It is sad that letters by philistines (it is what we theatre people call people who don't have an ounce of theatre culture inside them) find themselves in a newspaper. It is even worse when the theatre is used as an excuse to give some political party undeserved political mileage, as Salvu Sciberras from Naxxar attempted to do in his letter entitled New Labour Still The Same (January 18).

I hate mixing theatre and politics and I am writing this letter to make a difference between the two. Ordeals like the one Mario Azzopardi went through in the 1970s are to be condemned.

As was the farce created by thugs at the MADC panto all those years back. But Mr Sciberras should be informed that censorship is still the law today. As a theatre producer, I have to submit every script I produce to the local censors and because of the conservative mentality on which censorship laws are built, I get more than my fair amount of hassles from the censors. Friends of mine from other theatre companies have suffered the same treatment. Sometimes we are threatened with having to cut out whole chunks from a script. Sometimes we are told not to put on a play at all.

I would like to stress that the censors are only people doing their job. Some of them are my friends and indeed the nicest persons you could get to know. It is the concept of censorship that should be eradicated. After all, nowadays censorship, I believe, only exists in totalitarian countries. Why should Malta, a Euopean country, have censorship laws? Censorship (not classification) is illegal in Europe.

Mr Sciberras went through pains to latch censorship laws onto a political agenda and this is, for lack of a better word, idiotic, especially when considering that the same laws are enforced today. Unlike Mr Sciberras, I believe that censorship needs to be condemned under whichever administration it is perpetrated.

My condemnation for censorship is well known and public, but latching it to a party's political agenda makes the theatre community and Malta as a whole no favours. Let us refrain from this practice and work together to show the powers that be that censorship should be abolished.