the tormented children of middle class parents, obsessed with expiating the sins of their fathers. Self-willed and rebellious, all through her adolescence and even now as a woman, she drives her father, Edgardo, frantic.

One day, seemingly by accident, she comes into possession of information which should never have been known. Her refusal to compromise entraps her in a claustrophobic and terrifying world. Too late, she discovers that what is being played out is far too big to pay heed to the fate of mere individuals as all claims of love or kinship collapse before the supreme need to safeguard the grand, dark design.