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CLASSIFIEDS info@mediatoday.com.mt 8 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 24 MAY 2026 CULTURE & CLASSIFIEDS GENERAL LITERATURE – A book of short stories by Leonard Schembri - "The unfolding story of the Holy Grail & other stories" available from all Agenda book- shops and outlets. HOLIDAY ACCOMMODATION MARSALFORN, Gozo - holiday apartments for short or long lets with magnificent sea-views. Call 21556021, 27556021, 79426883 PROPERTY TO LET XLENDI - catering premises in prime site to let. Can be used for other commercial purposes. Phone 79493021, 79426883, 77481592 or 77484029 SERVICES PLASTERING & RENOVATIONS - For all type of plastering and renovation call Matthew on 79727779 or send a message on fb: MA Plastering & Renovations. From Cosmana Navarra to Madonna taċ-Ċoqqa I usually review books. Books are civilised creatures. They wait for one patiently on the bedside table and they do not begin without you because you spent twenty minutes circling Valletta for parking, and they certainly do not lock the doors once the lights dim. Theatre, however, is more vindictive than literature. It insists on physical presence. Gabriel Lia's Ċama Ċama, di- rected by Lee-N Abela, goes a step further. It demands cultural presence. Maltese-ness. Not na- tionality, but a cultural literacy, one steeped in festi, parish pol- itics, development scandals, in- herited Catholic guilt, and the in- stinct of wanting to be sheltered by institutions that repeatedly disappoint you. Ċama Ċama therefore knows, or imagines, exactly who it is speak- ing to. At times, the production risks becoming a perfectly sealed echo chamber for culturally lit- erate Maltese audiences who al- ready possess the references, the grievances, and the exhaustion necessary to decode it. Yet even when it falters, Ċama Ċama remains intelligent, theat- rically inventive, and emotionally aware enough to avoid becoming mere activist pamphleteering dis- guised as drama. The sea opens and closes the play. The titular ċama ċama neat- ly bookends the play, rather than being a plot device. The sea here is not the Mediterranean of Air Malta brochures and retirement fantasies. Lia tells us of the sea of humid village summers, cigarette smoke near beaches, adolescent melancholy, and the very Maltese instinct of going to sit by the sea whenever life becomes unbeara- ble. Watching Ċama Ċama, I could not stop thinking of Madonna taċ-Ċoqqa. The comparison is unavoidable. Once again, sacred imagery collapses under the weight of greed, development, institutional compromise, and a revered statute defaced. Once again, the village itself becomes the victim. One almost expects Karmnu ta' Randu to emerge from backstage muttering dark- ly. Hovering nearby too is the spectre of Cosmana Navarra: emphyteusis, displacement, ordi- nary people slowly edged out by systems that they have no control on. And yet, despite these recog- nisable references, the play never entirely collapses into imitation. Lia curates Maltese socio-politi- cal imagery obsessively, compli- mented with his excellent com- mand of the Maltese language. The result resembles a buffet of contemporary Malta: sacristies, protest chants, takeaway cappuc- cinos in parish offices, festa poli- tics, activist fatigue, performative piety, and priests. The 5 characters are, without doubt, masterfully thought out. Most of them are exactly what you'd imagine in-nies tal-knisja are like. The young priest, swish- ing about in cassock and palju, emerges as one of the produc- tion's most interesting contra- dictions: emotionally sincere, yet constrained by the institution he serves, piercing through the neu- tering brought on by the clerical collar. Lia gives the priests several striking soliloquies, the kind one leaves the theatre wanting to re- visit on the page afterwards. The priest characters acquired addi- tional fascination because there happened to be two actual priests seated in the audience during the performance I attended. Ċama Ċama constantly impli- cates its audience. At moments, the audience became quasi-con- celebrants. Bells rang and some- where deep within the Catholic reptile brain emerged the invol- untary response: "Imma għid biss kelma waħda u ruħi tkun imfejqa." The play understands something many secular Mal- tese intellectuals often pretend to have escaped: Catholicism in Malta sometimes survives not as theology but as muscle memory. This is where the production succeeds most beautifully. In rec- ognition. Spazju Kreattiv worked beauti- fully as an extension of the per- formance. The arena staging, sur- rounded by visuals of churches, sea, and village fragments, creates an intimately welcome suffoca- tion. The central prop box — from which objects continually emerged — worked beautifully, like a theatrical Pandora's box stuffed with the debris of Mal- tese identity. Every object seemed excavated from the same collec- tive subconscious: half maħżen tal-festa, half national trauma archive. There are moments of genu- ine theatrical elegance. The festa sequence, particularly the silent banda, was one of the produc- tion's strongest moments. Silence in Malta is often underused be- cause we tend to fear stillness; here, silence framed by liedna and pavaljuni became deeply uncom- fortable. The absence of music somehow amplified the cultural noise surrounding it. The play is also genuinely funny at times. The comic relief sacris- tan character could easily have descended into caricature, yet he provides some of the evening's most human moments. Still, not everything lands. The repeated use of the word "activist" increasingly irritated me throughout the production. The term has become so flat- tened in Maltese discourse that it often obscures more than it clarifies. In contemporary Mal- ta, "activist" risks functioning si- multaneously as moral identity, aesthetic performance, and social branding exercise. The play ges- tures toward this exhaustion but never quite interrogates it deeply enough. Activism and facebook lives sometimes begin to feel like just another piece of cultural landscape alongside church bells and festa statues. At times, I also wondered whether the references were too insistent, too eager to be recog- nised. But perhaps this discom- fort says more about my own social positioning than about the play itself. If one already inhabits these worlds — protests against Bills 143 and 144, Church con- tradictions, heritage discourse — does the play feel repetitive because it lacks subtlety, or be- cause Maltese public life itself has become theatrically repetitive? There were moments where I felt enclosed within a comfortable intellectual consensus, the sort where audiences nod approv- ingly at references because these assumptions already belong to them." Yet Ċama Ċama avoids stagna- tion through structure. Emotion- ally, it unfolds non-linearly, allow- ing tone to shift with unsettling effectiveness. Darkness arrives gradually. Not merely through death (although death remains theatre's oldest and cheapest ac- celerant, especially when paired with the Ghost of Christmas Fu- ture-worthy costume one char- acter was then wrapped into) but through the revelation that the very same things initially present- ed with warmth and humour can become mechanisms of suffoca- tion. Festa culture darkens. Nostalgia darkens. Village intimacy dark- ens. Even Maltese identity itself begins to feel claustrophobic. The performances reflected this unevenness productively. The first half occasionally tipped into melodrama, particularly among the priests, as though the actors briefly stopped trusting the intel- ligence of certain moments. The second half improved considera- bly once the cast had more psy- chological ambiguity to inhabit rather than symbolic functions to perform. Did Ċama Ċama show me any- thing radically new? No. Its the- matic concerns are already famil- iar to anyone paying attention to contemporary Malta. The cri- tique of institutional hypocrisy is hardly revolutionary. Its imagery, statues, processions, corruption, sanctity contaminated by money, belongs to an established Maltese artistic vocabulary. But originality is not always the point. Sometimes what we need is recognition. A mirror held up with love and anger and under- standing. What Lia achieves is synthesis: a convincing portrait of contem- porary Maltese exhaustion. The play understands the grief of loving a country while watching it dismantle itself in real time. It understands the fatigue of people protesting every Saturday morn- ing while suspecting the cranes will still win. It understands be- lievers wounded by the Church who nevertheless cannot sever themselves entirely from its ritu- als, rhythms, and bells. In some ways, the play recalls Harold Bloom's argument that strong works rarely emerge from total originality, but from the anxious reworking and reinhabit- ing of inherited cultural material. One borrowed line lingered after the performance ended: "Tiżfnu. Mad-daqqa. Tal-iżvi- luppaturi." You dance to the beat of the developers. Hearing it transported me immediately back to the Ġustizzja għall-Art- na protests against Bills 143 and 144. Malta increasingly feels like a country watching itself deterio- rate while insisting the festa con- tinue uninterrupted. Perhaps that is Ċama Ċama's greatest success. Not that it shocks us. But that it recognises us all too well. And now that he has shown such a clear understanding of who we are, in such crisp Mal- tese, I find myself genuinely look- ing forward to seeing more plays emerge from Lia's pen. Disclosure: I was provided with press tickets to attend this perfor- mance for the purpose of writing an independent review. THEATRE REVIEW ĦALEY XUEREB hxuereb@mediatoday.com.mt