One of my sisters demonstrated an interest in making a Lampuki pie and asked me for a recipe. The Anne and Helen Caruana Galizia book was at hand so I eagerly gave her a copy of the recipe and hoped, once she got round to making this torta, that she would invite me over to sample it. But the next day she sent me a text message: “I guess The Lampuki pie idea was only a passing fancy.” Disappointed I left behind her door Pippa Mattei’s recipe which is slightly different to the Caruana Galizia one but it seems that she has found both recipes too time consuming and complicated for her, an impatient woman and one not terribly interested in food. I was disappointed but am still hoping that my sister-in-law who makes an excellet Lampuki pie, will send me a slice, as she does every year. But, to my disappointment, she has not pronounced herself on the matter yet. Is it the dearth of lampuki I wonder? I’ll wait a little while longer and then ask her. I am greedy but I don’t like showing it if

possible.

I managed to go to two Maltese plays in the last couple of weeks and I enjoyed both, each in a different kind of way. Karl Schembri’s Il-Manifest tal-Killer, which has always created controversy and is now selling in a new edition, took place at the MITP theatre which has never been a favourite venue of mine. It always looks as if it needs a good wash and dusting down and the lights are too low, to keep overheads down I suppose. We sat on red chairs. I cannot remember what kind of chairs we sat on the last time I was there – plastic and steel perhaps, but these brightened up the place.

Even over the weekend, Valletta is still a nightmare where parking is concerned, with all those places reserved for residents. The painted blue lines are impossible to recognise in the semi-darkness. I know the government needs to fill up its empty coffers but it is unfair to fine motorists when they park on these spaces until lashings of blue paint are used over the very worn out paint now existing.

I went to Il-Manifest with Mary Darmanin, who is always excellent company. I am not familiar enough with the novel and it is therefore difficult to make out how far the script captures the spirit of the text. As a play, it was good fun and easy watching, for though it dealt with some uncomfortable subjects, such as abuse of power, incompetent and even brutal police, media censorship and others, the use of caricature, presenting well-known types, made it very much a play in one’s comfort zone. Some clichés can make good jokes, since one is so familiar with them, and the actors took the caricatures to their limits, with some very fine acting. Mary and I loved Sandro Vella and his larger than life, but smaller than a pea brain in his role as Commissioner of Police. At certain moments I thought he would get a heart attack on stage since his acting was so true to life. Sandro is behind Maltafly.com and creative in every way. He is an IT whiz kid and teaches IT I believe. Goodness knows how he finds the time to act too, but he does. I hope to see more of him on stage as he is a born actor. He was the revelation of the evening for me as I had never seen him act before. Indeed, this may very well have been his first acting role for all I know. Both he and the lead Mario Brincat, played by Bryan Muscat who also wrote the script, made the most not only of some good lines but of the most expressive body language. However, ‘Mario’s’ slouch was too much like one of Ray Calleja’s TV characters whose name I cannot remember. The one that carried a bird around in a little cage. So, perhaps this character was not so original after all. Having said that I was in Qormi recently and to my complete surprise, there, in the very same street where I was parking, a man with a birdcage, bird and all, passed by. So, it seems that this character is part of our village life even if I had never come across anyone carrying a birdcage under his arm before.

The main problem with Il-Manifest was that on the one hand it cleverly displayed the depressing, because seemingly inevitable, ‘truth’ that police are still unschooled, uncouth and even rough; that the media bows to outside pressures all too easily; that Maltese students care more for the freedom of animals than they do for any other freedoms; that shy people have a tough time; that the lonely remain attached to ‘virtual’ relationships, and that all this is as true of the 1970s, as it is of the present decade.

On the other hand, this clever link, showing how little has indeed changed, made a lot of the play passé for old timers like me – but even Mary, who is considerably younger, commented on this.

Whilst we accept that youngsters of each generation think it ‘cool’ (as they say) to throw in the ‘f’ or in this case the ‘z’ word in every second word, it seems pathetic that a lot of the furore about the book, centred around this language. Surely there is more to being radical than this?

I find it ridiculous that the book was censored on University radio no less, for this very ‘ordinary’ way of being young! For Mary and I, who had had enough of ‘f’ words by the time we were in our twenties, which is many mangoe seasons ago, this made the play rather tame and old-fashioned. Even the description of the radio phone-ins, and the shift to blogs as ‘the’ arena for social interaction in our time, has already been done so well, and with such depth in, for example, Immanuel Mifsud’s short stories, that the evening had a strong feeling of déjà vu. Having said that, the acting was really very good, and that includes a very engaging and interactive narrator played by Chrysander Agius – so I am looking forward to seeing many of this cast again.

Alfred Buttigieg’s Ippermettili Nitlaq, at St James Cavalier, was a totally different kind of play and very thought provoking presenting the audience with a moral dilemma. As you may have already learnt from the publicity for this play it is about a young couple who resort to fertility treatment and have a baby who suffers from a dreadful and rare condition for which she has to undergo several operations if she is to live, even if that life will be spent in a wheelchair.

The paediatric surgeon – unusually a woman – was played with great sang froid, as was required of the role, by Monica Attard, wants to operate. Why she is so insistent we are not too sure. The nurse in the ward played by Liliana Portelli, who was at the same time upbeat, practical but compassionate, is against it as she has seen too many children suffer and cannot see the benefits of all these operations and gives us the message that perhaps it is best for everyone to allow the child to die. The parents (Stefan Cachia Zammit and Angele Galea) are uncertain but the father is more rational than his wife who after all bore the child for 9 months and hopes that the operations will be successful. In the end they sign the papers. Is a life spent entirely in a wheelchair and dependent on others, a life at all? The daughter certainly does not think so. The role of the daughter was played by Sharon Bezzina who was so moving and convincing.

Buttigieg also questions fertility treatments, if indirectly. Should one have a baby at any cost? Are fertility treatments monitored or are they a free for all, especially as they are big business sometimes giving hope to desperate parents and making a great deal of money out of it all? Are all the decisions which doctors take always in the interest of the patient/ relatives or is there sometimes an element of using the patient as a guinea pig? The play very cleverly makes us think of these and so many other moral questions. The play was very well cast and excellently produced by Immanuel Mifsud. It kept those of us who saw it thinking and questioning.