True Love Lies by the Candian playwright Brad Fraser (presented by Unifaun at St James Cavalier) is a powerful play that depicts the breakup of a family.

Trouble is caused, initially, by the discovery of a secret kept by Kane and Carolyn, the parents, from their children, Madison (20) and Royce (17) and subsequently of yet another secret, connected with the first one, unknown so far to Carolyn.

Fraser makes the damage to the family likelier by making Madison a sexually adventurous girl who plays a crucial part in what happens. Royce, instead, is an intelligent boy with no self- confidence who is mercilessly bullied at school and is more than a little neurotic.

The trouble begins when Madison, who has no intention of getting a college education because she wants to earn money and have as good a time as possible, applies for a job in a restaurant and discovers that David, the restaurateur, who strikes her immediately as being gay, is an old friend of her father’s. At home she and Royce discover that Kane and David had had a serious love affair before Kane’s marriage to Carolyn. This has long been known by Carolyn, who now makes the mistake of agreeing to invite David for dinner.

When, during the meal, Carolyn speaks lightly of the relationship Kane had had with David, the latter gets up in some anger and gets his back on Carolyn by telling Madison she can have the job she wants in his restaurant.

More family drama follows. At one point Carolyn tells her son that while many marriages do not fail, quite a few of them expire, and this is the theme Fraser depicts so strongly.

Romualdo Moretti’s set is minimalist, as Fraser himself prescribes, but it has a certain elegance. The small stage at St James Cavalier constrains a great compactness and the use of the same area for Kane’s dining room area as well as for David’s restaurant.

As no time is lost over scene changes, Toni Attard’s direction keeps the play flowing from place to place, from one often surprising event to the next.

The cast of five ranges from excellent to not-less-than-good. The direction of scenes is gripping, such as when David turns the tables on a threaten-ing Royce, or when Madison proves that gay people can still succumb to the sexual wiles of a determined woman.

The cast ranges from excellent to not-less-than-good

Fraser’s play is not a black comedy, but it is a darkish one. Plenty of smiles and more than a few laughs are provided by the wryly ironic comments of Royce (Joe Azzopardi, who is particularly good as he deteriorates psychologically in the second act) and the worldly-wise retorts born of a long experience of life and business of David (Ray Calleja), the central figure in the plot. Madison, who says she wants to sleep with every man she meets, until she eventually announces she is going to have a shot at monogamy, produces many a nervous titter from the audience.

As the play develops and unhappy endings start looming for some of the characters, the smiles get rarer and the audience begins to wish that none of the character will face a future of unalloyed unhappiness.

Calleja is a fine David, a gay man who has found real love in the past, lost it and begins to hope he can retrieve it. He is self-possessed and never at a loss except when, to his great surprise, he is practically raped by a girl, gets to love her and is roused to jealousy by her for a while.

His love for Kane, however, has never died out and much of the play sees him trying to help Kane as he experiences ever growing familial problems.

I should add that Calleja is the only member of the cast who knows that even the casual throwaway lines spoken in real life must always be comprehensible to the audience. An intimate theatre like that at St James Cavalier should not be a temptation to retain certain tones and volumes that work during the rehearsal period.

Bettina Paris, following her very successful Woman in Tender Napalm, has come up with a very striking Madison, a girl of rampant sexuality that may be on the verge of discovering true love.

At the end she times her final departure from the restaurant shortly before the arrival of Kane. Is this her final shot at her mother, whom she hates, as she enables Kane and David, both of them lonely, to have an intimate meeting together?

Jes Camilleri’s Kane is characterised by the frequent hinting of submerged feelings as the past catches up with him, but also by his genuine passion for Carolyn.

Pia Zammit’s Carolyn has a number of moments when her facial expression reveals that what she is saying is not what she is feeling. As at the end, she tries to pretend that she looks forward to her new life, we know that this woman is suffering a grievous loss.

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