Author: David Hudson
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Id-Drammi ta’ Alfred Buttigieg
After having published Alfred Buttigieg The Collected Plays, a collection of the his four full length plays in English, Alfred Buttigieg returns seven years later with Id-Drammi ta’ Alfred Buttigieg, which include all the plays which were staged between 1981 and 2023. This collection contains 10 plays, plays which, for one reason or another, did…
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Why we need literary criticism in Malta
My father was a teacher at the then George Schinas Primary School in Luqa in the 90s. He didn’t drive a car – still doesn’t – and, being from Birkirkara, he had to catch two buses every single day to make it to work. I went to school with him, as a student and a…
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Għażiż Francis is a stunning homage to the peak of Maltese theatre
I have a faint but vivid memory of being a cheeky toddler, bold enough to ask the great Francis Ebejer in my mother’s small kitchen why he blinked so emphatically every few seconds. Nervous tic, he replied. I also remember him bringing jam heart biscuits — a treat I looked forward to. Francis always visited…
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Castillo Film: Technically Good, Narratively Poor
Part of Take Two’s marketing for their new feature film involved videoclips of a number of short interviews of people who attended the premiere. The superlatives were plenty — these came from clearly biased viewers like Lawrence Buontempo, who worked with Take Two on previous productions, or Salvu Mallia, director Abigail Mallia’s father — but…
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Immanuel Mifsud’s award-winning Għażiż Ä ismi is skin deep
Għażiż Ä ismi is veteran poet Immanuel Mifsud’s latest collection of poetry with a focus on the Covid-19 pandemic. With a title like that (it is translated by Ruth Ward into English as My Dear Body), one would expect a love letter to one’s body, a vulnerable collection that touches upon mortality, futility, and loss. My…
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It Ends with Evil Publishers: the Colleen Hoover Phenomenon
Books are afforded a lot of slack that other media do not benefit from when it comes to quality. Who cares, we ask, if some books are bad? At least people are reading, right? Why don’t we say the same about TV? Or movies? Why don’t we say the same about music? That TV series…
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Mozart ‘drops’ new track — what does that mean?
A newly discovered Mozart composition was released to the public last month. On the one hand, you had Youtubers and influencers calling it a ‘drop’ and sensationalising it in an almost mocking fashion and, on the other, conservatives — and what the former group would term as boomers — were lamenting what went wrong with…
