Salesian Oratory - Sliema

Atturi Salesjani 2nd performance this season is on the 3rd and 4th December 2011 with Francis Ebejer’s Hitan in 2 acts. Directed by Joe Camilleri, Hitan will be staged at the Salesian Theatre in Guze’ Howard Street in Sliema.

Hitan is stylistically a straightforward play, which owes its success to its uncomplicated plot and sharp naturalistic rendering of the strong emotions: hate; anger; and pain that over-power the characters. It was also one of Ebejer's first plays with a precise geographical setting, though the fact that it is set in Malta is not particularly relevant to the drama, except perhaps to justify it to a Maltese audience

Guilt and memory are important issues in many of Ebejer's Maltese-language plays. They are very obviously central in Hitan (Walls), a television play from 1970 that subsequently became a stage production. Hitan is about three generations of a Christian Jewish family, two of which had survived the Holocaust. The grandfather, who has settled his family in Malta after the war, is obsessed with remembering the Holocaust and making sure that his grandchildren know it as if they had lived through it like him. He had lost his wife in a concentration camp, and it is clear that he feels guilty about having survived, as he claims all those who had their dear ones taken from them likewise feel. But he also harbours a deep hatred toward the perpetrators of the great genocide, a hatred that seems to extend to all non-Jewish members of the human race. His house is a shrine to the Holocaust, and he has even enlisted his grandchildren to reenact symbolically the tortures of the camps, armed with Nazi flags and Jewish and Christian icons. Nevertheless, there is one important item missing from his shrine of memories, which is anything that might remind him of his wife. Among the many pictures hanging on the walls, there are no photographs or other images of her. The return of the old man's daughter from Israel prompts him to "renew the house" through a sinister ritual. He reads from what seems to be his gospel of hate, and his grandchildren enact the parts of prisoners and of Nazi soldiers. It is when the ritual is interrupted by the granddaughter's non-Jewish boyfriend that the play reaches its climax.

This is the 2nd play of Francis Ebejer staged by Atturi Salesjani after II-Hadd fuq il-Bejt performed in April of 2005.

Book early!

Joe Camilleri
Director