The Maltese government and its censorship regime is coming under increasing pressure to lift the ban on Anthony Neilson’s play Stitching and to scrap censorship altogether.
While Neilson himself has launched a petition in London to remove the theatre classifiers’ powers to censor or ban productions, the Guardian’s theatre correspondent took the government to task for operating theatrical censorship – already a source of strong criticism from the Council of Europe.
“What the Maltese government has issued amounts to a didactic list setting out what characters can and can’t say in a work of art,” Haydon wrote on the Guardian’s theatre blog last Friday. “It is unacceptable that the police force of a European democracy in the 21st century has the power to issue notices ordering that a play is not performed. We can only hope that Unifaun theatre’s planned legal action against the Maltese government succeeds, leading to a change in this deplorable law.”
Defended by the censorship board’s chairman Theresa Friggieri, who is herself an actress and ironically the wife of leading playwright and philosopher Joe Friggieri, the decision has exposed Malta’s archaic laws despite its political membership to the European Union.
Haydon added: “The ban is a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms as outlined in articles 6 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights: ‘Freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a society, one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the development of every man ... It is applicable not only to ‘information and ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the state or any sector of the population.’”
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