Frolic, a new drama group, has taken on the seemingly easy but actually difficult task of presenting a series of comic sketches centred around Christmas and amateur theatre.

The production bears the ponderous, but witty, title of Post Dramatic Stress Disorder and was put up at St James Cavalier, Valletta.

The difficulty in this type of production is compounded by the fact that all the sketches were written by members of the group, none of whom is an experienced author and this shows most of the way.

A few pieces show how writers like Ema Marie Attard and Ryan Cutajar have managed to create a script that develops rapidly, has the requisite comic dialogue and ends with a little bang.

However, many other pieces were damp squibs and produced a minimum of laughs and sniggers.

‘Competition of the Carol Singers’ is a case in point, with its conflict between a singer who sees carol singing as fulfilling her when she sings them solo, as against two other singers who enjoy the fun of singing in a group.

Attard tries hard to make the soloist as affectedly funny as possible, but the conflict never reaches the level of comical intensity it needs.

Again, ‘Avant Garde Nativity Play’ tries very hard, although unsuccessfully so, to show how a typical nativity play is given a new garb by a professional American director (pretentious, but not very funny) who uses the cast as players of stars and animals as well as humans.

On the other hand, ‘Stage Mums’ wisely limits itself to satirising the little world of Maltese amateur theatricals with three mothers waiting to see which son will get a desired stage role.

Each of the mothers is bursting with pride for what they see as their son’s dramatic ability... and each also eager to discuss sexual misdeeds.

Bettina Paris, Ema Marie Attard and Marta Vella make this one of the more successful pieces of the evening.

From those sketches that rely more on choreography than on acting, ‘Interpretive Dance’ got laughs out of me, with its parody of an academic (Marta Vella) who is unaware of her porten-tous absurdity as she tries to get scholarly mileage out of presenting choreographed versions of Auld Lang Syne.

Then there was Lady Gaga’s Christmas Tree, a piece previously unknown to me but probably familiar to the many young members of the audience, which is built on a series of very obvious double entendres.

The sketches were written by members of the group, none of whom is an experienced author

The two dancers (Paris and Attard) performed an enjoyable parody of contemporary dance, getting some of the best laughs of the evening.

In ‘The Pitch’, however, the use of the famous Mewing Duet by the great Rossini could not lift the piece from its flatness.

Ryan Cutajar’s ‘Maltese life on TV’, with its various takes on Maltese courting habits and problems with growing children, provided a funny but not too unkind satire on teledrama on Maltese television.

I liked Vella’s character with her towering hairstyle. Paris, in this episode, changed from her winsome youthful looks to a very funny, ancient grandma.

The final sketch, ‘Putting the X in Xmas’, takes the Mickey out of the greatest modern Christmas myth. It shows a young wife seducing a beardless Santa and reducing her partner to jealous misery, a misery that soon disappears when Santa sends two of his female assistants to make him happy.

The episode ends the show on a libertarian mode with all the cast singing individually that all they want for Christmas “is you, you, you”, meaning all the rest.

Vikesh Godhwani, Ryan Cutajar and Sean Borg are the hard-worked male members of the cast, and Luca Zerafa provides the show with a lively musical accompaniment.

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