Download here the script of ix-Xiħa that is due in the next few days to be premiered on the stage of Malta’s national theatre.
I do this not to promote the play or because I wish many people to read it. I respect you and if you care for your physical and mental health I would advise you not to try. It is bad because it’s shallow, badly written, and superficial, and it is bad because it is spiteful, full of hate, prejudice, and disturbingly incurable visceral violence.
I publish the script as my way of protesting against this play. Mario Philip Azzopardi has the right to write and present this play. I have a right to be offended by it and to say so.
One of the women in this poster plays a character called Jenny a stand-in for Daphne Caruana Galizia. The title ‘ix-xiħa’ does not refer to her.
Ix-xiħa is the character of the dead mother who, in conspiracy with the audience, plots revenge on her snobbish, egoistic, half-witted four children by disinheriting them in favour of her servant and their nanny. One of the children is transparently Daphne Caruana Galizia or rather what listeners of Super One imagine Daphne Caruana Galizia was like.
She is venal, spiteful, classist, incapable of empathy or any human emotion. She is a stereotypical character in a stereotypical play that smacks of school-child proto-Leninism, the sort you’d have to sit through in some Soviet propaganda movie from the 1920s to admire the editing. The servants and the plebs in the play are good people. The aristocrats (represented as Victorian cartoon figures) are bad people.
The Daphne character is particularly evil. Here’s just the sort of line given to the character who plays her from the play that you’re meant to be shocked with though it is a piece of slander that we’re so familiar with by now:
“Jalla it-tfal tagħkom imutu kollha kemm huma bil-kanċer. Kull fejn tħares, ħallelin biss. SITWAZZJONI DDISPRATA.”
Prepare to retch.
It is truly horrible that the national theatre funds this. Imagine a play on Broadway making fun of the airline crew on the planes that flew into the World Trade Centre. Imagine a play on a Rome stage casting Paolo Borsellino as a womanising gambler.
Our national theatre pays for a play to promote to the level of self-proclaimed art and culture the 30 years of vilifying lies perpetrated by the Labour Party that were in part the cause of her killing.
Yes, Mario Philip Azzopardi has a right to this because it is not a crime to kill a woman with words and false memories. But that does not mean we should accept this.
So here is a fuck you from me to Mario Philip Azzopardi. Whatever surprises you had in store for your no doubt considerable audience, you miserable wretch, are now spoilt. While you’re wondering who gave me the script, think about the conscientious theatre staff – because there still are some – who gape in silent horror while you rehearse this filth.
I hope no one thinks of cancelling your play. I hope you get to perform it. I hope history will read this script and wonder how a country lives with killing a world-renowned journalist, a mother, a daughter, a wife, and a sister, and hires barely competent self-defined artists who have nothing to show for themselves but the hatred that consumes them.
