Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1085429
THIS WEEK THEATRE maltatoday | SUNDAY • 24 FEBRUARY 2019 4 Formerly UK-based theatre director John Baraldi speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about Apotheosis, an upcoming play about Dolores, a Maltese woman shunted to the fringes of society, but whose tell-all memoirs threaten to shake the foundations of the local establishment What is the story behind 'Apotheosis'? How did the initial ideas behind it first come about, and how did it eventually cohere into the play that we'll see performed? Apotheosis grew out of a Thanks- giving meal at my house in Hamrun in November 2014, so I blame it on the effect of too much food, too much wine, and too much Jack Dan- iels on Marc Cabourdin, who stood up and gave the most amazingly passionate rant about how much he loved his country and how badly it had been served by its politicians. I saw a side of Marc which I had nev- er seen before, as he normally gets cast as a good-looking heavy. And I thought that I had to write a play to create a charismatic, multi-dimen- sional man who seems to be all that his nation needed. It was the idea of "cometh the hour, cometh the man" – how historical evolution sometimes gives birth to a leader who epitomises all that a na- tion is, all that a nation needs, all that a nation wants. Thus the idea of The Man for Malta was born. Of course, I realised that Marc was far too busy doing far too many things to ever act in such a play but I liked the idea of a national leader emerging at a time of national need. And I realised that that leader should be a woman - a possibility which is highly unlikely in Malta. So The Man for Malta had to be a woman! I was going to com- mission a playwright to do it, but I soon realised that my ideas were al- ready far too developed to put them into the hands of another writer. So I decided to do it myself! So I started reading and went to the University of Malta to get some background and historical context. Soon, I had piles of books and articles and far too much information, so I looked for a structure. Years ago, I took students in Lon- don to hear Arthur Miller being interviewed on stage in the West End by the Director of the National Theatre. Miller talked about writing Death of a Salesman and how certain pieces of classical music seemed to influence the structure and mood of the piece. So I decided to find some music which seemed to work with the ideas swimming in my head. After many weeks, I found Arvo Part's Lamentate, which was writ- ten as a homage to Anish Kapoor's extraordinary installation in the vast Turbine Hall of the Tate Mod- ern in London in 2002. The myth of Marsyas seemed appropriate – a hu- man flayed alive by the gods for dar- ing to challenge them; what a suit- able allegory for a woman trying to be a political leader in Malta! Thus it seemed appropriate to be influ- enced by a musical composition at- tempting to honour a contemporary sculpture based on an ancient myth! So I took the ten movements of Arvo Part's composition, and structured ten scenes – each scene taking the ti- tle and the emotional content of the movement. Having been a musician in my youth, I understood the sonata format, theme and variations, expo- sition, development and all that. And it seemed appropriate to take a story on a structured emotional journey, using music as the guide. It is said that each movement in a symphony or sonata is like a sen- tence, and the sentences add up to paragraph or story. The same is true of a play. In this case, the musical de- scription of the movement gave me the emotional content and speed of the scene. And then I came across Tchaikovsky's music for Sleeping Beauty – the Apotheosis music in which the heavens bless Aurora – two minutes of glorious music often cut because the scene can be so ex- pensive to stage. And finally, I found Arvo Part's Vater Unser – a setting for the Lord's Prayer, which is ironic Teodor Reljic Angele Galea and Marc Cabourdin star in 'Apotheosis', staged at Spazju Kreattiv When the 'Man for Malta' is a woman