A course that you taught throughout your academic career was called ‘Theatre and Liturgy’. The aspect of both Medieval and Counter Reformation theatre that most interested you was the way in which the events of contemporary history were interwoven with the events in the life of Jesus Christ. Do you see anything similar happening in the spate of Passion plays and other street theatre the previews of which are taking up newspaper space this week?
So far I have not seen many indications of it. I have heard of one production in which the Roman soldiers were garbed in a manner definitely recalling Gaddafi’s troops. But they did not go so far as to make the Nato air forces evoke the droves of angels with whom artists like Giotto filled the aerial space around Golgota.
That would have been too ironic a comment on the presentation by Toni Negri and collabor-ators of the US as the contem-porary reincarnation of the Roman imperium so monstrously allegorised in Apocalypse.
In recent years there had been several notable attempts at fusing contemporary life with the history of the Passion. Contemporary theatre techniques were utilised emphasising audience participation and the affinity between ritual and theatre rather than the spectacular and ultra real-istic characteristics of the traditional Maltese parish teatrin.
More significantly, there were the Passion plays by Fr John Abela whose premature death was a great loss for Maltese culture even though he was based in Rome.
Notably there were also the most consistent pioneers in this area at Għargħur where moreover the Passion play was very ably interlinked with the street procession. Otherwise the illumination of present-day life and challenges by showing them as possibly mystical sharings in the central events of Salvation history seemed to be almost totally absent from the Holy Week pageants and processions in the streets.
Actually, as an analyst of theatre and liturgy, I have always been intrigued by the difference between performing in a Passion play and embodying the same figure in a para-liturgical event, such as a Good Friday procession.
The Passion play is essentially theatre, not liturgy. When you saw an actor like say Mario Micallef playing Christ, you witness a conflation of the two personalities, that of the Lord and that of Micallef, just as when you saw Hamlet performed by Sir Laurence Olivier you saw a conflation of the Shakespearian character with that of the actor.
On the contrary, in the procession what the participants aim at is a very abstract, almost statuesque image of the character as if removed from the dynamism and mobility of history.
I can see that dovetailing play and procession into a unitary performance presents a huge challenge, but also the best opportunity for in-building the contemporary experience into the archetypal events of 2,000 years ago in Palestine.
Do you actually see that it would be possible, for instance, to interpret the passion at present being endured in different ways by our Arab neighbours and by the Japanese and others throughout the world in relation to the suffering and metaphysical liberation wrought by Jesus Christ?
The greatest difficult in the way of doing so is probably the problem of really understanding what is happening in the neighbouring Arab counties. I have already previously suggested that perhaps the best way is by paying attention to those few analysts who had in some way prophesised what was going to happen, just as the best way to understand the world economic crisis is through the warnings that it was going to happen given out clearly enough by such economists as the Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz.
In the book Le Rendez-vous des civilisations by Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage, demographers, it was noted that the rise of literacy in Tunisia among women was accompanied expectedly by a fall in the birth-rate to two children per woman.
Awareness among the young adult population that they were the last generation in which there were many siblings in each family would provoke it into rejection of authoritarianism at the political level as well as revolutionising family life.
Todd and Courage noted that there was another factor that was a break on this anti-autocratic tendency, namely that marriages were still mostly within tribal or kinship parameters. The collapse of this tendency in Egypt, where the rise in female literacy was less and the birth-rate had fallen to three children per woman, was a key factor in generating the cultural change that led to revolution.
This tight connection between literacy and liberation is sharpened by the development of ICT, especially mobile phones, social networking (Facebook) which has literally enabled world youth to communicate on the same wavelengths.
The nexus between these phenomena provokes reflection on the Christian interpretation of history. The appearance of the Word of God as a human person and the making available of the language of Divine Love as a possible medium of human communication is seen by Christians as central to the interpretation of history.
The Arab awakening illus-trates the claim that the most determining factor in politics is the level and quality of communication.
How relevant do this kind of understanding of these critical events in terms of literacy and communication is the fact that the countries concerned are mostly Muslim?
Another of the prophets of the uprisings was the sociologist Marcel Gauchet. He spoke of the failure of Islamic Utopianism and its substitution by the Turkish model which sought to ally Islam with liberal economics.
The revolutions are being caused not by hunger but by political frustration. This transformation of Islamism can be interpreted in the perspective of ecumenism between the religions of the Book.
Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.