From radio plays to the stage

Oreste Calleja Skart 3 Siltiet Ghaziz Angelo 2014-2015 Noel Grima

Born in Ħamrun, Oreste Calleja studied at the Lyceum and St. Michael’s Training College for Teachers (1964-66). He left Malta in 1974 to study at the University of London, Birkbeck College, and then in 1990 he attended North Florida University, and Jacksonville University, Florida, from where he obtained a BA in Art and French. He was a committee member of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju in the sixties. At the same time he started writing plays for the stage, radio, and television.

These include Anestesija ( 1969), Għargħar( 1979), Ċens Perpetwu (1969), Satira (1970), Jum Fost l-Oħrajn (1970), En Passant (1970), Iġsmaiħirsa (1970) and Għażiż Angelo (1971).

Before he emigrated in 1974, he published Erba’ Drammi (1972) which is still used in secondary schools as a text in Maltese literature.

Since his return to Malta in 1991, he has written and published three other plays, Għasfur taċ-Ċomb (1993), Il-Belliegħa filBir (1994) and U l-Anġlu Ħabbar... (1995).

Skart is the name of his latest new play. It tells of a simple yet calamitous event in an ordinary man’s life.

Enclosed in the same volume there is Cens Perpetwu, a teleplay which was among the very first teledramas written specifically for MTV in the early 1970s. It featured for years in Calleja’s first publication, 4 Drammi, which is in the secondary school curriculum.

In the second volume of this trilogy, Calleja adapts three of his stage plays into screenplays and includes selections from Il-Belliegha fil-Bir, U l-Anglu Habbar and Ghasfur tac-comb.

In the third volume of the Xeneggjaturi series, published later, he offers us two radio dramas, Ghaziz Angelo and Skuzi ta…, the latter a translation of his original radio comedy, Excuse me, are those your eyes?

Ghaziz Angelo tells of a young girl’s coming of age and out of isolation, her first venture in love, as reported on her intimate diary, her clashes with her comfortable but stilted middle class family and her recluse brother, from which she is freed by a penfriend we never get to see. The play is accompanied by piano music, the girl’s deadening piano lessons which she feels is hemming her in and from which she breaks free. Skuzi ta… is a rather more rollicking skit on board a bus (must have been one of the old buses), a bumpy ride in which a Maltese woman with limited English interrogates a man she bumps into, a foreigner with a surname falsely resembling a Maltese one. This must have been written at a time when the appearance of a foreigner on a bus was still rather rare but already the interaction between the Maltese and the foreigner was leading to a breaking down of barriers, including the linguistic ones.