Theatre
Dwar Menopawsi, Minorenni u Muturi High Speed
St James Cavalier
The encroaching years seem to have a rather odd effect on our behaviour.
When middle age threatens to rear its balding head, we begin to experience mood swings that we’d long left behind us at the backdoor of adolescence, as the startling realisation that the humdrum of our nine-to-five jobs and the ensuing relationships have taken over our lives.
Alfred Buttigieg’s Dwar Menopawsi, Minorenni u Muturi High Speed deals with just this particular feeling of discontent.
Henry and Kate, a married couple with a teenage son and a daughter in her early 20s who calls on the phone but is largely absent from their lives, have realised that their existence is just that – a daily, unwavering drudge pun-ctuated but the same irritating squabbles and routine domestic infractions which make them strangers to each other.
Director Malcolm Galea had a strong script to begin with and his clear vision for its treatment made the evening a very enjoyable one.
What Mr Buttigieg did so well was to capture this middle-aged discontentment and subsequent rebellion from conformity in a way that is uniquely Maltese – cultural and social idiosyncrasies were delivered with a nod to our national quirkiness and fiery Mediterranean temper.
Pierre Stafrace, who played Henry, a bank employee with a boss he hates, had a wonderfully expressive face and dryly comical tone which balanced a bemused attitude with a disparaging one in reaction to Angele Galea’s Kate.
It was good to see Ms Galea dealing with a meatier part as Kate, a school teacher and guidance counsellor at a boys’ comprehensive, with a hard to reach headmaster and troublesome students.
She gave a well-rounded portrayal, if at times rather lacking in projection, of a woman whose life has become bogged down by other people’s troubles while she set hers completely aside. I did find that certain deliberately long scene changes rather slowed down the pace of the otherwise slick production, where Chris Gatt’s light design was crucial to create the right setting.
Henry and Kate’s son James, played by a very able Jacob Piccinino, is an arrogant, entitled brat who waltzes through life with an ironic smirk of self-confidence on his youthful face and in so doing, incites his parents’ ire at their own lost, distant youth and the possibilities that it once held. Their solution is to retract into a pseudo-adolescence.
It is Henry who first succumbs to it by smoking his son’s weed and getting very randy thoughts about James’s pretty and leggy girlfriend, Fay, played by Tina Rizzo. This was an admirable performance which portrayed her playful, sexual exploration and interest in older men and combined it with the fresh innocence of youth which we all so yearn to regain, as Annie Lennox articulated so succinctly in her song Seventeen Again.
Mr Piccinino and Ms Rizzo gave the performance a fresh burst of energy and worked very well with Ms Galea and Mr Stafrace, making the play a very credible piece because the ease of dialogue was instantly felt.
Henry subsequently does the typical man-in-a-mid-life-crisis move and buys a ridiculously expensive motorbike.
This is met by hilarity and mock admiration from James and exasperation from Kate whose growing relationship with one of her charges, Donald, portrayed ably by Franco Rizzo, begins to get a tad too intimate. It reaches a climax when Kate follows her husband’s previous indiscretion, and falls into a passionate embrace with Donald, in the same way that Henry had with his son’s girlfriend, Tina.
Caught in the act by James, the play concludes in an open-ended manner with a house in a state of disarray, Henry at his recently-bought cross trainer in an attempt to regain a physique long gone to seed and a visibly absent Kate.
The darkly comic vibe with occasional poignant bursts of regret that Dwar Menopawsi, Minorenni u Muturi High Speed created, made for an evening of good quality entertainment and was a good start to the 2012 theatrical calendar.
• Performances also run on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.