Trevor Zahra has long been the most widely read author of fiction in Maltese, and hisIl-Ħajja Sigrieta tan-Nanna Ġenoveffa has had huge readership.

This rumbustious novel goes beyond all other Maltese novels known to me in its frank treatment of sex, but it is also very broadly comical, while most of the time illustrating Zahra’s psychological perspicacity.

This novel has now been dramatised by Marcelle Theuma, who has also directed it for Unifaun at Sir Temi Żammit Hall, University of Malta. She was a good choice, for she has now probably become the most imaginative stage director in this country.

Earlier this year, she showed in her direction of Clare Azzopardi’s In-Nisa Maltin Jafu Kif that, like Albert Marshall and Mario Azzopardi, she is very interested in exploring elements of traditional teatrin.

These, together with her interest in symbolism and her readiness to juxtapose the comic and the sentimental, make this production a very entertaining and often surprising one, despite its unwieldiness and excessive length.

Watching this production soon after watching Agatha Christie’s dessicated The Mousetrap the previous week was a relief. Zahra and Theuma between them have produced a large, episodic work that relishes not just double entendres, but also an abundance of explicit language and situations which I sometimes found overpowering, whereas most of the others in the audience just wanted more and more.

The play is all about Ġenoveffa, a woman who has had a long and very active love life, details of which she leaves in a manuscript that comes to light after her death.

We find out, sometimes in considerable detail – which often had the large audience in a roar – her development, fuelled by her insatiable curiosity, as she gets information from, and some rudimentary experience with, other girls at school, and later with a male cousin.

Her meeting, as a teenager, with Zanzu, a social inferior and much older, but sexually most attractive to her, speeds up her desire for sexual activity. But, like most girls in the 1920s, her desire is not truly fulfilled until she marries the man.

Zanzu dies when she is still 40 and still very eager for new experiences, but the day comes when the memory of Zanzu troubles her again. Here, however, Zahra provides a beautifully written final scene, set in a cemetery, where Ġenoveffa speaks in great honesty to the dead Zanzu, and to herself.

Zahra has wisely allowed Theuma to make changes in his script (which, however, is used abundantly in this stage version) so as to make the piece change from narrative to theatrical. Zahra’s verbal bawdry remains almost untouched, but the sexual activity has sometimes been greatly modified.

The best example I can think of is the notorious and wickedly comic scene of Ġenoveffa’s first night of marriage with Zanzu, which is played by Ġenoveffa alone as the excited narrator. The actor playing Zanzu appears, in a touch of brilliant comicity, as an image of the head of the Baptist whose grimness is responsible for Zanzu’s initial impotence in this scene.

Of the many other strikingly imaginative touches, the scene in which the now widowed Ġenoveffa introduces us to the young men, who were her shortlived lovers, is played with comical vividness using a large flat board with painted, but headless, figures of three men.

The splendid Chris Galea pokes his head through each aperture, showing us the superficial differences between the three, but also their basic likeness.

Galea also plays Zanzu throughout. Theuma is even more imaginative in the scene (one which could, most easily, have been omitted from the stage version) in which Zanzu’s lesbian sister makes a pass at the horrified Ġenoveffa on the eve of her wedding.

The scene is played below a (live) statue of an androgynous-looking Archangel Michael, played mischievously by Laura Best, who changes from pretended shock to camp satisfaction as the scene develops.

Romualdo Moretti’s elegantly designed and easily changeable set makes the constantly moving scenes very possible.

The quick changes become fun in themselves, as Best and David Bonnici dance a series of tangos by the great Astor Piazzolla or neatly garbed maids set and dust the props for the next scene.

Theuma’s most cutting-edge device is to make the central character, Ġenoveffa, played by three actors, one of them a man. Her stated aim is to present different facets of what will probably remain one of contemporary Maltese fiction’s (and theatre’s) most memorable characters.

Marta Vella, whom I have seen before but who here gives what is easily her most accomplished performance, is the key Ġenoveffa, the eminently sensual woman much of whose life has been governed by her strong sexual desires. Her playing of the first night scene is richly comical and, despite the very favourable audience, she never overdid even the most explicit lines.

Her performance as a sensualist is very consistent, but when, at the end, she comes to terms with the spirit of Zanzu and with herself, she is impressively subtle. This scene brings this play, in which sexuality is at the very core, to an unexpectedly quiet, and indeed moving, close.

Maria Buckle plays a more internal Ġenoveffa, the person who reflects on what she does, though she never disapproves of it. Her Ġenoveffa becomes more important as the play develops, particularly in act two.

Her restrained comicality is very obvious in a scene that is becoming de rigueur in contemporary Maltese theatre: one set in a confessional.

Theuma has already tried this in In-Nisa Maltin Jafu Kif. In this case, the confessor is one of the once notorious priests who tries to wheedle out of his penitents as many sexual details as he can. Chris Galea squeezes out of this nauseating practice a good deal of broad comedy, and it is thus one of the most surprising moments of the production when he suddenly appears garbed as Ġenoveffa, while Buckle becomes a slimly attractive priest in a cassock. Theuma loves to lose a barbed dart against clerics and church whenever she can.

Buckle showed us her ability to play serious scenes in the scene of Zanzu’s death, a scene to which Theuma devotes much care; it comes as a shock after the prevailing comedy of much that has gone before.

As the third Ġenoveffa, Galea makes us see the character as the woman who has begun to lose interest in the sexuality of her marriage and, after Zanzu’s death, becomes akin to men in her constant hunting for new sexual partners.

I think Theuma has gone over the top with this trinity of Ġenoveffa figures, but I was surprised at the way in which the boisterous audience settled down quietly as it tried to make sense of this male Ġenoveffa figure.

As Zanzu and other male figures, mostly funny, Galea also does very well. He, Vella and Buckle are a remarkably versatile trio who, between themselves, people the stage with many other striking characters.

Love it or hate it, this is truly Maltese theatre. It certainly has its excesses, but it shows it can also be sophisticated when it is the work of someone like Theuma.

When authors and directors stop feeling relieved that stage censorship is a thing of the past, they will probably resist the temptation to pull all the stops much of the time.