Theatre
Rondinella;
Il-Mudlamin
St James’ Cavalier, Castille Vaults

What fascinates children is the concept of the unknown along with the idea of the potential possibility of the impossible – when fantasy might just become reality.

While accompanying adults may have had to suspend their disbelief, children found it much easier to accept the Drama Unit’s piece, Rondinella, adapted from one of the fairytales by the Brothers Grimm – The Fisherman and his Wife − held in the theatre at St James Cavalier.

The same can be said for Trevor Zahra’s original new short story, Il-Mudlamin, which was envisioned as a form of walk-through performance in the vaults underneath Castille.

Director Philip Stilon, who was also the narrator for Rondinella, did a good job in motivating the young audience members to participate actively in the telling of the story by pretending to be the waves in the sea, making the sounds of farmyard animals, leaves and the wind too.

The concept was instructive and simple: what happens when you cannot get enough of anything? What if wealth, power, respect and glory aren’t enough? What truly makes us happy?

Dominic Said as the Fisherman and Valerie Blow as the Wife, both portrayed well-crafted, story book characters whose development takes place in the vignettes which were framed as short scenes by Giovann Attard and Zep Camilleri’s set – which opened into a story-book backdrop.

Rondinella and Il-Mudlamin, with their simple storyline, were targeted at teaching much needed values

The strong point about this performance was its slick execution, appropriate delivery, which was still enjoyable to a grown up audience and cut-glass diction.

Said’s Fisherman is a happy, easy-going man who loves his simple life and one day catches a magical talking fish called Rondinella, whom he frees from his hook and who grants him three wishes in gratitude.

His wife then proceeds to ask for increasing wealth stemming from the middle class to the ridiculous – from a good homestead to becoming Pope.

All of which the fish, manned and voiced by Marcelle Theuma, grants kindly, even giving the fisherman another three wishes for his wife.

The man’s selflessness and his desire to make his wife happy are what drive him to make such grandiose requests.

The fish’s final question is for the fisherman to ask for what he truly wants – to which he replies that he just wants his wife to be happy. Going back home, he finds their ostentatious cathedral-cum-palace transformed back to their old hovel and his wife happier than ever in the old life they used to lead.

The moral of the story being that sometimes happiness can be found in the simplest of things which we take for granted and that it is never too far or difficult to reach if only we look carefully enough.

People who are very happy just the way they are in Trevor Zahra’s Il-Mudlamin (the darkened/ shadowy ones). The eponymous creatures are an underground version of human beings who choose to live beneath the bustling metropolis of Valletta for hundreds of years, descending there for some obscure reason and emerging only to procure human garbage which they recycled into useful new things.

It was an attraction in itself to have a much-loved children’s author recount the story himself, in the guise of an anthropological discovery, with the willing Mudlamin allowing some surface folk down in to the labyrinth on vaults where they live.

Introduced to aspects of communal living in an exploratory manner, the audience was taken into various chambers, where they saw Antonella Mifsud walking on walls, Kayleigh Gelfo, the Mudlama Head Cook writhing and dancing in cockroach soup – yes, the element of disgust is something children seem to find entertaining; and Andrew Schembri’s musical performance on the ‘katusofonu’ – a custom-made outsized form of pan-pipes fashioned out of plastic plumbing tubing, which produced an eerie and oddly enjoyable sound when played.

Children were also asked to write their names on blank copybooks “for a post-performance activity” only to find that their books had been magically filled with the story of the Mudlamin while they were at their subterranean exploration.

With protective medallions which lit up to show the audience the Mudlamin’s good will, and the growing realisation that this hidden community led very ordinary lives, the thematic value of the piece lay in the understanding that different is good – that there is little need to fear what we do not know.

It is much better to attempt to understand it, and of course that recycling is a good idea because we lead disposable lives at the detriment of the environment and more importantly our creativity – which is stifled from reimagining clever ways of making use of ordinary objects.

Thus both Rondinella and Il-Mudlamin, with their simple storyline, were targeted at teaching much needed values to the younger generation – and, let’s face it, universal values which even the adult audience could benefit from remembering.

A job well done.