Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/542972
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 19 JULY 2015 30 This Week How did your collaboration with Stagun Teatru malti come about, and how did you arrive at Faith, Hope u Char- ity as your subject for the play? Working with, or rather work- ing for Stagun Teatru Malti (STM) is a different experience from working with other thea- tre companies. STM is basi- cally a commercial venture that provides theatre performances to audiences with a particular characteristic of presenting plays in Maltese and related to Malta and her history and politics. Similar to what hap- pens in other artistic ventures their writers are hired to come up with a product they are pay- ing money for. The writer is, in other words, writing for the company rather than for him- self. I was approached by STM some two years ago to work on an adaptation of Monsarrat's The Kappillan of Malta. Bas- cially STM bought the rights from Monsarrat's publishers, and I worked on a stage version in Maltese. As it happened, last year's Il-Kappillan ta' Malta was a success and I learned that for the last two performances people had to be turned away. So the producers realised, or maybe confirmed, that WWII is a very interesting subject also because, save for some memoi- res and novels written mostly by foreign authors, there is only a slight volume of work on it. That's when Faith, Hope u Charity was conceived as a possible subject for this year's STM's summer production. So, neither the idea nor the sto- ryline are mine: I worked on (or around) the producers' sto- ryline and created the play. The core of the play appears to be a love triangle set in the middle of World War II. Giv- en that such a set-up has often been exploited for melodra- ma, what attracted you to it, and which themes do you hope to bring out? As I pointed out in the previ- ous answer the idea of a love triangle during the worst mo- ments of the siege was not mine. The producers believe the subject will pull crowds, and I have no doubt about that. But of course, on accepting to take the assignment I also wanted to make sure there is some Mifsud effect in it. So rather than a sop- py romantic story the play will, perhaps, give more space to the politics behind the war and also aims at tackling various myths about the war and, moreover, about the British rule. To start with the very story of the planes Faith, Hope and Charity, though documented, has still a number of loose ends: there were eight- een planes just before the War broke but only four were left on the island. The Gladiator plane was not best plane to fly dur- ing WWII but it was the only type made available for Malta's defence for that time. And how good or bad were the relations between the British rulers and the native citizens? I'd also like to think that the romance in the play is more reminiscent of the great novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez rather than the lovey- dovey type of thing. This isn't the first time that the war has featured in your fiction, even if your novella Fl- Isem tal-Missier (u tal-Iben) explores it far more intimately and impressionistically. Are there recurring aspects of the war that interest you, and do you return to them with this play? As you're saying my novella and this play are quite different from eachother, both as to gen- re and philosophy maybe. But WWII, as a subject, continues to haunt me: it was such a ma- jor event, devastating in many respects and, at least according to some historians, had also an enormous social impact. I keep thinking about Maltese authors and their choice of subjects. One of the few Maltese novels about the war is Vic Apap's L- Ulied tal-Azzar. If my memory serves me right it was published in the seventies, that's forty long years after the war. Then there was Ebejer's Requiem for a Malta Fascist, 1980 and sub- sequently Lina Brockdorff's work. So little, and so long af- ter the event itself. Why? I find this very very curious. In a way I got interested in WWII know- ing my father was a decorated war veteran who used to spend hours on end recounting war- time experiences. He esteemed the British but some experi- ences he used to relate – his own of course – did not convey a fair portrait of the British rul- ers, and I always wanted to put that forth without, however, addressing the issue with the sort of loud patriotism which I was very exposed to when I was young. The scope is not to ex- press anti-British sentiments, rather to do away with myth and see things differently from what other saw them before. What kind of contribution would you say Stagun Teatru Malti offer to local writers? Would you say we need more such initiatives? STM has a professional set up. As such they assign a job to you and you carry it through. Work- ing in such a set up is totally different from what local play- wrights might have been used to do before. It's not a ques- tion of playwright says all and has the last word on everything. To start with, playwrights, nor- mally, work or collaborate with a theatre group: their work is shared with the actors and di- rectors who give feedback to the authors and then they go back to their wordprocessors and make the necessary changes to the script. All playwrights work like that: Shakespeare had his own company as did Strindberg and Author Immanuel Mifsud speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about penning the play Faith Hope u Charity, a commission for Stagun Teatru Malti, and moving out of his comfort zone to work within the milieu of a commercial theatre production More than collateral Immanuel Mifsud: "STM is a commercial operation, and playwrights who are touchy should forget about working for them"