Paul Xuereb reviews Trevor Zahra’s alternate and highly satirical view of Malta’s chequered history in Xagħret Mewwija at St James Cavalier in Valletta.
Always eager to explore different genres in fiction and the theatre, Trevor Zahra has now tried his hand at a revue-type potted history of Valletta, Xagħret Mewwija, at St James Cavalier, Valletta.
Light-hearted, always lively, satirical and very coarse on occasion
This is a spoof of the shows tourists are likely to see about, say, the Great Siege, or Malta and the World War II blitz.
Directed by Carmel Aquilina and his Kast group of actors, it is light-hearted, always lively, satirical and very coarse on occasion. It is meant for the popular audiences who lap up with glee what Zahra presents, as most of the audience showed on the third night when I watched it.
In his very recent book Bizzilla and now in this show, Zahra is experimenting with the use of narrators, who are in most ways very different from himself. They can say things he is unlikely to believe in, but they can also act as a stalking-horse for views about Malta and our people, which Zahra himself does, in fact, subscribe to, but which are not greatly pleasing to the powers that be.
Zahra is, at heart, a man of the people, and like the people, he shoots his darts of irony at Renzo Piano’s remake of the Opera House ruins. In this show, his narrator and ironical/sarcastic commentator, surprisingly, is Dragut (Joseph Galea).
This is the celebrated and frequently successful seaman and admiral known to all Maltese as the man who led the population of Gozo into slavery in 1551, and who died a warrior’s death during the Ottoman siege on Fort St Elmo in 1565.
Zahra has taken a couple of licences with his Dragut. For one thing, he was killed by being knocked on the head by the mother of a comely Maltese girl he tried to seduce or actually seduced.
Secondly, this Dragut says he has been buried in Malta, when historians say his body was taken back to the country of which he was pasha – Libya – where he was buried with honours in Tripoli; his tomb still stands there today.
I have tried to figure out why Zahra chose this man, who was in his lifetime a deadly enemy of the Knights of Malta and hated Malta as the place where his brother was killed in a raid that led to the vengeful invasion of Gozo.
Even at the end of the show, when the ‘Maltese’ members of the cast turn on him, proclaim their ‘Malteseness’ (no irony on the author’s part) and denounce all his pungent criticism of Malta and the Maltese, Dragut’s spirit is not exiled from Malta.
Perhaps we are meant to think that he represents all the foreigners who have been in Malta over the ages and will continue to visit us – people like Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Benjamin Disraeli – who are quoted by Dragut gleefully when they disparage Malta. But Zahra probably thinks that such criticism of Malta sometimes made great sense, and cannot be ignored.
The revue, with the music written for it by Augusto Cardinali, is presented in a series of episodes, starting from the planning and building of Valletta by Jean de Valette (Joe Cortis, who brings out the man’s pride and his disparagement of the Maltese who fought in the Siege) to a design by the Italian engineer Francesco Laparelli (Joe Pace), and the early building of the city supervised by Malta’s great architect/engineer Girolamo Cassar.
The first words uttered by Dragut, whose ironical smile and stinging tongue lead the audience skilfully from one scene to the next, are, in the broadest, Maltese.
This is usually a sure sign that the following dialogue will not be notable for its restraint. The scene where Cassar (Charles Sammut), in his nightcap and nightgown, tells his wife he has been asked by the Grand Master to visit Rome and inspect fortifications and other buildings, is the first scene in the low comic mode.
This is when Cassar’s wife, moved by a jealous premonition that her husband will have fun with the women of Rome, gets him and herself sexually excited by using the terminology of buildings as references to his bodily parts.
Zahra’s script and Aquilina’s direction let themselves go in this scene, and both Sammut and Antonella Galea Loffreda as the wife, suit many of their actions to the words. Dragut’s ironic comment that Valletta’s fortifications proved to be effectual only in one case, when they were used by the French in 1798-1800 to keep the Maltese insurgents out of Valletta, echoes what has been said by many other authors and commentators.
The constant tussles between the Order and Malta’s bishop over jurisdiction are exemplified in a scene where Bishop Miguel Balaguer writes to Rome in protest about not being allowed to build his palace in the new city. Another scene illustrates the great unpopularity of Grand Master Jean Paul Lascaris’ prohibition of carnival revelling in Valletta. I liked a scene from the 18th century, in which Maltese peasants are hard hit by Grand Master Francisco Ximenes’ prohibition of rabbit hunting and speak fearfully of the people executed following the so-called Rebellion of the Priests.
The first digs about the Opera House come in the episode where the first house was burned down during a rehearsal in 1873, and much more so in the much later episode when the rebuilt house was largely destroyed by a German landmine in World War II. Here, the pungency of Dragut’s comments goes over the top.
Pace and Sammut are a couple of jolly and very bibulous British sailors in one of the later scenes showing the Maltese Anglophiles who could see no wrong in British colonial rule and the Italophiles who saw nothing good in British rule.
These are depicted in the persons of a barmaid (Christine Micallef) and a hot-tempered woman (Galea Loffreda).