Sean Buhagiar in the title role of Vassalli.

Tyrone Grima’s Ċittadin Vassalli, staged at the Manoel Theatre as part of the Staġun Teatru Malti, is – as the play’s producer/director Mario Philip Azzopardi warns us in his programme note – a “socio-political fantasy”, as opposed to a straightforward historical drama. Historians, he tells us, will express disagreement with much in the play.

The play is about one of very few Maltese historical figures whose personality and life brought them well to the fore among the Maltese of their time and carved their image permanently in the national consciousness.

He was not just a semi-legendary figure, but a three-dimensional person who lived, achieved, failed and suffered in the last decades of the Order of St John’s rule of Malta and the first decades of British rule.

Realising that Mikiel Anton Vassalli, despite his great significance, was not quite the stuff of which normal stage heroes are made, Grima has simplified a big chunk of his biography. He has ironed out awkward bits, entirely omitting his last (only remotely heroic) years under the British. Rather, he has made Vassalli into a man who stood up so defiantly to the Order when he was charged with high treason, that he earned Grandmaster Rohan’s grudging respect. He did not receive a sentence of death, but one of life imprisonment. This was a sentence he did not serve, as his Maltese warders allowed him to escape to Italy.

Vassalli was an intellectual whose lexicon and grammar of the Maltese language did much to give our language scholarly respectability. This eventually helped make its learning in Malta an essential tool for the Maltese to earn their rights.

The play launches us into the heart of things. Vassalli (Sean Buhagiar) is in chains, imprisoned by the Maltese insurgents against the French invaders. Vassalli is allied with the French because he strongly believes in the ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity of the French revolution.

He was not just a semi-legendary figure,but a three-dimensional person

In prison he meets another very significant historical figure, his fellow-Żebbuġi Francesco Saverio Caruana (John Suda), a priest who is also firmly in the French camp. He says he was captured outside the walls of Valletta and tries to overcome Vassalli’s suspicions. The play then takes the form of flashback scenes in which Vassalli is seen during the last years of the Order, urging his fellow-Maltese to embrace the ideas of the French revolution.

He strongly attacks the might of a tyrannical Church, and asserting his anti-clerical stance by living with Caterina de Fremaux (Larissa Bonaci), scandalising his mother (Ninette Micallef) and all of respectable society.

One of the very obvious symbols that burden and weaken the production is Vassalli’s continuous, or almost continuous chaining throughout the production. This is allied to something even more tiresome; throughout much of the action, there is the presence of hooded and cowled creatures (għefiered we are told, or demons).

These hustle round Vassalli muttering and sometimes yelling slogans, many of which urge him to beware of newfangled principles. I know this is meant to be a semi-epic drama but even those who might agree with this tired device must certainly be critical of how much it dominates many of the scenes.

As the plot develops, four of the demons doff their disguise, one at a time, revealing themselves to be Rohan (Godwin Scerri), Napoleon (Edmond Vassallo), the heroic priest Dun Mikiel Scerri (Mario Micallef) and, most surprisingly, Caterina de Fremaux, the woman of Vassalli’s life and mother of his children.

Scerri is certainly the most interesting of these demons, for this representative of the Church so mistrusted by Vassalli loved his country as much as the latter.

However, he opposed the French and was executed by them; on the contrary, Vassalli’s trust in the French led to a long exile from Malta. Micallef’s acting shows little of the intellectual that Scerri was, but he plays the scene where he and his fellow-conspirators are about to be shot with a pastor’s dignity.

If one ignores these questionable features, the plot on the whole moves well. Azzopardi’s firm direction is obvious in the scenes between Buhagiar’s de-jected (but far from desperate) Vassalli and Suda’s very wily, double-faced priest-politician Caruana.

It is also evident in some of the ensemble scenes, in some of which Azzopardi makes use of a kind of chorus of mostly non-speaking, but nonetheless emotional, Maltese people. He is also successful in his direction of four characters who stand for the fiercest of the Maltese insurgents, ready to slaughter the captive Vassalli and only held back by the violently clashing views they hold.

In fact, on the first night, the only laugh I heard from the audience was when one of them got taunted by another for being the usual bellicose Żejtuni.

Had the play ended with Vassalli’s exile, it might have ended fairly satisfactorily. But unfortunately Grima (and no doubt Azzopardi) wanted something much stronger for the ending, and so devised the play’s least acceptable feature.

Vassalli’s chains are seen to bring him up firmly to the large, but handsomely designed, stone feature (by Adrian Mamo) that is the production’s permanent set. A huge cross, to which Vassalli is now chained, projects out of it.Vassalli launches into a powerful tirade against the Maltese people’s weaknesses and especially their inability to find unity even on the most important issues.

This hammy, rant-like speech comes out of the blue, leaving most of the audience quite disconcerted. Ditching realism is one thing, but turning Vassalli into a politician haranguing a mass audience from the cross is another.

Apart from Suda’s Caruana, surely the production’s most accomplished performer, and Buhagiar’s often nuanced Vassalli, the following were well-worth watching: Bonaci’s flirtatious and, in her last scene critical, Caterina; Ray Calleja’s sharp Ransijat (a French knight who turned republican) and Scerri’s stern, but thoughtful, Rohan.