‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players’. So says Shakespeare’s Jacques in As You Like it, in 1600. The meaning of the phrase is perhaps somewhat different to what this leading article is attempting to convey, but it is a powerful message nonetheless; life is like a play, and we merely go through stages and act them out throughout our lives.

But what of the other side of the stage? The current production of Even More Fourplay is wit and satire at its best. The performance featured sketches regarding Arriva, Zumba, Daphne Caruana Galizia, John Bundy, older people and social media and many, many more.

The performance was, in itself, brilliant. It was witty and funny. But it goes one further. Through well-intentioned satire, a performance such as this can draw the public’s attention to issues of national importance. Make no mistake, the sketches were not mere Mickey takes, there was a message in each and every one of them.

Each of the writers who took part in this performance came up with the goods in taking seemingly exhausted subjects and ‘speaking’ about them to a contained audience. In other words, the stage has the ability to resurrect issues which people are sick and fed up of, and giving them a whole new twist. So yes, the stage has a big role to play. It is not mainstream media, far from it. But it is another form of ‘media’ which tackles issues with a breath of fresh air, a good dose of wit and some very good humour. Of course, the actors make the performance what it is, but the script shows a lot more and it is often only after you stop laughing and re-emerge into the normal world that the subtle nuances become apparent to you.

The stage also has the power to say things which would normally be a bit taboo. Let us give an example. The audience roared with laughter when a reference was made to the wucken fanker – an obvious jibe at Austin Gatt. In the mainstream media, that would almost be termed offensive and would not normally be published, except we are using it as a very good example of what the stage can achieve versus the printed word, television or radio. In that context, it was deemed to be hilarious and a very stark reflection of what the general public thinks about the issue. A lot has been said about changing media and entertainment and the migration to online sources. But it would be a sad day indeed if the stage and printed media were to disappear. Perhaps the best skit of all was the three newscasters from Net, PBS and One – all of whom painted ridiculously different stories about the same news item. This particular ‘act’ gave more credence to the leading article published in this newspaper last week which more or less said the same thing. And this leads us to ask the critics: Do you still think we are so wrong to chastise and berate the political stations for their absolutely skewed and manipulated news ‘items’?