Manoel and Maltese theatre

Dr Paul Xuereb (The Sunday Times, June 15) continues to mislead readers by producing a series of gratuitous claims related to Mario Azzopardi's recently published It-Teatru f'Malta.

It is absolutely untrue, for instance, that plays in Maltese produced at the Catholic Institute are few. This theatre, in fact, produces only Maltese plays and always has an excellent turnout, proof enough that the public at large is interested in vernacular material.

Two recent surveys, conducted by students of Maltese Studies at the University of Malta, showed that a vast majority of audiences attending the Catholic Institute and the Salesian Theatre in Sliema prefer plays in Maltese and that another majority expects Maltese theatre to be critical of official institutions.

This is concrete evidence that if the Manoel had nourished Maltese theatre with vision and strategic planning, the situation that emerges from Mario Azzopardi's It-Teatru f'Malta would have been much better. We would perhaps have arrived to evolve teatrin into teatru, as so perceptively suggested in this paper last Sunday by Guido Saliba, a veteran of the Maltese stage ("Once Upon a Dream": National Drama Company).

Nor is it true, as claimed by Paul Xuereb, that the plays performed at the Manoel Theatre are only those the various companies want to produce. Only last month, the Manoel Theatre, on the suggestion of Paul Xuereb himself as chairman of the Drama Committee, commissioned an obscure drama, The Knight of Malta. Thousands of liri were allegedly allotted to the production and the project flopped clamorously, according to media reports.

The Manoel is also known to have commissioned work by Joe Friggieri and, more recently, because of severe pressure, by Oreste Calleja and Anthony Portelli. This means that the Manoel can, if it has the will for change, call the shots in favour of Maltese drama.

Contrary to what Dr Xuereb thinks, the Akkademja tal-Malti is in no position to do Maltese theatre a "direct service". Unlike the Manoel Theatre, the Akkademja has no premises, no administrative office, no public funds to operate and no infrastructure to influence the production of Maltese drama in any effective way.

By contrast, the Manoel is entrusted with many thousands of liri each year from public funds, in order to cater for theatrical and other cultural activities. The Manoel, it should be remembered, and as Mario Azzopardi rightly points out in his book, had its own drama school, with a writing class, and refused to continue to run it.

The Manoel has made no moves to encourage Maltese drama over the years and that is why we have arrived at this grave situation. Moreover, the Manoel has also deemed it proper to refuse, last year, an additional Lm5,000 from the Department of Culture to stage a play that placed first in Malta's "national" drama contest.

Dr Xuereb may have his own ideas about the worth of theatre pieces by the late Doreen Micallef who, I should mention, was the winner of a series of gold medal awards for drama in the late Sixties and Seventies. It was on the initiative of the Ministry of Education and Culture that her plays were revived after her death by a group of dynamic young performers and a professional television crew that provided filmed biographical images. The only fault with the production, which was innovative and bold, was that it tried to include, in full and at one go, all the one-act works that were written by Ms Micallef in her lifetime, published together under the title Wicc Imb'Wicc u Drammi Ohra.

The situation at the Manoel, as described faithfully in Azzopardi's It-Teatru f'Malta, is the result of long years of treating Maltese drama shabbily and without interest in its evolvement. There was no plan whatsoever by the Manoel Theatre to reinvent Maltese theatre and authors of worth were humiliated by being systematically ignored.

The least the Manoel could have done was to commission new scripts and if necessary, translations/adaptations into Maltese, a practice that is evident in national theatres all over Europe. The Manoel could also have revived Maltese drama festivals and started looking into teatrin as the grassroot potential for the development of Maltese indigenous theatre. As Azzopardi once more points out in his book, the teatrin texture has been explored by authors like Ebejer, Friggieri, Calleja, Alfred Sant, Vella Bondin and recently, by Marshall, Farrugia and Bartolo, and Vince Vella and Jesmond Grech. Again, Guido Saliba's contribution to this paper on June 15 is of great value in this regard.

L-Akkademja tal-Malti strongly believes that the Manoel Theatre is seriously at odds with Malta's official cultural policy and the Everitt Report conducted by a commission of European cultural experts in Malta last year. If the Manoel has killed Maltese drama by omission and neglect, the task to revive it is daunting, but Dr Xuereb cannot shrink from his responsibility as chairman of the Manoel Theatre Drama Committee, a position he has held for many long years. It is high time that this country calls for accountability, even in cultural matters. Anyhow, we need to control this anti-Maltese sentiment.

L-Akkademja tal-Malti has taken note of what was said, in another Sunday paper in English, by Professor Joe Friggieri, himself a dramatist and newly appointed chairman of the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts (MCCA). Professor Friggieri quoted the law regulating the Council in terms of cultural outreach programmes, the monitoring of standards (the Manoel has become the venue for a brand of coarse, vulgar acting that has taken wing even at St James Cavalier) and the regulation of what is being organised by such institutions run on public funds.

Most importantly, and this is of utmost importance to the Akkademja tal-Malti, the MCCA chairman has pledged that his Council will "foster and promote our own cultural identity, our language first and foremost." Few cultural activities can impact the language like theatre does and few other art forms can express a language of relevance like theatre can. The Akkademja tal-Malti hopes that Professor Friggieri's declared promise is not only sustained, but reaches the Manoel Theatre with no further delay.

Dr Briffa is president, Drama Commission, L-Akkademja tal-Malti

Paul Xuereb writes:

Charles Briffa and L-Akkademja tal-Malti labour under the illusion that certain matters can be changed from the top, when reforms have to come willingly from the bottom. One can see this in the Akkademja's brave attempts to get people to use the Maltese language, and use it correctly, whenever possible.

Unfortunately, you cannot make people do such a thing if they do not feel like it. In Malta, as in many other countries throughout the world, the English language tends to be used more and more, and both spoken and written Maltese are becoming increasingly larded with English words and expressions. I fear there is very little the Akkademja can do about it, and I doubt if the legislation being promised can be very effective.

It is the same with theatre. No institution can create a kind of theatre against the will of both performers and audiences. Most of our best drama groups prefer to perform in English, mainly because there is very little writing in Maltese by our playwrights that is skilful and stageworthy, while on the other hand there is much being written in Britain, the US, Germany and other countries that is not only technically exciting but also in tune with the current world spirit. That is why they tend to perform non-Maltese plays.

Yes, I know that Maltese plays are performed to large audiences at the Catholic Institute, but does Briffa truly believe that the future of our theatre depends on this kind of popular theatre? Somehow, I do not think so. Let these plays be performed by all means, but one cannot expect the more intellectually sophisticated audiences that go to the Manoel and St James Cavalier to view such plays with delight. On the other hand, plays like Joe Friggieri's Id-djarju ta' Sara and Trappisti played to large and enthusiastic audiences at the Manoel. What Malta needs is many more plays of this calibre.

Briffa should note that since its reopening in 1960, the Manoel has never shown plays in Maltese under pressure. Most of Ebejer's plays were first performed at the Manoel in the Sixties and Seventies, as were plays by Guzè Diacono, Guzè Chetcuti, Erin Serracino Inglott, Anthony Portelli, Alfred Sant and others. Good Maltese plays have always been greeted with pleasure both by the theatre and its patrons. Is this the "shabby treatment" of which Briffa complains?

Briffa says that the Manoel should start "looking into teatrin as the grass-root potential for the development of the Maltese theatre". Why should the Manoel be doing this, and not our playwrights and drama groups? Groups like Theatre Anon and those run by John Schranz have been working busily for years to create new types of theatre, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, but they do not expect Mummy to come along to hold their hand. Theatre has never developed like that.

Like Briffa, I look forward to aid from the Malta Council for Culture and the Arts to those groups wishing to perform theatre in our language - but only if the works proposed deserve it. It would be disastrous if low-calibre works were to be subsidised simply because they were written in Maltese.

The new chairman of this Council, Joe Friggieri, is well known for his support for, and creative work in, Maltese language theatre, but he is just as known for his direction of plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Piran-dello, Diego Fabbri, Tennessee Williams, and Chekhov. Anyone who tries to depict him as a narrow and parochial Maltese could not be more at fault.