Leanne Ellul, a young and hitherto unknown playwright, caused a stir when she won last year’s Francis Ebejer competition for plays with a work due to be performed next year.
Another work by her, Marjelena, has now been per-formed by a recently created group, Il-Bakkanti, in a venue new to me, the Green Room at Pjazza Teatru Rjal, Valletta.
When I took the lift down to this below-ground venue I found myself in a long, somewhat narrow, area in which the small audience was seated in just two long rows.
The acting area was a long, shallow area furnished with a white desk and white other furniture, the only colour provided by posters attached to a couple of doors.
One of these led to a dentist’s surgery, the other to a doctor’s clinic. We never caught a glimpse of the doctor, but Dr Agius the dentist (David Scicluna Giusti) turned out to be one of the key characters, the caring professional towards whom his receptionist (Olivia-Ann Marmarà) and his patients, two women and one man, seemed to be greatly beholden.
It soon becomes evident that the patients who turn up are looking for moral, much more than physical, healing.
One of them, a sexy but not cultured or even very literate, young woman (Mandy Mifsud) has little control over herself and is clearly desperate to have some help, the reason not being evident from the start.
We soon learn that she is married to the somewhat brutal and utterly insensitive Simon (Gilbert Formosa) who comes to the clinic in search of her and treats her quite roughly.
We then learn that the woman is also connected to Luca (Aldo Zammit), a teacher and a paedophile who was responsible for seducing her when she washis pupil, causing her to go through a trauma.
Worse still, we learn that Luca and Simon have been accomplices in the seduction of girl students, before Simon married one of Luca’s cast-offs.
We are then taken by surprise when we find out that another young woman (Alison Abela), who has been drawing figures of men on a white-board (and who speaks English, not Maltese and confuses the two languages), has also been seduced by Luca when she was still his student.
Like Mifsud’s character, she has long been a patient of Dr Agius and still comes to him for comfort when despondent.
It is a theme requiring greater depth
Even Agius’s receptionist is emotionally dependent on him, but unlike the other women she is self-confident and quietly disapproving of the two somewhat troublesome or puzzling patients. A fourth woman (Louise Fenech) is waiting her turn to be seen, although it is never clear by which doctor.
She is intently reading a book, until her placidity is badly interrupted by the goings-on and angry words of Mifsud’s character and her husband Simon. She comes out as the most articulate of the four women, but she too at times gets flustered, leading her to break out into explosive anger.
If Dr Agius is seen as a psychologically healing character, the other two male characters are disruptive both morally and psychologically.
The sordid link between Simon and Lucio, and the knowledge that Lucio’s teaching has been suspended because of his misbehaviour, make the audience perceive that two of the women have been abused by the two men.
On the other hand, the receptionist and the intelligent book reader do not seem to have a past link to the two men, but both have been upset by the two men’s behaviour in the clinic.
The audience discovers at the end the very strong link between the four woman characters, a link I cannot reveal without spoiling the ending for future audiences. I shall only say that the ending does provide a theatrical surprise.
At the same time, I feel that Ellul has treated a theme belonging to the field of psychiatry too simplistically. It is a theme requiring greater depth than this talented but still inexperienced writer could provide.
Josette Ciappara’s well-controlled production is aided by the all-white decor, which makes this exercise in the treatment of a clinical condition superficially acceptable. On the other hand, the excessive length of the acting space and the great closeness of the audience to that space oddly makes the production less, not more, intimate.
Some of the performances give the production a strength the script only haltingly has. Scicluna Giusti’s dentist/psychologist is a true centre of loving care, while the four Marjelenas are distinctively different personalities.
I did think that Alison Abela’s lively characterisation was some-times a trifle too comic for this kind of play.
Zammit’s Lucio was the kind of smooth lover boy you would not trust with an elderly aunt, while Formosa’s Simon was the kind of rough loud-mouth who attracts so many young girls.