Interview | Sunday, 28 December 2008

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In defence of suicide

After living for almost four years in the Brussels bubble, Albert Marshall returns for good, but he plans anything but retirement. In fact, the man behind Malta’s first TV soap opera Ipokriti will be soon staging a controversial play about suicide and mental disease

Karl Schembri

Albert Marshall is back, and he intends to stay. After three and a half years working as a translator with the EU Commission in Luxembourg in what he describes as a “prolonged holiday”, he now says he’s back for good.
“It is a hard decision because most of my working life I have been travelling around,” he says just a few days after landing. “At 61 I think it’s about time that my diaspora is controlled.”
But far from retirement on his mind, Marshall hastens to add it’s now time for him to return to his “career and do the things left undone”.
The man is not new to returning to his native island. He has already been through it once after returning from Australia.
“Going to Luxembourg was a form of escapism, in the sense that after PBS and Super One, I felt that I owed myself a rest. I was doing senior management for 10 solid years; health-wise also, I felt I had to go somewhere to get rejuvenated. Going to Luxembourg and doing translation work was in fact a prolonged holiday. Luxembourg is provincial: it’s quiet, it’s not Paris or Brussels or London. The work – although deadlines are very serious – doesn’t put anyone under pressure at all.”
Himself a man of letters, Marshall didn’t mind translating some of the most remote EU directives which nobody reads. He believes it’s a point of principle for Maltese to be among the official European languages.
“We have to understand that in terms of national prestige, it is extremely important once we are EU members that Maltese finds its appropriate niche, and not be discriminated against within the union itself. In Luxembourg, for instance, they bear a grudge because Luxembourgeois is not an official language, despite the fact that population-wise we’re equal. So fortunately Maltese has made it to the official institutions, because it is our national language.”
He also believes that translating everything into Maltese enriches the language in the process, while modernising it.
“A cliché which the EU public relations try to feed journalists is that a translating exercise costs the value of two cups of coffee a day. Of course it’s per capita on a number of citizens within the EU. That makes a lot of financial sense, really. So OK, fine, there are irrelevancies like trains and other elements that are not pertinent to Maltese society, but those are a very minute reflection of the lot.”
Marshall is only one of a multitude of people, some of them very well-established, who, together with many young graduates, have been lured by the EU’s promise of a relatively easy job with lots of perks and a great salary away from the islands.
Joining him from the theatre scene in Luxembourg was Oreste Calleja, and as with every other scarce resource here, the brain drain is being felt already.
“I think 100% of those who decided to come over are a loss for Malta. Well, like in the past, like in any country that went through the process of joining the EU, important talent for the country of origin had to leave their country. In Malta, of course, because of our size and economies of scale, this may have more of an effect than in any other country. But I daresay that people who believe that they can give Maltese society more than being in Brussels or Luxembourg doing translations, those kind of species don’t last long. They come back, like I have.
“Let’s face it; unless you are fortunate enough to overcome the huge linguistic problems, especially in countries like Luxembourg, and unless you penetrate the closed shop of the arts scene there, unless you are one of the very few lucky ones, then there’s no option for you but to come back and do what you really want to do in life in a place like Malta. I for one, and Jane, have tried, but in vain.”
Life in the EU institutions reminds Marshall of Marcuse’s theory of the golden cage.
“It is a golden cage, really. Salaries are extremely good, work is not like digging mines, and the bureaucracy is out of this world. In the process of exiting the Commission, I felt like I was trying to perform an escape from Auschwitz. It’s amazing. I had to collect some 15 signatures from different departments, and unless you do that before your last day you are not allowed to leave. The Luxembourgish state too is difficult to say goodbye to, because for some odd reason they make life difficult to get legitimation for you to leave the country. … It is Kafkaesque.
“But I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Bureaucracy is important for fairness to be administered. Everything goes by the book; there is no way you can advance within the institutions just because you know somebody. It is the ultimate result of heavy bureaucracy. But it is heavily mind boggling, and there are moments when it can be extremely frustrating, especially for managers.”
Outside the golden cage, Marshall now intends to fly. Already, he is working on a highly provocative play by Sarah Kane – 4.48 Psychosis – that will be staged at the Manoel Theatre on 28 February and 1 March.
The play, Kane’s last piece before she committed suicide, will be a co-production between the theatre and the Drama Centre.
“Whoever wants to touch Sarah Kane intimately needs to be very daring,” Marshall declares.
“Sarah Kane has become synonymous with nudity, with violence, black humour and all this bullshit, but you have to transcend that when you’re reading Sarah Kane, in terms of subtext, because she’s not just about that. 4.48 Psychosis, which happens to be her last piece before she died, is in fact a very deep, honest and genuine study of mental disease, almost biographical in a sense. It is an indictment on the tendency of society to marginalise mental disease, like a back pain; since it is not visible people do not believe you are suffering and don’t take it into consideration. Kane tries to use her own sense of deception by the institutions and writes 4.48 Psychosis as a metaphorical swear word against these powers. She does that in a very provocative way.
“I understand that a few months back there was another one of her earlier plays staged at St James, which may have given the impression that Kane is all about the clichés we have talked about. But I want to sell this play in terms of happy moods, in terms of lightness. There is a sense of lightness in Kane’s contemplation of suicide. It is like the final escape which is important after suffering so much. The solemn, noble exit out of a life not worth living. That, to me, like euthanasia, is an extremely positive way out, and I think I want to celebrate that positive way out, rather than go extremely negative and see wrist-slashing and bloodshed all about. I think that is not Kane, at least that is not Kane according to my book. Therefore 4.48 Psychosis is going to be a special reading of Kane, that should not scare away people who stay away from gory stuff, but should entice them to come along and empathise with the people with mental disease and what they have to live with.”
For long a sure-fire way of getting eternal condemnation within the Church, but also an act that goes against the very instinct of survival, suicide has been viewed in modern times with a patronising attitude: the people who commit it have to be either out of their senses, or irretrievable failures. Marshall says his interpretation of Kane is “a way of giving dignity to suicide and to people who suffer from mental diseases. Going beyond the usual patronising attitude towards them.”
Marshall is aware of the controversial territory this brings with it, but he says that as far as he is concerned as theatre director, he will be presenting Kane’s material “openly, with no hang-ups, and with no regard to what the Maltese think of the act of suicide”.
“My treatment of the suicide phenomenon is going to be light, light-hearted; it’s going to be looked upon as a natural process which is related to the goodness of one’s persona, rather than the evilness of the individual who is going to commit one of the most grievous sins against our creation.”
Beyond the play, Marshall confesses to a little arsenal of unpublished works of his own, especially poems, that are awaiting publication.
“Three and a half years not doing theatre and living far away from real poetic impulses have been pretty frustrating, and therefore you can imagine what I was doing in my spare time. I was writing and I was holding stuff which I believe should not be thrown out, and I think I’ve put enough material, plus what was waiting to be published before Luxembourg, and hopefully and knowing myself I know that within a short time I will be working hard and committing myself to various projects. But I really want to discipline my output and preserve time for two important things: my health and my writing.”
He also declares his intention to take over the management of Maltamedia.com, one of the first online Maltese news portals somehow still kicking, and his own and Toni Sant’s brainchild 10 years ago.
“I’m into it because I feel that it was one thing that I had to look into very seriously coming back for good if you like. I feel that now the scene has changed, the American elections have been won on the internet, and I feel that in a short time Maltese elections will be won on the internet, too.”
The former Super One chief executive says he still has “a sense of allegiance and ideological belief” with Labour although it is clear he is now quite cut off from the party.
“I feel that at 61, after what other people and what I’ve been through, people should reinvent themselves,” he says. “We tend to take ourselves too seriously, and there is a tendency to miss the wood for the trees. When I come back to Malta I’m not coming back to this country as perceived by people who have lived here all their lives. I’m coming back to a natural base, but I’m carrying with me this honest, radical belief of me being a citizen of the world and not a citizen of Malta.
“In this expansive view of my existence, and I say this with all modesty, I don’t have the time to analyse what’s offensive to the society I have chosen to live in. I’ll be myself… it’s not a question of being on the avant-garde or the rear-garde, it’s being me, not feeling tied down that belong to your nation. There is no ‘your nation’ anymore. My abode now is physically Malta but spiritually is the entire universe. I come here to be myself. If I don’t have my space, it’s up to me to create it, and if I don’t manage, then I’ll again frustrate myself and piss off again.”
Pissing off and returning, as he put it, is his way of describing his relatively lengthy stays abroad.
“That has always been the reason why I left… and I always come back a better person,” he says. “I had no reason to come back from Australia because I was doing well. I came to Malta three times, and I will keep coming back. I believe Malta is generous enough at this point in time to provide the people their space. I know some people are engaged in very serious experimentation here, the music scene is rife with new exciting sounds, people like Ġużè (Stagno) are writing literature or some may call it pseudo-literature, which is cutting into the introvert consciousness of Malta as a nation. I feel that after three years I have been rejuvenated. I come back full of vigour and energy and like my good old mate Alfred Sant said prior to the last election – 61 is not the end but the beginning of the end, and I think this is the first phase of ageing gracefully.”

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