Kast is a drama group that specialises in the dramatisation of works of contemporary Maltese fiction. They dramatised some of the short stories in Alfred Sant’s 2009 collection Pupu fil-Baħar (St James Cavalier).

The work of dramatising the stories seems to have been done in collaboration between the members of the group: Carmel Aquilina (director) and Antonella Galea Loffreda, Charles Sammut and Joseph Galea (actors).

As a writer of short stories, Sant is not remarkable, andthere can be little comparison between these stories and his novels such as La Bidu, la Tmiem - 1599 or L-Ewwel Weraq tal-Bajtar. His weakness as a short story writer is an inability to find good compact plots or to develop them interestingly when he does. It therefore does not surprise me that Kast’s dramatisation of six stories from the volume has not produced gripping theatre.

A story like Ġulina, for instance, which reads well as narrative, remains uninteresting in theatrical form, but I feel Kast have done a poor job of their dramatisation.

Again, Qassis (Priest) is an interesting portrait of a shady financial consultant who is ruined by a far from holy priest who is his client but turns hostile towards him and is instrumental in the man’s being tried for fraud and imprisoned.

In the stage version little of the characterisation remains, and Sant’s plot is actually weakened, so the man’s judicial troubles are allowed to make little impact.

One of the production’s problems is that there are only three in the cast, so in some of the pieces even Sant’s relatively simple plotting is not allowed to breathe.

In other pieces such as the title piece (Mannequin in the Water) or in Blogg, the small cast is no impediment, though in the former the director has had to make two members of the cast each play two roles.

The production uses another story, Ulva, which is about aliens from a planet whose environment has become polluted and who come to Malta to view it for a possible colonisation but, on viewing Sant’s characters in the various episodes, decide the island is not for them.

‘Blogg is the most succesful’

The aliens are dancers, (from the Dancel Dance Studio, choreographed by Celaine Buhagiar) not actors, garbed in colourful skin-tight costumes. I fear I could make little of the recorded speech used and I feel sure they had very little impact on the audience, save in puzzling it.

Aquilina has done a good job of directing tightly and the actors also worked successfully at producing a variety of characters.

Galea Loffreda comes out best, perhaps, in differentiating her characters such as the flirtatious tourist guide in Pupu fil-Baħar; the churchgoing middle-aged spinster in Ġulina who falls in love with a man (Joseph Galea) who is a pariah in the village and tells the interfering vice parish priest (Charles Sammut, an amusing portrait of a good man who begins to fear himself) that she does not want to do parish work because she does not believe in God; and best of all as the snobbish blogger Melanie whose world falls about her ears in Blogg which is also the most successful of the pieces.

This last piece will probably seem to many to bear some resemblance to someone in the public eye. Melanie’s philosophy of life and society has as its basic tenet that there are two types of social beings: those whose every act is guided by good taste and fine intellect, and others whose clothes, behaviour and tastes are abysmal or not far from being so.

For the latter she has nothing but supreme disdain. She realises her husband has changed, and not just because he would like her to get rid of her faithful but apparently gay Asian gardener (Sammut) but because she has deep fears about his recent behaviour.

She does not mind his having as his lover her friend Julia, presumably because people of her class fashionably have affairs with other people of their class, but anything else terrifies her.

Galea gives his most concrete performance as the detective suffering from a heavy cold and trying to cope with interrogating two couples in Pupu fil-Baħar who have failed to report they saw a drowned man floating in the sea but excuse themselves, saying they thought it was a mannequin and not a corpse.

His cup runs over when on the phone his wife tells him of a television news item about the finding of a mannequin reported to be dead.

Galea and Sammut team up well in Bil-Għali, a satirical piece about village politicians in which a local notary and the local deputy mayor attend the funeral of a woman who has died of grief when all her efforts to have a sleeping policeman placed in front of her house fail.

We learn it was the dead woman’s husband who secretly opposed the application as he was eager to have his street free from obstacles to allow the statue of the Risen Christ to be rushed at Easter satisfactorily up and down his street.