Gwerra, Familti … u Ommi, which is being produced by this year’s Malta Arts Festival, is actor Pino Scicluna’s tribute to his uncle Aldo, an Italian soldier who fought in WW2. David Schembri meets a man torn between two countries.

“I can’t answer… I really can’t answer.”

Pino Scicluna’s piercing blue eyes look at me pleadingly, then stare in the distance as he tries to digest my question. “I really can’t say.”

To his side, a spiral notebook full of points he wanted to discuss during the interview. In front of him, a beer. Him? Stumped.

The interview had been progressing well. He had ready answers to any question I could ask him about his theatre career and Gwerra, Familti … u Ommi, the monologue he will be presenting for the Malta Arts Festival.

In the monologue, Scicluna, who is based in Milan, tells the story of World War II as lived by his mother’s brother, Captain Aldo Zanini, an Italian who was stationed in Sardinia during those bloody years.

Scicluna, whose father Giuseppe, died at an early age, saw in Zanini a father figure, who used to spend every summer with his Maltese nephews – either in Malta or in Italy.

Giuseppe senior did not want his children to travel by plane, so their summer trips to Lago Maggiore, in the north of Italy, which they did by boat and train, took very long. Once they arrived, urban Italy was the Scicluna sibling’s fun park, with the escalators in shopping centres being the centrepiece of their amusements.

Scicluna’s summer playground eventually became his home. After finishing school, he studied animal husbandry, following a stint working for an animal feed company and was given the opportunity to take his studies further in Italy.

While the details of animal nutrition occupied his Maltese workdays, Scicluna started drama training at the Malta Drama Centre (Mtada), and when he moved to Italy to study, the theatre “virus”, as he terms it, had already infected him. In Italy, he decided to pursue a life in theatre, something he has managed to keep up to this day.

Now that he also writes the material he performs, Scicluna has explored themes which are close to home, which included Internati u Deportati (with Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci), a piece performed in the Auberge de Castille to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the deportation of 42 Maltese citizens who were considered Italian sympathisers to Uganda.

Among these was the 23-year-old Giuseppe Scicluna, who was a member of a fascist youth group and who was deported to Uganda when still in his early twenties. Scicluna was in love with Italy, and after the war he married Ada, Pino’s mother, whom he had met in Italy.

“To this day, she doesn’t speak a word of Maltese,” Scicluna says of his mother.

In Gwerra, Familti … u Ommi (produced in Italy as Pillole di guerra… calda) Scicluna looks at his uncle Aldo’s side of the story, who in the war was stationed in Sardinia. Scicluna’s script is based on the stories his uncle (who died in 1989) used to tell him, as well as on the letters he sent his family.

“I have this image of my father and my uncle stuck in my head. When they played chess against each other, my father used to sacrifice the pawns one by one. My uncle, who was a military man, used to get angry at him, and ask him ‘why do you sacrifice the soldiers?’” Scicluna says.

Zio Aldo always won.

Apart from chess, Zanini also used to play bridge with his German counterpart in Sardinia. When, on September 8, 1943, the Italians signed the armistice with England, effectively turning the two comrades into enemies overnight, Zanini used to recount how the German captain had called him and threatened to kill everyone if they did not surrender. He also tells the story of two Italians who fought a partisan war, bringing the total number of characters he plays – including himself – to four.

Scicluna himself, who, at 57, grew up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, is resolutely anti-military, a sentiment which is encapsulated in a particularly vivid image he employs in the work: “I think war is useless. There’s a section where I say that the results of a war, whether won or lost, are blood and sh**… sangue e mer**, mer** e sangue. That’s how I’m going to say it.”

Although the play is in Maltese, some remnants of the Italian script are present, and the play is directed by Katia Capato, Scicluna’s life partner and co-founder of Nuove Cosmogonie Teatro.

Which brings us to the question that had this man of words at a loss for them: does he feel Italian or Maltese? “Maybe… Maltese?” he asks, only to take it back after a pregnant pause. “I can’t answer this, I’m sorry. Did you want a straight reply?”

Gwerra, Familti … u Ommi runs between July 6 and 8 at Couvre Port in Vittoriosa.

www.maltaartsfestival.org