Francis Ebejer [Cotemporary art in Malta]

Abstract

If Francis Ebejer is a unique phenomenon in Maltese literature, it is not only because of the impact he made upon it, but also because of the fascinating and intriguing development one can trace in his works. One can say that Ebejer burst definitively upon the Maltese theatrical and literary scene with his first three-act play Vaganzi tas-Sajf (Summer Holidays) in 1962, setting the trend for a more mature and modem approach to our theatre. By that time he already bad two English novels accepted and published by a London publisher, which had earned him critical acclaim from such newspapers and periodicals as "The Times Literary Supplement", "Irish Times", "John 0' London's Weekly", "Birmingham Post", and others. Within the same period he was also reasonably well-known locally for his highly original radio-plays in Maltese, some of which had earned him First Awards in national competitions. The Ebejer phenomenon came like the proverbial bolt from the blue. For a while there was a spate of literary devices our poets of the time could lean on, Ebejer had to start from scratch in order to bring our theatre in line with the best modern thought and technique. Suddenly Ebejer brought us face to face with a Maltese word-expression that revealed a wealth of possibilities away from the hackneyed and quite often impoverished way of saying things that for a long time had passed as dramatic literature. Vaganzi tas-Sajf had won First Prize in the first ever playwriting competition held by Malta's National Theatre, the Manoel Theatre in Valletta. The impact was tremendous and the Maltese discovered that Ebejer had placed our dramatic reputation firmly in the European and world context. In 1964, two years after Vanganzi tas-Sajf, came Boulevard, a sweeping, evocative and ironic look at the human condition conceived in terms of total theatre, and three years later, Menz. Ebejer's English play, The Cliffhangers, was, like all his other plays, produced by the author himself and acted by a Maltese cast. It brought in hundreds of English speaking admirers of Ebejer's type of theatre. This creative period culminated in Il-Hadd fuq il-Bejt (Sunday on the Roof), staged in 1971 and described as a "national happening", the like of which had not been known in Malta ever since the good old days of Italian Opera at the Royal Opera House. There are many factors which account for this sudden acquisition of fame, this rise in Ebejer's popularity; but it seems to me that two stand out more clearly than others. The first is Ebejer's change of style, or rather the widening of his expression, reflecting the different facets of this writer's exciting personality: from the theatre of ideas in Vaganzi to symbolist-absurdist in Boulevard, to social-symbolic in Menz, to naturalistic in II-Hadd fuq il-Bejt. Secondly, people's thoughts in the very early Sixties had begun to veer towards the idea of political independence and some of the old yardsticks did not apply any more. Our theatre desperately needed someone to point out the way, and Ebejer bad come along, after his long and successful apprenticeship in radio-drama. This is why the year 1962 is regarded as the beginning of a new and powerful Maltese literary and dramatic tradition. Ironically-and this is a pointer to what I described earlier as an intriguing development Ebejer's best work so far, Boulevard, with its extraordinary totality of human experience, came in 1964, near the beginning of his chequered career in the theatre. At this time, the right theatrical climate had not yet been created and a much later play like Il-Hadd fuq il-Bejt, which is less complex technically and thematically, would perhaps have been received better.