Gozo Days

It’s that old multi-tasking indictment and being a mere male I’m subject to the law once again. The blog suffers when my mind is taken up by other matters and recently our little drama company started on the trail for government funding – then later realized that our integrity may be impaired and our precious time taken up by company matters rather than theatre. So, we remain our own masters, flexible and free, surviving on ticket sales and a certain amount of sponsorship. The core members of the group are all professionals, we have high standards and it’s allowed me to do some of the best work of my life so far. It’s also allowed me a platform for my own written work, for a second time and in a different country.
Cardigan, a lovely coastal town in south-west Wales, provided the first opportunity. Teivi Theatre Company occupied the Guildhall Theatre in the town for three summer months and produced two of my plays. The first moments were traumatic. The play was a comedy called Oh Pair! I had a part in it and therefore was on hand from the moment I passed my script over to the director. It is a moment every playwright must endure – it is your child leaving home and you have to let go and it’s not easy. It took me a few days to reconcile my vision with that of the director and there was tension for a time. I don’t know how the resolution came about but somehow I saw the sense in giving the director his head and he led us along a happy trail and produced a great result. I remember the man with affection and admire his tenacity and his theatrecraft. His name was Noel Cummins and he died of leukemia two months ago.
The play lives on and is published online on lazybeescripts.co.uk and as wonderful as Lazybee is its publication here is perhaps a shadow of what might have been. With my old friend Phill, who now runs an enormous role play organization, I sat in an office off St Martin’s Lane opposite Marjory Vosper, one of the foremost literary agents of her day. She said to us, “We’re going to make a lot of money with this play” then she died three days later. I was already on to the next thing and the energy had dissipated, so I did nothing with the play until offering it to Lazeebee two or three years ago. Since then it’s played twice in the States and three or four times in the UK. Just to finish off the Oh Pair! tale – it received great reviews in the local newspapers which also enjoyed the first night gaff. To achieve some extra space on stage we had set a coffee table in front of the tabs (curtain for non-theatre folk), which closed on act two, scene one leaving an ice cream on the table. They opened on act two, scene two, two minutes later but, as it explained in the programme, it was three months later in play time and the ice-cream had hardly melted at all.
Cardigan County Council was happy to allow us use of the theatre as we added to the cultural and entertainment value of the summer programme in the resort town. Things are different on the island of Gozo where minor enmities are the order of the day. If it is a microcosm of the world at large, it is little wonder there are wars. Divisions are everywhere and start with the two political parties adhered to by tradition more than judgment. In the not too distant past, election time intolerance has resorted to gunfire. Two social entities, the Leone and Astra clubs, divide the inhabitants along party and religious lines and during Festa celebrations each of the institutions’ buildings need police protection.
Small wonder then that within the cultural environment, there is similar jealousy that makes life difficult for a non-aligned theatre company. A space in the magnificent Citadel has been designated for use as a theatre and we have used it twice, each time navigating the boisterous ocean of incumbent jealousy and fear – in this most public of ancient buildings, labeled now as a Centre for Culture and the Arts – one of these inhabitants cried, “This is my home!” His sinecure at the Citadel should be curtailed but connections are everything here and change is sloth slow. The worst of it is the deliberate sabotage that even when detected raises a naughty grin rather than embarrassment or, God forbid, contrition.
Here on this tiny holiday island of Gozo that talks about widening it’s offerings to a visiting public, our little company once again sees the cannons being rolled out at the Citadel. We are eager to mount our next production but communications have already broken down between departments, putting the event in jeopardy and raising stress levels. It is scheduled to go ahead in November and this time we are looking for a professional actor to join us from the UK. He will play Henry V111 in a new play of mine, if the powers that be can restrain their need to demonstrate their various strengths and allow it to succeed.

gozo days

The Duke of Edinburgh is ninety and still as out-of-touch with most of his wife’s subjects as ever. The BBC news showed a brief back-story about his award scheme and his conservational interests and flipped to the studio where the interviewer asked him if he was ‘green’? He said no and that there was a big difference between being a conservationist and a… he thought about it and said to himself “the hell with it”… a bunny-hugger. Perhaps he couldn’t reconcile green with the Queen’s Award to Industry or his hunting-shooting-fishing life-style (for which he might have found some credence), but the macho attitude was sickening and spoke of an outmoded, elitist power junky.
God (in whom I don’t believe) help the planet if this man’s attitude prevails.
To my mind we of the West, anyway, while being as persuasive as we can with the East, must assume a different mind-set. A new dogma of ‘necessary consumerism’ needs to manifest itself in society; an understanding of our needs without exceeding them, where the motto of shop-until-you-drop is an ugly concept (which of course it is). An awareness that the factories of the world are overproducing everything from cars to carpet-tacks and thereby creating mountains of waste, much of it indestructible. The hope is that with the awareness will come a change that puts the brakes on consumerism.
Advertising has almost become a science where products are targeted to specific areas of population and perhaps it is time to turn it upon itself. Let’s have advertisements that inform us that such-and-such a packaging on a particular product is minimal and bio-degradable. Let’s overcome the ridiculous health and safety procedures that impose sell-by dates for insurance reasons. If they’re not added to the waste mountain, many out-of-date products are shipped off to smaller, less litigative states (I know, I live in one of them). The EU overcame the ‘straight banana’ issue, let’s do the same for sell-by, perhaps by prefixing the date with the word ‘recommended’ in an attempt to alleviate absolutes.
Health and safety has become as much of a joke as an inconvenience and added considerably to the expense of working lives. The film industry thrives here – as I write, Brad Pitt is filming a mega-budget pic in Malta – and suitably tagged individuals are legally needed to stand by any shot considered dangerous. I know this to be true because I was dunked several times into a water butt while filming Blackbeard (James Purefoy is having new success, I understand, with ‘Injustice’, bless him). The dunking bothered me not at all (although I hope it looks as if it did!), but the health and safety man checked with me each time I surfaced. Accidents will always happen but the current climate limits risk and without risk there is no forward movement.
The island I live on has a cliff path par excellence, fifteen hundred metres above the sea in places and inspiring in all weathers. The worry is that Health and Safety will want to sanitize the experience with a handrail. Within a short time the inspectors would condemn it because of corrosion by the elements and shotgun pellets, then signs banning access would go up all round the coast. Repair would take many, many more months – witness Rundle Gardens, once an oasis in the middle of town – for the past two years a building site on route to paving over the place and leaving holes in the concrete for the trees – before nature once again took it toll.
Nevertheless, it’s a great place to live where everybody complains that there’s nothing to do, but they do it anyway.

gozo days

Saturday may bring Malta closer to the twenty-first century. The population will vote for or against divorce and the country is divided. The Bishop of Gozo has declared that anyone who votes in favour should be denied the sacrament and, my wife tells me, that things were even worse in the sixties when burial rites were denied to families who were known to have voted for the Labour Party.

Looking across the water to the chaos that is The Arab Spring, where a lid has been kept tightly screwed down on a mediaeval system, now erupting; makes me reassess this near third-world country I live in. The ‘cult of family’ prevents a communal goodwill and allows the dogs to bark all night from the rooftops. The incessant building digs greedily into the bedrock and shakes ancient stonework to subsidence. Never enough voices are gathered together to change the iniquities and you can read the still small ones (including mine) regularly in The Times. Omerta thrives and murderers get off scot free, yet my daughter, sixteen now, walks safely through the streets at midnight – for the time being.

Already the boats are increasing in number, as the refugees leave the shores ofTunisiaandLibyaand who can blame them? Summer will bring a suffocating influx of immigrants set to break the bounds of containment presently in situ. The age-old problem of being visibly different isn’t a concern yet and is allayed somewhat by football coaches imported from European countries who tend to be the same colour. It’s changing though and the coterie of customers at the same corner table day after day can’t all be football coaches. Besides being the same colour they are also more or less the same age and all of them male. They will grow in number, jobless, until the entire sidewalk café is inundated and that might prove unpopular. The magic word, integration, would dissipate my fears but how can it happen with any expediency? Immigration will speed up exponentially with the improving weather conditions, but integration will take a generation or two.

A large and growing number of young, male immigrants together with those re-locating less obvious souls (such as I) will change the face of these islands and slowly erode the cult of family. The idea of community may replace the extant blind chauvinism but it may be at the expense of safety. The lid has been tightly screwed down here too, and kept in place by the family cult; when that’s exploded and the contained ills migrate to the streets I hope that my daughter will be a lot older.

Whether or not thePhilippinesare left out in the cold as of next Saturday, the very fact that the divorce issue inMaltahas reached the level of referendum is a breakthrough. A budding politician referring to EC accession told me that Malta would act as a safety-valve in the community – meaning, I think, that the laid-back, attitude of  life in general would counterbalance the more rigid attitudes of Northern climes. I don’t think so: deep down that relaxed attitude conceals a strict and constricted code of ethics that belong to ages past and is full of fear. Today’s Independent states that a yes vote will so weaken the fabric of society that it will leave itself open to Muslim infiltration and the adoption of Muslim law. In the relaxation stakes, the UK is way ahead of us.

gozo days

Well, they seemed to like us and I loved playing my parts in the Four Chekhov Comedies, I even enjoyed changing the settings. There were four of us and no stage crew, so we did everything ourselves, barring lights and music which were in the unerring hands of the conscientious Joanna. We ambled on stage and had a brief informal chat with members of the audience, then gently moved onto the script and into character. I enjoyed all six lines of my disaffected butler in Drama and listened for fifteen minutes as my fellow actors did their stuff. The audience laughed a lot at the end twist and then it was time to dash in and change the set, then dash off and change costume for The Bear. Two pages and in –first night, forgot to tuck my trousers in my boots and did it on stage, in character – an adorable character. Loud, expansive, commanding but getting as good as he got from the woman he quickly falls in love with. Long speeches railing against womankind while admitting his weakness in front of it and eventually clasping his love and ending with a smacking kiss – I loved it.
The second part kicked off with a mimed piece called The Sneeze, which Michael Frayn has put into the collection and gleaned from a short story. The four of us sat as in a theatre ourselves, the Dying Swan played as we watched the ballet, then I was overtaken by an enormous sneeze, the repercussions of which brought gales of laughter and the eventual demise of my character. A swift change of set and I’m on again in topper and tails as the bumbling, hypochondriac suitor of a landowner’s daughter in The Proposal. We had great fun with that and once again we ended with a kiss.
Our first night was the twenty-ninth of April and we worried that the Royal Wedding would put paid to our audience, but, if anything, it enhanced it. We were packed out for all the shows and with a dress rehearsal and pre-show preparation, we rolled over the wedding completely. At lunch in the town centre there was no hint of Matrimony Royal, but I knew that the British Residents Association, or BRA – you’d think they’d put the word Assoc first – anyway, this pendulous organization had their own shindig in a local hall and at least one of the popular pubs flew enormous Union Jacks. Presumably a good few of their customers came to see our show afterwards. Royalist or Republican? At this distance and having spent less than a couple of months in the old country in the last twenty years, I’ve no right to an opinion. If I had, I’d lean towards republicanism, although there was recently a very convincing TV programme about Prince Charles’s good works. Still the privilege, land ownership and income get up my nose. The country could find good enough ambassadors without the need for anachronistic nobility. It will probably die out within the next half-century and ex-pat outposts such as Malta’s BRA will have to support itself without the pageantry.

gozo days

Little mention has been made on this page about the upcoming show which opens on Friday – largely because I’ve talked about the times of relaxation. It’s all heightened emotions now, kept in check of course for the most part. There’s time left for an explosion and that might come tonight as a result of a delayed rehearsal because the lights will be late. Par for the course in these climes, but we foreigners never get used to it. This is the lull before the storm and I can feel my nerves jangling in anticipation. Four short plays were supposed to take the pressure off me, but it turned out to offer me the largest speaking role for some time – page after page of monologue which, somehow, I have to make interesting and indeed, humorous.
None of the folks in the street, who show an interest, believe that Chekhov can be funny, so the challenge is on. To that end, on more than one occasion during my rehearsal antics, I have felt like John Cleese or rather, Basil Fawlty. Apart from the slapstick, I hope we do the great man justice, because I honestly love doing Chekhov, but who here would come to see a major work? I’ll be seeing one on June 30th when there will be a ‘live feed’ from the National Theatre in London showing The Cherry Orchard, starring Madame Hooch, as my daughter says, referring to her role in the Harry Potter films: otherwise known as Zoe Wannamaker. A nice classical connection, as it was her father who struggled for years and eventually succeeded in erecting the Bankside Globe Theatre, which I believe was opened after his death.
I can sympathise ever so slightly with Sam Wannamaker’s efforts because it is mighty difficult to put on a show here to any kind of standard. It is a great shame because there are some wonderful venues with the proper sound and lighting (more or less). The trouble is that these places are linked to parish life in one way or another and the parishioners think nothing of walking through the building and talking at the tops of their voices – it’s their space and the renting of it doesn’t prohibit their access. This is a perfectly normal situation and I don’t think there is anything malicious about it, it’s just that the kind of respect we require isn’t part of the culture. So, we tend to mount shows in places where we have more control, which is why this week we are at the Ministry. The Ministry isn’t open all the time and the stage lights are arriving, not in the morning as expected, but this evening, delaying our rehearsal. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Gozo Days

Another Sunday, another walk and another mind-numbing, speech-defying vista to affirm our appreciation of being here. We voice inadequate praise for the flowers we stand amongst and the towering cliffs above the wind-cuffed sea stretching to the sunset. Our footfall disturbs a migrant quail, buntings tempt us away from their nesting area and a wheatear bobs for attention.
Our conversation bobs about in similar fashion covering events of the week between with concern for our offspring, contempt for driving skills, and complains about television on a local front and consideration for Japan, Cote d’Ivoire, and Libya internationally.
Portugal has gone for the EU bailout this week and to get it will have to accept the austerity package that prompted the resignation of its premier. The people will not be happy about that and will no doubt demonstrate as they did in Ireland and in Greece. These demos are uprisings against the system just as the workers revolts at the turn of the century in the UK. The masses are unhappy. We are sickened by the millions in bonuses dolled out to bankers for doing nothing more than their job. How did this situation come about and how will it end? Do you share with me a feeling that Christ is about to enter the marketplace and upset the tables? There is a move to consider splitting the various factions within the banks in order to protect deposits, so that if the riskier investment side of things collapses then the deposits remain intact. All of which is still an in-house structural consideration which may or may not come into being and may change nothing for you and me.
Is there another way to look at a system change? The banks rely on us to fund them; very basically, getting our regular wage sent directly to the bank from where we take what we need and the residue gains a certain amount of interest. What if we all received our wages, digitally, at home on our own PC and messaged the bank with the sum we wanted to take from the ATM at any given time. That would leave the bulk with us, individually, in digital form, growing with every wage payment. It’s the same idea as stuffing the mattress, only there’s no cash in the house to worry about. It wouldn’t be gaining interest, of course, but it wouldn’t be in the bank either and it might grow to a sizeable amount – a sum that could prove to be a better bargaining chip than a weekly or monthly deposit. You could choose anywhere in the Eurozone to deposit your by-now, large lump of savings, which will bring the banks to heel and prompt competition to favour the customer rather than the CEO’s bonus.
Exactly how to set up that personal-account-that-doesn’t-go-to-the-bank, I have no idea but it must be possible or be made possible. We are relinquishing power to the banks just as the workers did to the factory owners and a revolution is imminent. The evidence is presently on the city streets but I think it will catch fire in cyberspace where cleverer people than me with simple, but drastic solutions will influence a generation into leveling the playing field.
On the fields above the cliffs, the wind shifts and the wheatear, known as the harbinger of Spring, flies north to deliver the message.

Gozo Days

You know that we have a Sunday scheduled walk during the months temperate enough to allow them - and so it was yesterday. This time we chose the eastern coast with views to Comino and Malta beyond. It was an afternoon of colours – we crossed plateaus of honey-toned sandstone, then the richness of Spring’s green garigue, and picked our way over jagged grey, volcanic residue to the sea’s edge.
On the tide line, purple anemones, their fronds withdrawn, shone like raspberry jelly moulded upside-down against the rock. Black sponges clung there like tar, an arms length below the surface and a patch of bright orange coral began its steady growth. We stood on a mat of damp yellow plant life proving that a tide does work in the Med. It lapped gently, in shirt-sleeve weather, under a moisture-muted sun and sucked noisily at the gaps made by rougher surges.
Spray from those dog days would certainly have reached the greenery we’d crossed, but Earth fights to fly her banners. Carpets of wild iris, sumptuously indigo and butter-yellow, dare you to take another step and pink and scarlet, cerise and pale lemon wildflowers beyond my naming powers, peep through the various greens of the leafy vegetation. The prince of beauties, whose buds we’ll gather in May, shows a single bloom, a bridal shower of snow white tresses bursting from an otherwise bare caper bush.
Capers anchor themselves in crevices all over the island, often on cliff-edges hundreds of feet above the sea. We stood about forty feet above an inlet looking down at a tranquil turquoise patch of water which was surrounded by darker depths where undersea rocks covered the sandy bottom. A girl, a teenager in a bikini , popped up over the rim having swum across the gap and climbed barefoot up the rock. She smiled, said the water was freezing and announced that she was going to jump from where we stood. It was the only spot from where the jump could be made into that bright blue, rock-free oasis. She hesitated briefly then threw herself off the brink, screaming all the way down to a glittering splash, then swam easily to the other side of the inlet. Her friends greeted her casually, with barely any reference to her prowess – they were all male.
Our mixed bunch applauded, the distance muffling our appreciation and finding no recognition. We turned homeward through the bucolic idyll of our afternoon ramble and I though about, but did not voice, the atrocities that were and still are occurring a hundred miles or so across the water in the direction of the setting sun.