Skene theatre group had a lot to live up to following last year’s passion play Skond San Ġwann.
The scenes between Mark Mifsud and Sarah Lee Zammit were electric, with both actors working together to create complex shades of humour and pathos that steered the play away from pastiche- Peter Farrugia
At once traditional and innovative, the performance attracted patrons and visitors from across the island to Luqa’s Metanoia Theatre.
Variously regarded as Malta’s best Easter drama, this year’s offering It-Tmiem? eschewed traditional representations in favour of a topical story shot through with contemporary spirituality.
Written and directed by Andre Penza, the play follows the lives of Mark, Pamela and their adopted son Samuel. Mark is a rock of the community, a volunteer working on the parish’s Holy Week statues.
When a young man named Darren decides that what the parish needs is a new statue (featuring Christ surrounded by children) Mark is dismissive – this sets the ball rolling, with Mark’s self-destructive behaviour culminating in the death of his son.
There’s plenty of melodrama but it somehow works, set against the vari (passion statuettes) themselves which animate and speak from their archetypal world.
Mark Mifsud was excellent and brought his character to life in fits of rage, indecision and remorse. His marriage is presented as loving but unfulfilling, and it’s not long before he falls into the arms of the beautiful Charmaine (another volunteer) who’s unaware that he’s a married man with a young son.
The scenes between Mifsud and Sarah Lee Zammit (Charmaine) were electric, with both actors working together to create complex shades of humour and pathos that steered the play away from pastiche.
Pamela Schembri was convincing as Mifsud’s harried and anxious wife, whose life revolves around work and family. She managed to create a character that wasn’t entirely pleasant (a little small in scope, a little meanin spirit) but all the more authentic for it.
When she finally realises her husband has been unfaithful, the character leaps into uneasy action with a kind of stumbling fear (somewhere between the hope that she is wrong and the knowledge that she must be right) that is to Schembri’s credit as an actress.
The young boy, played by Samuel Iyke Okoh, was very good indeed. He engaged other characters with a guileless ease that made the character’s innocence at once endearing and, ultimately, all the more heart-rending.
Where the first act was intriguing, full of shrewd observations on the state of Malta’s religious community and its concurrent decline in spirituality, thesecond act of the play lacked coherence.
The storyline involving Darren (well played by Darren Gatt), whose fatal decision to take drugs for the first time is somehow linked to the Mark’s neglect, becomes so thin it barely registers at all.
I can appreciate that the story was trying to speak to youngpeople as well as older audience members, but by fragmentinghis story Penza diminished its force.
By the end of the piece we are told that the narrative has been a fantastic, “thank God it’s just a dream” sequence of events – nobody has died, nothing has been lost.
While this gave the production a happy ending, it denies any chance that the redeeming message of the Risen One might penetrate the absolute darkness of Mark’s despair, his wife’s suffering, Darren’s surrender and Charmaine’s complicity.
It undoes itself before their sadness can be overcome, and that presents a substantial problem of artistic integrity.
The family unit that Penza created serves as a real heart of the story, and that might have been maximised to better effect.
Mifsud’s performance as a conflicted husband and father was pitch perfect, but staggered a few times under the pressures of a script that demanded too much and didn’t give enough time for the kind of full development that certain, very emotionally charged, scenes involved.
While I can appreciate the playwright’s intentions, if Penza had cut the subplots entirely it would have given just the right amount of space for the main story to breathe.
As it is, It-Tmiem? was a good production put together by a talented cast of people. The ambitious script was obviously written with a keen sense of reality, plenty of wit and a telling eye for Maltese religious mores.
We can only hope Skene will continue to present challenging Easter offerings, and push the envelope with their creative reinterpretations of the season’s quintessential passion play.