NEWS | Wednesday, 04 March 2009

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Franica Pulis
Last weekend Teatru Manoel, in collaboration with the Drama Centre, produced Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, directed by Albert Marshall.
This is the second work by the controversial British playwright to be staged recently, after Unifaun Production’s Blasted last year. Both plays featured nude scenes (as did other recent productions, including Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, Schaffers’s Equus and Mario Azzopardi’s Sulari fuq Strada Stretta); and Blasted in particular even had two men having anal sex on stage, with the audience given a full frontal view of a soldier’s buttocks as he sexually abuses the other man.
One question automatically springs to mind: why were the above plays allowed by the Board of Film and Stage Classification, but not Anthony Nielsen’s Stitching – which incidentally features no nudity or sex scenes at all?
Albert Marshall dismisses out of hand any notion that his play had received “preferential treatment”, because he is related to the Board’s chairperson, Theresa Friggieri.
“Of course not!” he replied emphatically when asked. “In fact she had phoned me last December to tell me she sent the play to another member of the board as we were relatives. This member did in fact want to censor a particular line, but I told him he should contact the producers.”
Marshall explains that he would willingly remove the line if the producers agreed. “However, this line was never censored, as the producers never got back to me about it.”
As for the decision to ban Stitching, Friggieri herself explained in a press release that the play touches upon four themes which remain taboo in this country: blasphemy (although, as pointed out by this newspaper some weeks ago, the play contains hardly any blasphemy at all); “obscene contempt for the victims of Auschwitz” (though, unlike Germany and Austria, there are no laws banning such expressions); “dangerous sexual perversions leading to sexual servitude”; and “reference to the abduction, sexual assault and murder of children”... the latter including a “eulogy to the child murderers, Fred and Rosemary West.”
But this explanation has only deepened existing uncertainties as to what can and cannot be staged in Malta. A strict application of the above themes would automatically preclude many classical works, including Shakespeare and Marlowe, and nearly all the Greek tragedies.
Take Euripides’ Medea, recently performed in Malta: the tale of a woman driven by jealousy to murder her own two sons – not because she was insane, like Frank and Rosemary West; but simply to spite her husband who had betrayed her.
But Medea was allowed, while Stitching was banned: raising questions regarding the standards applied by the Board when taking such decisions.
Albert Marshall himself disagrees with censorship for plays, though he admits he has a few reservations.
“I do believe there should be some kind of guidelines, such as the Diocesan ratings,” he says. “Although I don’t agree with these guidelines – as they can classify a film as ‘H’, which does not allow anyone to see it – at least they explain their reasoning for their ratings.”
This is one step further than Maltese law goes. In fact, the law does not refer to anything specific, except that “plays which offend public morality” can be stopped or suspended by the Commissioner of Police. But there is no legal definition of “public morality”, which in practice means that any decision is bound to be subjective.
But Marshall also believes that the producers are legally bound to notify the audience of the play’s; just as a cigarette company has to notify that “Smoking Kills” on cigarette packets.
“I also believe that if a play is sold under false pretences and spectators are shown what they were not expecting, they should have the right to sue the theatre company in court under consumer law. After all, plays are consumer products just as much as a bottle of soft drink.”

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