Theatre critic laments lack of contemporary culture

While hoards of tourists visit Malta each year, the country is not making the best of the potential offered by its cultural richness, according to Kalina Stefanova, a Bulgarian theatre expert.

Dr Stefanova is associate professor of theatre criticism in Sofia's National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts and deputy president of the International Association of Theatre Critics. She has just delivered a series of lectures in Malta, held in conjunction with the Theatre Studies Department at the University of Malta's Mediterranean Institute.

Dr Stefanova told a handful of journalists and reviewers over lunch at St James Cavalier, in Valletta that while Malta was blessed with so many tourists, culture was being provided to them in the past tense: "You have this incredible museum of a town, Valletta, this jewel of a theatre, the Manoel, and the incredible temples. What is Malta giving tourists in the present tense, though? Sea, hotels and light entertainment when you have all these other venues that can be filled with contemporary culture bolstering Maltese identity."

In this regard, Dr Stefanova thinks Malta is at an advantage because many people can speak English fluently.

Having authored 10 books on theatre and criticism, some of which are published in London and New York, Dr Stefanova has given lectures in Istanbul, Zagreb, Amsterdam, Singapore, St Petersburg and South Africa. Her articles have also been published in 19 different languages.

"Theatre criticism enables society to think critically of itself and its institutions," Dr Stefanova said.

She compared a theatre devoid of critics with somebody who lives in a flat without a mirror, who relies on the opinion of his loved ones and never knows for himself what he looks like. "His family will probably never tell him that he's shabby," Dr Stefanova said.

The conversation touched upon such issues as the lack of professional critics in Malta, the theatrical companies' struggle to attract audiences, the expenses incurred to put up productions and the media's enduring dilemma about promoting cultural activities - is publishing a play preview rendering a service to the arts or just thinly disguised advertising?

Recalling a series of lectures delivered in Cape Town, South Africa, where she had been a visiting scholar in 1998, Dr Stefanova said students had written in an essay given at the beginning of the course that the main aim of criticism was promoting theatre.

"I was very pleased that Maltese students did not share this idea," Dr Stefanova said, explaining that she had found students with great potential here and was positive they could "become good critics".

However, she explained, Malta risked facing an identity crisis if it did not take cultural criticism seriously.

Speaking of culture and the arts in her native Bulgaria, Dr Stefanova said the government had reduced its budget for culture. "As, alas, is the case in other countries as well. No wonder that there has been this trend in the contemporary theatre world where politics is expelled from the stage. This is often a kind of protest vote against this bad side of politics," she said.

"Political and economic systems come and go but culture is what stays and defines us as people," she added.

Next week, Dr Stefanova will be in Hungary to participate in a week-long promotion of contemporary Hungarian theatre placed against a backdrop of everyday culture such as mineral baths and coffee shops. She will then sit on the jury of the first festival of contemporary Baltic drama in Sweden.

"This is how these countries are trying to get international recognition while bolstering their national cultural identity," she said.