Mario Philip Azzopardi and the Manoel Theatre chose interesting dates for the performances of their two joint productions this season. L-Indemonjati, with its plot clearly inspired by the doings of the dislikeable Franco Debono, was performed during the general election weekend, and the first performance of last week’s In-Nisa Maltin Jafu Kif, featuring the mockery of some of the characters for ecclesiastics and their functions, and for Good Friday pageantry, took place while the Our Lady of Sorrows procession was winding its way round the streets of Valletta.

Easily among the very best plays in Maltese I have seen for quite a few years

Clare Azzopardi’s longish two-act play, however, which must have caused some playgoers strong distaste, is a much more successful work than Albert Marshall’s. Its clever combination of very lively dialogue, sharp characterisation and arresting imagery puts it easily among the very best plays in Maltese I have seen for quite a few years.

The satirical barbs directed by Azzopardi at Christianity and its practice in this country are tightly bound up with the basic feminism that inspires the play.

Like Marshall in his last play, she includes a scene featuring a confessional, where most of the six women characters make a mockery of confessors and sacramental confession. But she makes it clear that her chief objection to the sacrament is that it is conducted by men, and that women are subjected to it.

One of the characters, the lesbian lawyer Felicienne, strongly voices her objection to women having to pour out their consciences to someone who for her is just a man. In what is perhaps the play’s strongest scene (blasphemous, the orthodox would judge it), an unconscious male stripper wearing just a jockstrap is garbed in a red robe and what looked like a crown of thorns.

He is submitted to the ridiculing behaviour of five of the women garbed in the gowns and hoods of males in Good Friday processions. This scene, ending the first act, is surely meant to send up the behaviour of the devout in Holy Week, and the women are clearly parodying the behaviour of men in this and in other scenes.

Just as powerful is the way in which five of the six women characters assert the rebellious strength of their sex, going to extremes that are surely new to the Maltese straight theatre. The six are women who got to know each other several months earlier, when they had given birth during the same period of days.

They meet in a deconsecrated chapel in a lonely place, rented by the husband of one of them, Marija. The place stores not only petards, but also a good array of Good Friday processions costumes.

The idea mooted by Gaby, whose unhappy experience of marriage has made her very revengeful towards men, and Nicolette, a well-to-do notary who does not get enough sex from her husband, is that the six should be treated to a show by two male strippers.

One or two of the others – especially the youngest, Ruth, who has a possessive husband whom she fears – think this is all that will happen. When the strippers are drugged with Ecstasy, bound and gagged, becoming sexual playthings at the mercy of the women, Ruth is alarmed and has to be pacified with a strong sedative for fear she may go off and endanger the proceedings. Much worse will eventually happen, but I shall allow playgoers to discover this for themselves.

The play’s opening 20 minutes or so deceptively promise to be a farcical comedy. But soon enough, the audience detects that the action is going to take a serious route and the comedy becomes darker by the end of the first act.

Though tempered by the comic send-up of things religious and ecclesiastical in the second act, it becomes darker still until the shocking end of the act. The play ends with a short epilogue in which the women give us some idea of what had really happened at the end of the second act. But they themselves seem to be utterly confused, both in their reminiscences and in their behaviour.

They have certainly gone much too far. Marcelle Theuma, who directs the play with the attention to powerful imagery and to lively dialogue I have long come to expect of her, chooses to have Rossini’s dramatic Stabat Mater as the music dominating this epilogue. Does she intend us to think the women who dominate the play are themselves ‘ladies of sorrow’, worthy of our commiseration but not, I think, of our respect?

The six actresses are an impressive lot. Magda van Kuilenberg gives what is easily her best performance I have seen so far as Marija, superstitious and ignorant, but full of self-confidence.

She is a big woman, but her performance is larger than life and holds you every second.

Coryse Borg is at her sexiest best as Nicolette, shapely in her red frock. Of all the six, she is the one who has a very low view of motherhood and is also the one who is most eager to treat the drugged strippers as some men treat women who are at their mercy.

Sharon Bezzina’s Gaby is perhaps the only absolute male-hater of the group. She delivers her long, uninterrupted monologue in act one, in which she describes how the birth of her child led to what, for her, was the end of her marriage, with a frightening intensity.

Marilù Vella (Ruth) also creates a well-rounded character. Married to a possessive husband, who checks through his mobile on all she does, she has no real friends and has to resort to Facebook to communicate with others. She is a pitiable person, victimised by the others and ironically made to wear the Virgin Mary’s costume – all the other costumes are male ones – as worn in a religious procession.

Marta Vella’s Felicienne, the lesbian lawyer who has borne a child for herself and her partner, speaks with distaste of having slept with a man to conceive the child, and is one of the extremists in the group. The character as a whole, however, perhaps needed more projection.

Maria Cutajar’s Angele, perhaps the least showy of the six parts, is unhappy because of her husband’s neglect but manages to be a nurse as well as a believer in superstitious techniques.

All six combine splendidly in the scenes where they dress up, as in the hilarious scene where they put on Roman soldiers’ costumes and small moustaches and comment in bully police fashion on the unconscious strippers lying before them.

The ensemble playing is generally first-rate, but the charades they play in act two were not consistently effective.

Claudio Carta and Chris De Giorgio are the two strippers, who bravely broke the Maltese theatre’s record for the length of scenes featuring male nakedness.

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