Valletta Dramatic Company have come up with Neil Simon’s first play, Come Blow Your Horn, in a Maltese version bearing the title Inġabar Għax Jiġbruk (Manoel Theatre) written by the late Nini Fleri Soler, well-known actress in the first few decades after World War II.

It is not, I think, one of Simon’s best comedies, but funny enough, and interesting for its strong autobiographical content. The two principal male actors, the brothers Alan and Buddy Baker, represent the playwright’s real-life brother Danny and Neil Simon himself respectively, while the dictatorial father is a somewhat pitiless portrait of the Simon brothers’ real father. Mrs Baker was also based to some extent on Mrs Simon.

Baker Senior is a successful businessman who employs his two sons in his factory. Alan, the elder, has long rebelled against his father’s insistence on ruling his sons’ life, by dedicating a good chunk of his life to women and merry-making, but his father bears up with this because his younger son Buddy is very well behaved and dedicated to his father’s business.

When, however, Buddy decides he too has had enough, and goes to live with Alan in his Manhattan flat, Baker Senior erupts, and when he discovers that Alan is a womaniser who has no intention of marrying, and that Buddy intends to do the same, he explodes, and sacks both of them from the family business.

Things cannot get worse for any of them when Mrs Baker, mother of all mothers, decides to leave her husband and to go and live in Alan’s flat.

What happens, however, is that the two brothers suffer a sea change: Buddy forgets all about being a well-behaved businessman and gets obsessed with getting pretty women in his bed, whereas Alan, after having suffered a couple of diatribes from his father, who casts on his head the appellation Buffu (I’m not sure what the original text says, but I doubt if it is ‘Clown’) over and over again, decides to change his way of living.

He gets a couple of very important business deals concluded for his still fuming father, and then wins it all when he proposes to his girlfriend Connie right in front of his parents. At the end, Buddy remains alone on the stage waiting for his latest girl, but the playwright denies the character representing himself a happy ending…

Simon is, of course, Jewish, and in this play he gives us his picture of a Jewish family, with a very loving mother who cannot let go of her sons, and a tyrannical father who insists on making his sons images of his hard-working self, and scorns them for letting him down.

Indeed, Simon’s picture of the father is a harsh one, and were it not for George Micallef’s skill in bringing out the father’s laughable personality, the production might have verged rather more on the serious.

Micallef provides us with a comical version of what used to be called the padre nobile in old-fashioned drama, but he remains formidable and his mighty bellows of Buffu and Buffi may set the audience laughing but are uttered with such strength that the audience has to realise that the play may be a farce on the whole, but that for this difficult man what is happening to him and to his family is close to tragedy.

Joe Izzo has done a good job in directing the piece, starting off with the opening scene in which Carlos Farrugia’s Alan shows us what a deceitful charmer he is as he lies again and again to his latest girl, the glamorous and flirtatious Peggy (Angele Cristina), with whom he has just spent a weekend skiing in Vermont. He then introduces us to a more serious girl-friend, Connie (Marvic Cordina, a straight part done stylishly), who loves him despite her awareness of his deceitfulness.

Farrugia plays Alan with a light touch, though he never misses out on the nuances, so there is quite a contrast when his brother Buddy, played by Renato Dimech, comes in. Dimech’s style is not light, and in fact he overdoes his technique in the opening scene to bring out Buddy’s lack of social skills. Fortunately he soon finds the right level and begins to get his laughs without trying too hard, notably in the scene where he impresses Peggy, whom Alan has passed on to him, by pretending to be a Hollywood producer.

I should add that a fair-haired wig does not suit Dimech at all.

Izzo’s skill as a director comes out best in what is probably the play’s funniest scene: when Mrs Baker (Teresa Gauci), left alone in the flat, has to field a series of telephone calls meant for Alan, getting more and more flustered and more and more confused with each call.

A more practised light comedienne would have made more of the scene, but Gauci, more familiar to me in straight parts, does reasonably well, and excels in the last scene where good nature helps to bring matters to a happy ending for the family.

The three acts could have done with a more attractive set than they got.