Many teenage schoolchildren make up for their lack of intellectual maturity with their acute perceptiveness of the strengths and weaknesses of adult psychology.

Many people of my generation still remember the nicknames we bestowed on our teachers, many of them aptly and cruelly descriptive of those persons’ personalities.

In Għajn-Eye-Three, which was put up at St James Cavalier, Valletta, Simon Bartolo makes use of this in order to depict how an intelligent and arrogant teenage student has influenced the personal life of generations of teachers over a period of some 20 years.

He has been able to do so for such a lengthy time because he is not a normal pupil but a spirit, the kind of spirit Maltese call a ħares. Like similar spirits in our folklore, he is kindly but can be frightening.

In fact, Bartolo’s one-act play, though basically broadly comic, has the spirit (known to the characters as a student called Jeremy Spiteri) on occasion scaring the four human characters out of their wits in order to cure them out of their prejudices and petty quarrelsomeness.

Bartolo may have intended this one-act play as a tribute to Francis Ebejer. I have in mind in parti-cular Ebejer’s The Cliffhangers (L-Imwarrbin in its Maltese version) in which a group of people all of whom have a shady past, living together in a small hotel are brought forcefully to face their past life by being made to see an enactment by two mysterious young people.

Where Ebejer wrote a long three-act play, with many lengthy dialogues and a few aria-like speeches, Bartolo takes a little over an hour, making his characters address each other in rapid short speeches.

There are repetitions, but the dialogue pushes the action forward all the time and the long scene in a dark cellar corresponding to Ebejer’s elaborate enactment scene is also fast-moving.

The play is set in a Maltese school housed in an old building. The headmaster, played by John Suda, is approached by a teacher, Miss Saliba (Coryse Borg) who explains that her favourite student, Jeremy Fiteni, has been absent from her class for a fortnight.

The highly strung teacher waxes angry when the Head says there is no student with such a name on the school’s books.

When two other teachers, Orlando (Roderick Vassallo) and Gatt (Gilbert Formosa) come in, it seems that they might have a memory of the boy, though they do seem vague about it.

The audience, however, realises that they have all taught Jeremy following a scene in which Jeremy himself (Jamie Cardona), materialises when heralded by a thunderclap and makes us see that he has been their student during different years.

To each of them he has been useful: he has all but cured the Head of his tobacco addiction and he has enabled Miss Saliba to achieve some control over her nerves.

The author’s direction of the play is well paced and his cast’s personalities emerge strongly in this intimate theatre

He has helped Orlando achieve the courage he needed to out himself as a gay man and – in the only comical theme - he has taught Mr Gatt (nicknamed Mr ‘Gass’) to reduce his inordinate flatulence to a minimum.

What Jeremy now does is to manoeuvre the four into spending time together in the school’s cellar, which he has locked from the outside.

The four continue to vent their dislikes and prejudices for a time, the climax being when Saliba manages to beat up the big (but not very manly) Orlando in revenge for what he has taken from her.

Things improve as they play a game that reveals to each of them their bigotry or ingrained dislikes. By the end of the play, Jeremy’s desire to see the four become sincere friends and colleagues seems to have been achieved.

The author’s direction of the play is well paced and his cast’s personalities emerge strongly in this intimate theatre.

The cast is led by John Suda’s Head and Borg’s Saliba, whose brand of feminism is of the kind to bring that idelogy into disrepute.

Perhaps Borg’s nervous distemper need not have been portrayed so physically as it consistently was.

Wearing a tight dress, she was an accusing figure all the time, darting out her finger at all and sundry and projecting her shapely derriere as she bent accusingly, while her voice flung at them her disgust at their perceived disapproval of her.

It may have gone on too long, but it certainly made her the production’s most memorable image.

Suda’s head was a combination of his familiar stage gravitas, undercut by a burgeoning sense of distrust in himself, while Vassallo’s Orlando was made comical by the contrast between his large and strong figure, his love-sick comments while on the mobile with his lover and by an overall tendency towards being rather effete.

Formosa’s flatulent Gatt was rightly directed to keep his comicality in check, and Jamie Cardona’s Jeremy was a stern judge, merciless until he gets what he desires.

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