An actor is an actor, you might think. Film, television, theatre, radio, and so on – one is the same as the next, isn’t it? Actually, it isn’t. Not only do most actors have a preference for a particular medium, but they carry different connotations and even levels of prestige. Before the age of big-budget television in which we now live, film actors would never dream of being on a television programme – those two worlds stayed very separate.

Although it’s not quite the same case, there is also a degree of separation between television and stage in Malta. Which one you prefer is entirely up to you, but some division does exit. Many talented local theatre performers will never dip their toes into the local television scene, while many beloved television stars never tread the boards.

In recent years, the much-needed rise of homegrown plays has softened this border somewhat, and somewhere in this new territory dwells Clive Piscopo’s Fejn Jeħodna r-Riħ. Though he has been involved with and ap­pear­ed in various local theatre productions, Piscopo is a recognisable name in the sphere of local televised drama – a fact that seems to have heavily influenced this production.

Writing and starring in a play is a hefty task indeed, and incredibly ambitious at that. But I feel that Piscopo may have performed better in one of these roles than the other. Though he gives possibly the most thoughtful performance in the show, he has somewhat stacked the odds against himself in producing a play which seems as though it would have been much better suited to the screen.

The hard work clearly put in by the cast and crew was appreciated by their audience

Directed by Lee-N Abela, Fejn Jeħodna r-Riħ is at its core an emotional drama, but it takes unfortunate detours into implausibility and gets a little lost in its own plot holes. The story, which centres on two brothers (Piscopo himself and Nichail Portelli) returning to Malta after many years spent on the road, apparently running from a mysterious past.

Although a lot of thought has clearly gone into the story, its twists and turns come off as convoluted as they all come spinning out in heavy-handed expositionary dialogue during the second act. Instead of allowing the audience to put together pieces of the story on their own, this production spoon-feeds answers in one massive chunk once the twist has been revealed. I think Piscopo is smarter than this, and I think his audience is, too.

The structure of the play, which included a cast of no fewer than four supporting police characters with no more than a line each, and intermittent childhood flashbacks, seems specifically designed for the screen. Rapid-fire editing of the children’s innocent scenes into the tense current narrative would have been far more effective than cutting the pace of a tense chase scene by adding a flashback to it. Although the performances of the supporting characters were good, they contributed nothing to the plot and could have easily been boiled down to the two main police officers played by Eric Grech and Louise Fenech, and Inspector Pizzuto, played by Peter Galea.

With all this in mind, Abela, as director, had a tricky job at hand. Although I believe that she succeeded in keeping the pace going strongly throughout the play as it unfolded, she could have done more to reign in some of the play’s more melodramatic moments. I’ve been in plays were audiences tittered ner­vously in tense moments before – but I’ve never heard outright guffaws when a character is screaming and deadly serious in promis­ing bloody vengeance. Yes it is the audience who respond that way, but an audience responds to what they are presented with.

It may be the case that some of the humour contained in the play was somewhat at odds with the rest of the show’s tone. Although the story is about as dark as any Greek tragedy worth its salt, the inclusion of some exceptionally crude and zany jokes from Grech’s and Fenech’s beat cops may have skewed the tone a bit. Don’t get me wrong – I have no problem with jokes that would make a sailor blush, but this style of humour felt heavily out of place to me.

Once again, I believe this may be a problem which stems back to the choice in medium. While television gives you the time to build your world slowly, develop your characters, and lay the clues for shocking revelations, this is much harder to accomplish in the stripped-bare confines of a stage. With only a couple of hours to spare, there is little time to spare on the unnecessary. What appears must be the true essence of the story and no less.

As I sat in the audience watching this play, I was struck by the intensity of the reactions from the people around me. They howled with laughter (perhaps not always appropriately); they gasped and cried at the final reve­lations; and they jumped to their feet in applause. There is no doubt in my mind that the hard work clearly put in by the cast and crew was appreciated by their audience.

My question: is that enough to mark success, or should we always keep pushing for something more?

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