You know how it is when you gaze briefly at the sun and then look away? You start to see dark spots everywhere; spots stain your vision after having looked directly at the source of light, ironically enough.

Through the play’s characters we become aware that there are greater forces determining our life.

I often wonder whether the same happens when it comes to what we deem as ‘real’, whether our version of reality – the one we are able to see, the one closest to us – can only be a reflected one; looking straight into the face of reality will blind us. And if it does not, then someone or something else will.

So, when a piece of contemporary theatre comes along claiming to be nothing but a crude reflection of Maltese society in its most condensed and ‘basic’ form – a crude picture of a tightly-knit Maltese family portrait – set amid polished surfaces and mirrors, one cannot help but look and glimpse their own little segment of reality reflected there.

Repubblika Immakulata, written and directed by Simone Spiteri and backed by an outstanding cast and artistic team, is Dù Theatre’s comeback play following a four-year pause, and it comes adorned beneath a misleadingly simple premise: a wedding, a general election and a village festa – three highly-anticipated moments on a collision course in the lives of three siblings, narrated to us by the elusive fourth and younger sibling, Anon.

Little binds them together, and the little that does is rapidly withering away: the family home, once the stable cradle of morality, is set to be auctioned and the table around which they reminisce their childhood ‘carefree’ days falls apart, disassembled into a cage of steel and, ultimately, emptied out as a hole in the ground. There is, indeed, little concern for one another if not for the inevitable ways the actions of one threaten to ruin the ambitions and dreams of the other.

Herein lies the first (of many) in-your-face ironic twists of the play. For repubblika essentially means ‘the concern of the people’. But the concern here is not quite of or about the nation, even if the sinister political, social and environmental situation of contemporary Malta looms as the tragic and comic backdrop to the play. No, here, as is perhaps the case most times, the concern is with coming across as spotless, stainless, free of fault and guilt – a white, clean record, as white as a new wedding dress, or immaculately clean and polished floors. In other words, immakulata, impossibly so.

Be it the language, the actors, the clothes, the set, or the narrative itself, the only part that remains clean throughout are the mirrors placed all around the seating area. Mirrors are constantly diverting back all the action happening before you. There, between light changes, you may glimpse your own face looking on, a helpless spectator feeling just as tied down as the miserable characters on stage.

Something has to be polished clean to realise that what you are looking at is, in fact, innately filthy, contaminated, corrupted

As Dr Marco Galea, senior lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Malta puts it: “...through these characters we become aware (perhaps more than they themselves are aware) that there are greater forces tugging at the string, determining our life. If we are not aware of this string, it is only because whoever is holding its end is so far away from us, just like someone who walks the dog on a long and loose leash, giving it the illusion of freedom, until it is pulled back suddenly.”

Therefore, it is almost as if something has to be polished clean to realise that what you are looking at is, in fact, innately filthy, contaminated, corrupted. It cannot help but get tied up in complex situations, impossible to clean with one magical sweep or promise – a marriage, or being elected as a Member of Parliament, or drowning your problems away, or obliterating them in the explosive fires of a village festa.

The feast being celebrated, l-Immakulata, is precisely what one cannot be. As is often the case, and the play seems to want to remind us, we celebrate and glorify what we do not understand. We raise educated and seemingly-reliable strangers to a place that threatens to swallow them whole and spit them back out as degenerates of what they once were. We invest our faith and hope in an idea which promises to bring us out of the mess we’re in. We would like to remain clean in a very dirty game.

Indeed, some onlookers – as passive participants – might call the play “dirty” by some other standard, by the crudeness of its language: “lingwaġġ ħamallu”, some might call it. Though, I would rather think of it as “lingwaġġ tal-ħama”.

If irony drives the play forward, it is language that colours it. Articulate and loud, visceral and unfiltered, the words are dirtied by the filth their speaker is subjected to, the filth they must be heard through or risk being suffocated by it. This ‘filth’ is of the kind that finds its way to practically everywhere, like fine limestone dust, entering from the fringes to the core, from the personal indifference and distance of authorities such as the State, the Church, the judiciary – you name it – to the domestic and inner spaces of our everyday life. The threads of power, culture, fear, ambition, unfettered progress, that far too often entangle our own – those ‘purer’, finer threads closely woven to our heart: innocent, child-like dreams, unbridled by political correctness, reason and, least of all, by ‘reality’.

The ‘reality’ Repubblika Immakulata throws us in is a pretty dark one. Indeed, it is a story told from the dark, quite literally too. The play itself opens up in utter darkness, filled only by a voice singing, or rather, coughing up the lyrics from the Maltese classic – Xemx; a voice recalling the radiating beauty of the sun in utter darkness. What an apt introduction! For the play seems to hover somewhere there throughout – in between. In between memories and the present, between dreams and realities, between realisms and exaggerations, between stereotypes and the familiar, between clarity and doubt, noise and silence, light and dark.

Indeed, the dawn of the play occurs at nightfall, and the battle with the bigger-than-life stranger all throughout the night. We would be hopeful fools to think that the play might offer some kind of resolution, some kind of outcome to this endless condition. Not once does it pretend to do so, but nor does it forget its audience – real people, with real frustrations, who have grown hoarse and tired of lamenting their own version of what is right and just.

Soon, or perhaps we already have, we will grow tired of fighting, of listening, we will eventually stop caring, seeing. What should matter becomes invisible, nameless, anonymous. Which is precisely why there is a dire need for contemporary theatre to blurt it out as it is, unfiltered and unpolished – sharply, so that it might cut straight to the bone where it hurts, where it can no longer be ignored.

Repubblika Immakulata is a Dù Theatre and Spazju Kreattiv co-production.