Several years ago, in an article about actress Ethel Farrugia, I wrote that her “charismatic personality as well as her technical ability and artistic sensibility made her one of the outstanding influences” in the first decades following the end of World War II.
Our theatre owes much to her and to another outstanding woman, Inez Soler, for the early stages of its development from the lively but unsophisticated theatre being offered in the years after 1945 to the much more interesting and sophisticated productions in English and Maltese by Atturi in the 1970s and 1980s and by Francis Ebejer in the 1960s and the following two decades.
For many years a leading member of the British Council’s staff in Malta, Ethel was soon involved in drama productions. She received some very good training at the Bristol Old Vic and was later awarded a British Council bursary to study drama production and adjudication in Britain, with acting experience at theatres like the Nottingham Playhouse and the Aldwych in London, and in plays by Shakespeare and Molière at the Edinburgh Festival.
Her one experience of acting in films was in the 20th Century Fox film The Magus.
In Malta, where she was the music and drama organiser of the British Council, she first acted very strikingly in productions of Arms and the Man and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and went on learning about stage direction from the professional English theatre people brought over to direct productions by the British Institute Players. She then did very well when she herself directed Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy.
In the 1970s, a number of theatre people led by Karmen Azzopardi and Paul Naudi formed the semi-professional theatre group Atturi, of which Ethel was a founder-member, and was asked to direct for it. Her direction of an open-air production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, with a strong cast, was carried out with great attention to detail and left a great impact. It was unfortunate that her unremitting insistence on detail and professional impatience with carelessness and shoddiness irritated the Atturi leadership and stopped her from directing more for Atturi.
Ethel played an important role in the development of theatre training in Malta. She helped found the Manoel Theatre Club, which ran stimulating workshops for theatre people, and when the Manoel Theatre Academy of Dramatic Art (MTADA) was founded in 1977 she did some fine work in teaching for it, but she never got the headship of the academy she rightly expected, leading her to retire very early from her theatre work.
Though her main achievements were in the theatre, she did some valuable work for music in Malta, under British Council auspices. This included the formation, in 1954, of the former Commander in Chief’s orchestra as the British Institute Orchestra under Joseph Sammut, for which she organised a number of concerts until 1971. She was also responsible for the production of a weekly programme on classical music on the Rediffusion cable network.
Late in her long life, Ethel received official recognition of her outstanding work for the Maltese theatre by being made a Member of the Order of Merit.