Censors stitch themselves up

At first glance, the front page photo of actress Pia Zammit leaning against Mikhail Basmadjian and the GQ magazine cover with a naked Jennifer Aniston, don't seem to have much in common.

But they're both evidence of how censorship backfires and has the opposite effect to that intended. Aniston, who posed in nothing but a smile and an American tie, was covered up by the Hudson Newstands in Grand Central Station in New York. Sales of the magazine did not suffer. On the contrary, they soared.

The same thing happened when the Hudson Newstands covered up an FHM cover (the first in a series of five). On that occasion over 400,000 copies of the magazine flew off the shelves, well above the 350,000 average.

In Zammit's case, it's not nude pictures of her which are being banned or covered-up, but a play being produced by Unifaun, in which she has one of the two main roles. Stitching was written by the Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson. It is a play about a young couple who engage in mind and sex games and how they deal with loss and abortion. When performed abroad, theatre critics commented upon its unnecessary tendency toward shock value, but it has never been censored. Till now.

The Maltese Board of Film and Stage Classification has banned the performance of the play. The reasons for this decision have not been made clear. What is clear, however, is the unintended publicity the ban has given the play. In the normal course of events, the producers would have to compete with other events for attention, column inches and coverage. They wouldn't dream of ousting the regular shots of the Prime Minister or foreign politicians from the front pages. Now, the ban and the angry reaction has transformed Stitching into a very newsworthy item.

Out go the pictures of Barack Obama and in go those of Zammit and Basmadjian. It's publicity made in heaven for the production. Bans create buzz and stir interest in a country which has been rendered comatose by political discussion programmes.

The element of controversy has sparked off interest and placed Stitching firmly on the radar. The censorship has had another boomerang effect. It has spurred people who would not usually be inclined to watch plays like Stitching, into wanting to watch it, simply to show that they disagree with the censorship.

Despite the presence of the anachronistic censorship laws on the statute book, Malta is not the insular country it may have been in the 1960s when plays like Mario Azzopardi's Strada Stretta were banned. News and photos of all kinds of depravities, violence and torture, are accessible via the Internet.

Images of scantily-clad women flash unbidden across our television screens (and until very recently, were printed on the back end of a bus - as an advert for an underwear store). There's no way that adults who have seen such images and who have gone through many of life's major upheavals such as illness, death or separation, are going to accept that a board made up of adults like them is going to decide what they can or cannot watch.

People who are considered old enough to vote and choose a government, who can have a driving licence and who work in jobs which require a high degree of diligence and intelligence, are going to feel justifiably annoyed when they are told they are not being allowed to watch a play.

It comes as no surprise, then, to hear that people who are disinterested in theatre intend to support this production, if only to defy what they consider to be an immoral imposition. As a result, I predict that when the play is staged there are going to be record audiences filling the theatre.

Whether they'll be there out of curiosity, wanting to see for themselves what all the fuss was about, or as a sign of protest, is immaterial.

They will be there, showing us that censorship is futile. This is aptly summed up by Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the author of many books which were boycotted or sought to be banned by the authorities.

When one of his books (a fascinating work which was clearly about the realm of fantasy) was objected to, his immediate reaction was one of glee, as book sales went up.

He remarked about the pointlessness of censorship, and said of censors: "Because they never learn. The inevitable result of trying to ban something - book, film, play, pop song, whatever - is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone. Why don't the censors realise this?"

The Maltese censors may have found this out too late and that their ban on Stitching was a ban too far.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt