Well, well, well... just look who’s come galumphing to the rescue of the Film and Stage Classification Board, after it went and got itself entangled in yet another fine (and quite frankly embarrassing) mess a couple of weeks ago.
Why, none other than Dr Paul Xuereb: my favourite theatre critic, who informed us all last Sunday that ‘A Day in the Death of Joe Egg’ – performed the previous weekend at St James Cavalier by British drama group ‘In Company Theatre’ – was not actually ‘censored’ at all.
Oh, no. Never mind that at one point, the lead actor himself actually turned to the audience and said, in fairly clear and unambiguous terms: “WE ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SPEAK THIS LINE IN MALTA!” (quoted verbatim from Paul Xuereb’s own review, please note). And never mind also that this curious assertion was repeated no fewer than three times in the first act... before, one assumes, the cock finally crew.
Censorship? Of course not! For in the Gospel according to Paul, it was merely ‘a suggestion’, and not ‘an imposition’, on the part of the censorship board to remove that line from the play altogether: “The impression I got at the performance was that the Maltese stage censor had forbidden the use of this line, but I later discovered this was wrong,” Dr Xuereb wrote. “...When asked by the company if the censor could classify the play for a younger audience, including audiences of schoolchildren, saying it was ready to accept any changes that might be requested in the text, the stage censor agreed to reclassify the play for 16 and over, suggesting (and not imposing) that the line I have quoted be omitted.”
Goodness. How on earth did Paul Xuereb find all this out, I wonder? Did he put on his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker and cape, and sift through the clues with a magnifying glass? Or did he simply turn around and ask his own wife Cecilia – who, incidentally, has been a member of the same Film and Stage Classification Board for as long as any of us can remember?
(Naturally, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. After all, what sort of a rotten world would it be, if a man didn’t publicly defend the actions of a board in which his own wife was a life-appointed member?)
Oh, by the way: the excised line in question – again, quoted in Paul Xuereb’s review last Sunday – was this: ‘I see God as some sort of manic-depressive rugby footballer’ (spoken, it will be remembered, by the cynical, exasperated and disillusioned father of a severely disabled child).
Well, what can I say? Thank heavens our country is blessed with such valiant and selfless censors, who rightly object to such heinous, blasphemous and outrageously obscene stuff. Otherwise, the “school-children” present in the audience (a rather novel term for “16-year-old adolescent”, don’t you think?) might have... um... erm... I don’t know. What might they have done, do you reckon? Swooned in a paroxysm of unmitigated shock and horror? Urinated in sheer terror down the trouser-leg of their school uniform? Or just laughed themselves to a fit of dementia, and then sued the theatre management for post-traumatic stress and undue psychological damage?
Hold on, I think I’ve got it! Some of the 16-year-olds in the audience may themselves have been rugby footballers – I certainly was, at that age – and who knows? They might conceivably have taken offence at a stage actor comparing them to (of all inferior beings) God Almighty in person.
But somehow, even a gullible and naive former rugby footballer as myself finds this rather difficult to believe. Nor is this the only aspect of Dr Xuereb’s review to have befuddled my mental faculties. One other question has in fact been troubling me since Sunday.
How can a single line like that be considered ‘inappropriate’ for a 16-year-old audience when uttered aloud in a theatre... but then, perfectly OK to print in a newspaper, which in turn may very easily end up in the hands of children much younger than 16?
Hmmm. No, I somehow didn’t think you’d have an answer to that one, either. So while I’m in the business of asking utterly useless questions that no one will ever, ever answer – why on earth would the censors ‘suggest’ its removal in the first place? On what grounds? To what end? According to what (or whose) criteria? And what are the implications of its removal, exactly?
OK, I’ll answer this last question myself, seeing as the members of the Film and Stage Classification Board are evidently unaware of how seriously this latest faux-pas of theirs has undermined their own credibility.
Paul Xuereb is perfectly correct to state that, had the play been staged with the originally awarded ‘18’ certificate, no line would have been cut from the text at all. But what he omits to mention (other than the fact that he happens to be married to one of the censors) is that its re-classification to ‘16’ was made conditional on the removal of the above line.
This is not a ‘suggestion’, as Dr Xuereb obliquely puts it. On the contrary, it is very much an ‘imposition’, of the kind he claims it is not. And if you don’t believe me, take the word of the play’s director Daniel Brennan, whose reaction to the censorship was hardly one of gratitude:
“I have not heard of such proscription from anywhere in Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he said when I (unlike, it seems, Dr Xuereb) actually asked his opinion in the matter. “I find it a sad indictment of an apparent theocracy’s desperate need to control the populace however it can. I have met the most wonderful, passionate, emotional, cultured and highly intelligent people on my many visits to Malta and Gozo. I find it insulting that these people should not be allowed – because of the implementation of their government’s draconian measures – to enjoy the freedoms of the rest of the developed world.”
Bravo, encore, etc. I find it insulting, too. Not just for the sheer bloody-mindedness of a censorship board which would presume to decide (for my own benefit, of course) what I can and cannot watch on stage; but also for what this latest decision tells us about what really makes the board of censors tick in the first place.
The members of the Film and Stage Classification Board, it seems, are no longer content to merely classify the occasional film and stage production here and there (which, last I looked, was their remit according to law). No indeed. In the fullness of time, they have succeeded in arrogating unto themselves no less than the right to speak on behalf of God Almighty Himself – you know, taking offence at whatever they assume (somewhat presumptuously) might piss Him off; and politely ‘suggesting’ the removal of any line that God Himself, in His Infinite Wisdom, might fail to understand as thoroughly as they.
In fact, I do believe that over the past year alone, the Classification Board have hit upon an altogether new and unprecedented definition of the word ‘arrogance’. I mean that literally, by the way: as in the use of the verb ‘to arrogate’ above. Simply put, Malta’s stage and film censors have taken on far, far more powers than they can even stuff into their mouths, let alone chew... but with a significant and entirely welcome new twist.
Theatre producers, it seems, have finally had enough. The In Company Theatre - which Dr Xuereb would have us believe invited this act censorship in the first place – clearly defied the board’s expectations by alluding sarcastically to the line’s removal on stage: thus revealing the board’s machinations for all of us to see, and know, and loudly jeer at for the disgrace it is.
And in this, year of our Lord 2009 – soon to be 2010 – one local theatre company has finally taken the long-overdue step of filing a Constitutional case against the ban on Stitching earlier this year. Its objective? To put a stop to what can only be described as a cultural and intellectual coup d’état, whereby a handful of people, with no particular qualifications to speak of, have somehow succeeded in overriding even the Universal Charter of Human Rights.
Small wonder, then, that the same Board would flex its muscles with each and every single script to fall into its grasp. It has plainly understood that the days of its unlimited power are drawing to a close, and hopes to make the most of them while they last.
(Wishing all my readers a Very Merry Crisis, and a Happy New Fear.)
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