A fairly new group, Mediteatru, well-known on the University of Malta campus for small-scale productions, has now ventured with a production outside the campus.
Politira, written and directed by Keith Borg at the Splendid, Valletta, is presented as a satire on Maltese politics and politicians.
Politira is, I imagine, a concertina word made up of ‘politika’ and ‘satira’ and its plot and characters are very mildly amusing. The trouble is that it lacks the bite without which any satire cannot be effective.
It is set during an imaginary electoral campaign being contested by the Social Liberalists led by Agnes Borg, the incumbent Prime Minister and the Conservative Party led by Michel Decelis.
Borg’s popular minister Shawn Balzan, however, has a serious problem. He is threatened with the publication of a video showing him, a supposedly serious family man, having a good time with other women at a party and snorting cocaine.
The trouble is all coming from Balzan’s son Ben, who hates his father and wishes to get revenge on him for having neglected Ben’s mother when she was dying of cancer.
Balzan’s chief of staff Joe is worried by all this, trying to keep Ben happy by giving him the extravagant privileges he is asking for himself and for his greedy and vulgar girlfriend Jessica.
There is some plotting and counterplotting, but even if there is plenty of nepotism and use of public money to keep dangerous people happy, none of it is of the extravagantly grotesque or melodramatic type that might have moved the audience to laughter.
Misbehaviour is depicted briefly and unimpressively
Balzan’s misbehaviour is depicted briefly and un-impressively in a short video, while the Opposition leader’s extra-marital activities are dealt with even less satirically.
Agnes Borg is presented as having a lesbian relationship with the personable Nicole (Lara Borg Vella), but, fortunately, Borg has not used this satirically and in fact the Prime Minister is depicted in a relatively serrious mode. Her electoral speeches are full of the usual promises, none of them seeming ridiculously unreachable.
Perhaps Borg, who certainly has a gift for lively dialogue, should study what Joe Friggieri did to satirise what was happening during the public discussion of the project to rebuild the old Teatru Rjal.
He went extravagantly over-board, using characters from the 16th century and from our own time to take the mickey out of Maltese politicians and Maltese opinionists. His use of a cari-catured form of the TV programme Xarabank added to the fun and to the satire.
Without a clever device, the piece remains a more or less straight depiction of the kind of things many of us know or suspect are being done or not done by today’s Maltese politicians.
The audience should have been led to leave the theatre space giggling or guffawing and swear-ing that the travesty of real life they have just seen has more than a kernel of truth.
Borg’s direction was hampered by the great space and technical re-strictions presented by the Splendid.
Despite its somewhat primitive general look, the production was kept going by the focused performances of Mariano Said as the unprincipled politican, father Shawn Balzan and Kurt Pawley as the latter’s revengeful son Ben and Kelly Peplow as Ben’s girlfriend Jessica, Moira Muscat as the restrained, but clearly intelligent, Prime Minister and Carlos Farrugia as the oily Leader of the Opposition.
Aldo Zammit’s strong per-formance as Balzan’s chief of staff was flawed by his thunderous speeches in a quarrel scene with Balzan, using much more volume than warranted.