Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1208901
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 9 FEBRUARY 2020 4 THIS WEEK THEATRE Staged in a private residence and promising 'murder, eroticism, tea and wine' to audience members who will be texted the exact location of its Gharghur venue upon purchasing a ticket, L-Interrogazzjoni is the long- gestating latest dramatic work by Alfred Buttigieg; a two-hander featuring Angele Galea and Clare Agius. TEODOR RELJIC speaks to the veteran playwright about the upcoming Teatru Malta production "I always wanted a space where actors and audience were extremely close physically to the point of intimacy" First of all, how does it feel to be returning to drama after all these years? What is it about this play in particular that had you working at it for – appar- ently – four years straight? I have been working on L-In- terrogazzjoni on and off for the last four years, maybe longer. It took me so long because the different levels of reality and the characters' transitions from one level to the other needed to be both seamless and easily per- ceptible so it was quite complex to write. But writing this par- ticular play caused me so much frustration that at times I feared that I'll never be able to finish it to my satisfaction. I never want- ed it to be a straightforward crime thriller. It is normal for me to spend three or four years on the writing of each play. Besides, I am the kind of play- wright who cannot work on a new project before the previous one has been brought to com- pletion, in this case produced on stage and that was why only after Mela hawn xi manikomju? was performed in 2016 that I could get down to working on this play. Was the 'staged in a living room' device always part of the project since conception, or was this something that was decided upon later? It was the idea of Sean Bu- hagiar, Teatru Malta's artis- tic director. He was always convinced that it should be performed in a living room. And he never budged from this even though it was becoming difficult to find the right ven- ue. I was quite sceptical about having it performed in a private property, but when Teatru Mal- ta eventually found this perfect property which is exactly the kind of residence my characters Martina and Stephanie would be living in, I was bowled over and embraced the whole idea. I always wanted a space where actors and audience were ex- tremely close physically to the point of intimacy. Beyond that, what would you Teodor Reljic Angele Galea and Clare Agius in L-Interrogazzjoni, written by Alfred Buttigieg and directed by Lee-N Abela Photography by Elisa Von Brockdorff Alfred Buttigieg