Mario Philip Azzopardi’s new play at the Manoel Theatre, Xbihat (ta’ Xi Wħud li Huma Kattoliċi) is about the fierce Church-Labour Party conflict of the 1960s.
It is not the first play to tackle this subject, having been preceded in 2006 by Clare Azzopardi’s L-Interdett Taħt is-Sodda, a shorter and more poetical play than this one which is more realistic in tone and much more complex.
Azzopardi’s play, like the earlier play, chooses to have a young woman as its main character. Both plays, perhaps inevitably, bring in, but in technically different ways, Labour Party political meetings being disrupted by the loud pealing of church bells. In other ways, they could not be more different.
Xbihat is about a period in which the Labour party got a raw deal with Archbishop Mikiel Gonzi’s imposition of the interdict on the party’s executive committee and on any person voting for the Labour Party, but Azzopardi’s play, while emphasising their anticlericalism and religious scepticism of party members like the play’s protagonist Liza (Simone Spiteri) stays clear of depicting the Labour leader’s deep-grained hostility to the Church in Malta, thus making Mgr Gonzi’s action sound even uglier than it actually was.
The play’s many short scenes vary from straight realism to the depiction of a man’s hallucinations, to the melodramatic, and the subplot involving Michele, the Italian with a past (Godwin Scerri) tends to become more and more important as the play develops.
A long and somewhat tedious scene, in which two Italian enemies of Michele (one of whom is played by a Narcy Calamatta in very poor form) are grilled by the police, gives an annoying start to the second act. By the end, the play becomes Michele’s tragedy even more than the sorry tale of the interdict’s sorry effects on politics and human beings.
Liza has a strong personality, a fierce believer in the Labour Party and very active within it, but she is socially a pariah except in the party itself because she is a prostitute.
She is greatly in love with the young middle-class lawyer Victor Formosa (Sean Buhagiar), a rising star in the Labour Party, by whom she is pregnant, so she is shattered when, following the interdict, Victor leaves the party and breaks with Liza with a parting gift of money for her to have an abortion and to join her brother in Australia.
In the main plot, the politico-religious conflict reaches a climax when we hear of the interdict imposed on the Labour Party executive and on all those voting for the party.
We get a saddening/faintly amusing glimpse of common people at the grocer’s reactions to the interdict (Nathalie Micallef and Lilian Pace in gloriously vulgar form) and, more seriously, we are shown Labour meeting made inaudible by church bells, and stopping despite Liza’s angry remonstrations with her male colleagues whom she accuses of cowardice.
In the play’s most powerful scene, Liza and Dun Lawrenz in front of the sulky Victor argue about the interdict and the church’s actions in politics, with Liza being given the more convincing speeches which Spiteri delivers brilliantly.
Her fighting spirit, however, has now been broken, and in an extraordinary scene which some will find distasteful we are shown her being operated upon for abortion, while elsewhere on the stage Michele holds high, like a priest at Mass, a host he has piously salvaged from a church that has been broken into, damaged, and the sacristan mortally wounded by Labour thugs.
His words to the host show his faith is now in ruins, and soon after he is found dead.
Ironically, the police find it politically expedient to say it was he who killed the sacristan and damaged the church, and that his old treachery has now been proven.
Liza is that cliché, a tart with a heart of gold, for it is she who consoles the dying Michele, and it is her money, not that of her brother in Australia, that her mother has been receiving month after month.
In fact, were it not for Spiteri’s outstanding performance, one that puts her in the forefront of Malta’s actresses, Liza would be a character from a melodramatic soap instead of the feisty, intelligent and ultimately emotionally wounded young woman she convinces us she is.
Her constant use of foul language seems to spring naturally from her indignant spirit, her standing up to the Labour Party thugs who are about to beat her up has an admirable defiance in it and her ideas about politics and religion are put impressively.
Godwin Micallef, once famous for his strong, masculine voice and overwhelming personality, is a bit uneasy as a quietly-spoken man, hesitant in his speech and in his gait. His scenes of terror, however, as the past rises before him, work very well, and he does the bestwith the host elevation scene, a scene the play could well have done without.
Ninette Micallef’s Marija, Liza’s mother, an orthodox Catholic who is ashamed of her prostitute daughter, well represents the honest but unlearned voter who eventually defeated the Labour Party in 1962.
Buhagiar fleshes out the somewhat underwritten part of Victor Formosa, and David Rizzo as Ġanni, Liza’s friend and defender in the party, delivers his speech in the scene of the disrupted meeting with echoes of that old maestro, Duminku Mintoff.
It was good to hear the voice of that fine actress Karmen Azzopardi as the narrator who gives the plot its context. Onstage we see the narrator as an 11-year-old girl played by Pearl Marie Agius, a promising young actress who should learn, however, not to present her profile constantly to the audience.
Azzopardi’s direction keeps the plot flowing and the different strands interweaving, wisely making use of a revolving stage, but the cast when I saw the play on the first night were awkward at times when waiting for another scene while the stage is still revolving.
He makes good use of atmospheric music and Michele’s imagined scenes are effective.