Theatre
The Hate Politik
St James Cavalier

With all that has been going on in the world recently the condition of prejudice and bigotry is a malaise which affects us all.

In a collaboration between Kenneth Spiteri and Tommi Zeuggin, Arts Council Malta presented the public with a production of The Hate Politik, which explores the way in which hatred and prejudice is a learnt construct which humans develop over the years based on the way they socialise and on the manner in which their upbringing and immediate surroundings affect their world view and their perception of others and “otherness”.

With visual design by Austin Camilleri, sound design and music by Mario Sammut and light design by Chris Gatt, the stage was set for a well-funded, sharply-executed performance based on Spiteri’s conceptualisation of this very current theme. His dramaturgy, combined with Zeuggin’s choreography made for rather disturbing and certainly uncomfortable viewing.

The Hate Politik was an exercise devised to provoke thought but... it failed to deliver a dramatic experience

Sadly, the manner in which I was made to feel uncomfortable, I’m sure, did not quite match up to the expectation of discomfort and introspection about personal beliefs which the company was hoping to achieve on the audience.

Rather than dwell upon my innate nastiness and ethical and moral failures as a human being from my position of privilege as a straight, white male in my 30s (all of which I am very much aware of); my sense of discomfort came from the fact that in some way or another, this kind of rather obtuse, over-intellectualisation in performance has been done before.

From the moment the two characters of the King (Spiteri) and the Fool (Zeuggin) appeared on stage and began a to-and-fro-ing dance of wits and wills on their deserted, barren, salt-encrusted island – with the King wearing a crown that appeared to be made out of the rib-cage of an animal as the Fool (his servant) changed his nappy and cleaned his buttocks – my instinctive reaction was “Oh… another one of those. Here we go again…”

While I find the thematic content of the piece to be very worthy of discussion and a valid issue about which to raise awareness, the manner in which it was presented is becoming almost formulaic in its adherence to the poetics of the abstract and outlandish.

Two men tethered to each other by ropes in a very well-choreographed dance – a battle of wills as they scrabble in the salt for the sustenance of hidden lemons; creates a power struggle where the taste of bitterness and the satisfaction of one-upmanship meld into one. With the King dressing as a woman and singing a lullaby to an absent child they both yearn for, to the fear of the offshore sounds of sinking ships, drowning people and the wailing of a child while frightening helicopter sounds bring them a Visitor as a gift, the imagery works on presenting the audience with archetypes which can be intertextually linked to other canonical works of literature.

The two chief characters, the King and the Fool, wait for something to happen on their godforsaken island, with more than a nod to the nihilistic loneliness of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

The Visitor turns out to be a deformed changeling – a monster with pointed ears, wing-like protrusions, a horse-like tail and hind legs like a pig’s, reminiscent of the Duchess’s Pig-Baby in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And what at first was revered by the King, who initially reads it the first 10 fundamental human rights, is then reviled and abhorred. It is rejected in disgust for its otherness until it is placed on a plinth in an almost reverential manner, similar to the situation in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Thus the pseudo-intellectualisation of the piece did not work very well on those who can play the game and see through the thin veil of allusions.

The Hate Politik was an exercise devised to provoke thought but unfortunately, in spite of its slick execution and technical rectitude, it failed to deliver a dramatic experience without the hype of the faux-brow.