Love, enmity and solidarity

Ġużè Chetcuti’s Il-Kerrejja (Manoel Theatre) won third prize in the first drama competition announced by the Manoel Theatre soon after its reopening under state ownership in 1960.

It is written in what is meant to be a realistic mode about life in a humble tenement house during 1941 when Malta was suffering fierce enemy air raids.

Chetcuti managed to create the spirit of a small community living in great physical proximity to one another, but his realism sometimes lapses into the simplistic style of popular theatre and a touch of melodrama is sometimes just round the corner.

Mario Micallef, the indefatigable leader of Talenti, has followed the author’s published text (1963) and not that submitted for the competition, and used for the play’s first production.

In my review at the time I criticised the weakness of the play’s last act, and Chetcuti in all humility changed it to what it is now. It is not an ideal ending for the play, and I think Micallef has made the final curtain even less convincing.

However, I feel sure the rewritten last act is superior to what Chetcuti first wrote. Micallef has wisely decided to merge the first two acts, but I am not sure if his decision to provide a voice serving as chorus (not in the text) was just as wise.

The play’s large cast all contribute to Chetcuti’s picture of the community’s life, but some characters are more important.

Roża is a sharp-tongued, sometimes malicious woman who though married has a not-so-hidden weakness for Mattija, a widower who is strong in body but weak in his emotions.

She specialises in singing spiteful songs about people she does not like. These include Karla who is loud-mouthed and fond of unsubtle statements, but who is also a great family woman and suffers greatly when her children are killed during an air raid.

A younger woman, Pina, provides the play’s romantic interest when David, a young painter, falls in love with her, rousing for a while the enmity of his mother Ġakkina, a woman most of the neighbours dislike because of her quarrelsome nature and because she has been to prison after wounding a man who ill-treated David, still a boy at the time. David is not a convincing portrait of an artist. We learn that he has painted his beloved Pina as a sensual Madonna, thus incurring the strong disapproval of a friar, Patri Benedittu, who feels the painting demeans the Virgin, David’s defence being that of the need to be realistic in art

This very weak strand in the plot reaches its climax when Pina, in an air-raid shelter, the entrance of which has been blocked by the bombing, makes David join her in a vow to destroy the painting should they emerge safely out of the shelter.

Another character of some importance is Kruca, a young woman past her first youth, who suffers from a strong depression –surely not “paranoia” as Patri Beneditt says – caused by having been jilted by the soldier she loved and who had seduced her.

Like Ophelia, the crazed woman sings songs of desolation, and she belongs to melodrama not to realistic drama. Her role in the play is minimal, serving perhaps to make Pina temporarily reluctant to be engaged to David in the final scenes, but Micallef has departed from the text by focusing on her mysterious pregnancy at the final curtain.

Micallef’s direction is strong in creating atmosphere, and he succeeds in making the quarrelsome and hot-tempered Roża and Karla stay within safe limits.

Ninette Micallef is a three-dimensional Roża, finding subtleties in her malicious remarks, explosive when she finds herself being teased by young children, and singing her songs of love and spite equally well.

I enjoyed her singing ‘duel’ with Mary Rose Mallia’s visually formidable but emotionally weak Karla. I shall long remember Karla’s great howl of desolation when she suddenly realises the young child she has been holding with love in the shelter is dead.

Maryanne Muscat’s Ġakkina lacks real feeling in her important scene with Pina in the first act; her initial entrance scene and the scenes in which she thaws in her feelings towards Pina’s love for David are greatly superior.

David is not much of a character, but Alan Fenech gives him sincerity and honesty in his relations with Pina and in his defence of freedom in art. Moira Muscat’s Kruca is different from Karmen Azzopardi’s Kruca in 1963. The latter was a tragic creature, whereas Muscat is more of a pitiable mental case.

Michael Tabone is very strong as Mattija, certainly not inferior to Karmenu Gruppetta’s 1963 performance in the same role.

He is a good man always ready to help out, but much offended when others laugh at his pet goat and his emotional outburst when his pet is killed has true pathos.

Roża’s attraction towards him embarrasses him, but he never flares up about it. Michael Sciortino’s friar voices his questionable views on sacred art with authority, and in the shelter scene it is his courage and faith that keeps the other characters’ morale up.

The set was a trifle too handsome for a ‘kerrejja’, and the lowering of the stage lighting at two points, presumably for dramatic effect, was awkward.