Information
Anthony Attard
Loranne Vella
Russell Mizzi
Roberta Cauchi
Anna Formosa
Nathalie Borg
Antonella Axisa
Sephora Gauci
Chris Galea
Chiara Colette Frendo
Aleateia theatre group’s new production is titled A Heap Of Broken Images, and it is based on T.S.Eliot’s 1922 poem, The Waste Land. With a new line-up of ten actors, this is Aleateia’s most ambitious performance to date.
A Heap of Broken Images is a play of contrasts, indeed, during the prologue, host introduces it to the audience as “Mayhem beyond all reason and logic beyond all confusion ... Sinjuri nistidinkom ghal siegha ta’ teatru, poezija u zinn.” Script and direction are Simon Bartolo’s, as were all the previous productions.
A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES
A Heap Of Broken Images is Aleateia’s fifth theatrical production. Anyone who has attended to more than one of the group’s performances has learnt to expect nothing but the unexpected. A Heap Of Broken Images is no exception. The group has expanded. The new line-up consists of no less than 11 members, all bringing their own visions into an already established group. The result is a different Aleateia. But with the group projecting a new image with every performance, it seems that nothing has changed. Paradoxically, Aleateia’s identity is change and the more the group mutates, the more it proves that it is still the same old Aleateia which has existed since 1992 and whose ongoing research is still movement/text oriented. The political beliefs of the group has never changed either. Their mission is a fight against what they believe to be the most savage contemporary disease to have ravaged Malta ever: indifference.
The group’s last performance was based on the deconstruction (or dismantling) of a Maltese genre, the farce, complete with lack of communication, bilingualism, broomstick, tacky plot, double entendre and sell-out lines. That play was titled Il-Kaxxa. Since then, Aleateia hasn’t rested on it’s laurels. The group has been working on T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem, The Waste Land. The Result is A Heap Of Broken Images.
Mostly in English, A Heap Of Broken Images is written and directed by Simon Bartolo. It uses the idea of juxtaposing disparate images to create a whole that is not necessarily a whole. Apart from The Waste Land, other texts used within the play are Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and King Lear; Coleridge’s The Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fowles’ The Aristos; and The Holy Bible.
One of the most controversial features of The Waste Land was that it is written in ‘many voices’. No one persona/narrator tells us a story. The multitude of voices, each has something to say, and the ‘story’ is built in an extremely unconventional way. This characteristic of the poem was given much thought by Aleateia. How can this idea be staged? The group decided that in the theatre, ‘voices’ can also be supplied by body language and juxtaposition can be achieved if characters are saying one thing and other characters are doing something else. This is just one of the ways that the group dealt with the situation. Other techniques are used too. As Eliot said, “Tiresias... is the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” So, it was decided to use this character as The Host throughout the performance. A part aptly portrayed by budding young actor, Anthony Attard.
A Heap Of Broken Images is about 75 minutes long and will be perfomed outside, on the Steps of the CCT at the University of Malta on July 10 and 11 at 8.45 p.m. Patrons are also invited to contact The Precincts Office on 3290 2236.
"Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.
The next form of drama will have to be a verse drama but in new verse forms. Perhaps the conditions of modern life have altered our perception of rhythm. At any rate the recognized forms of speech-verse are not as efficient as they should be; probably a new form will be devised out of colloquial speech.
People have tended to think of verse as a restriction upon drama. They think that the emotional range, and the realistic truth, of drama is limited and circumscribed by verse. People were once content with verse in drama, they say because they were content with a restricted and artificial range of emotion. Only prose can give the full gamut of modern feeling, can correspond to actuality. But is not every dramatic representation artificial?
We wish to remind the audience that what they are seeing is a play, and not a photograph. The theatre, in the effort to get greater and greater realism – that is, greater illusion – and thereby attempting to do what the cinema can do better, has tended to depart so far from poetry as to depart from prose too; and to give people on the stage who are so extremely lifelike that they do not even talk prose, but merely make human noises. So we want to take the opposite direction."
A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES is ALEATEIA's 5th production. The other four were Xi Haga f'Att Wiehed (1993), Ghalxejn (1994), Is-Sellum (1996) and Il-Kaxxa (1997).
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A History of the Dramatic Text
