It was October 16, 2017, when Malta and soon after that the rest of Europe was shocked by the news that Daphne Caruana-Galicia, Malta’s best-known investigative journalist, was killed in a car bomb explosion. In her work, she regularly shed light on the corrupt links between Maltese politicians and businessmen.
In small Malta with half a million people, Daphne was known by many. Also journalist Herman Grech. He says: “I knew that Daphne could get into trouble: she constantly provoked the authorities, the politicians of the ruling party. But it never occurred to me that they would go THIS far. That they would not only hurt Daphne, but kill her in such a gruesome and public way. The people who planned it wanted to send a clear signal: don’t try to touch us. This event shocked not only little Malta, but all of Europe.”
Hermans Grech has been working in journalism for 26 years, the last five being the editor-in-chief of Malta’s leading newspaper “Times of Malta”. He was one of the journalists who later investigated the murder of Caruana-Galicia. But in addition to his work, Grech has been passionate about theater for many years. The play about Daphne is his second work as a playwright.
The idea for the play was created two years after Daphne’s murder, when journalists and the entire Maltese society began to understand that people potentially connected to the murder are also in the corridors of the government and are trying to cover it up so that the real perpetrators are not revealed.
“It was about two in the morning, we were waiting for the end of an important government meeting in the editorial office, people were protesting in the streets, the head of the prime minister’s office had just been detained, one of the ministers had been questioned… I remember sitting at the computer and thinking: here, a play is being created by itself! I am currently I’m writing it! There’s politics, drama, murder, public outrage… and it’s not fiction, it’s reality,” Grech recalls. “Later after the shows, the audience has come to me and asked if I fantasized something here. No, I didn’t fantasize anything, it all really happened.”
Joe Azzopardi plays “They Blew Her Up”
Photo: Fran Rizzo
Previously, Grech has also staged documentary shows – about the bombing of the plane over Lockerbie, about the Beirut hostages, about migration, about abortions, which are still prohibited in Malta. When he tackled the story of the murder of Daphne Caruana-Galicia, he addressed people as a playwright, not a journalist. And under the cover of the veil of art, people began to tell such things that they would never dare to reveal to Herman as a journalist. Practically all the texts in the play are documentary, but the characters who speak them are, as it were, abstract – the Journalist, the Whistleblower, the Lawman, the Evil One.
“The theater is a very powerful medium where you can say things that you wouldn’t be allowed to say otherwise. I remember in 2015 I staged a play about the island of Lampedusa and the migrant crisis related to it. After that, an audience member came up to me and said: I know that you already you’ve been writing about migration for many years, but nothing you’ve written has affected me as strongly as this show, even though it was fiction. I asked: you mean fiction affects you more than facts? He said: I’m sorry, but it does I think that the reason for this is that we are so easily distracted by mobile phones in everyday life, we can hardly focus on longer reading material.
In the theater you are forced to turn off your phone and just watch. I think it’s an extremely powerful way to tell stories.
That’s why I keep doing it,” Grech said.
In the excerpts of the show that can be seen on the Internet, the actors tell the story of the murder of Daphne Caruana-Galicia, each from the point of view of their character, which at times raises eyebrows with their apparent dispassion. The Maltese criminal world is embodied in his role by actor Alan Paris, who admits: “It is not easy to play this role. It has become easier with time, but at first it was crazy. The first dress rehearsal took place in small rooms. Thank God, Daphne’s son was sitting on the balcony and I couldn’t see him. Because I basically had to describe what I did to his mother. I still get emotional when I remember it.
And this is also a personal story for me. I knew Dafni, we used to work together. I have also met the man involved in Daphne’s murder. Malta’s society is extremely small.
We jokingly say that in Malta everyone is a cousin. Therefore, this event has affected all of us in a very personal way. Talking about what they did, how they did it, how they were proud of what they did… There is a recording where one of the murderers says: if he had known who she was, he would have asked for more money! And then laugh. This record will also be heard in our show.”
Alan Parris in They Blew Her Up
Photo: Daryl Cauchi
Actress Kim Dalli considers Daphne’s murder a significant turning point in Maltese society. In her play, she plays a Journalist, who at one point says: usually we protest by posting on “Facebook”, but this time thousands of people took to the streets, protesting against corruption and impunity. This is what she sees as the good news in this generally very dark story: “I have been a journalist myself. So when Herman offered me this role, it was like a dream come true, because I consider it a very important play. This is not fiction, this event is a dividing line in Malta’s history! I used to write many stories as a journalist, but I think that theater can sometimes move more than journalism. It allows us to feel more empathy and humanity. We can also show Daphne in this show not only as journalists, but also as a person , as a mother whose children lost her. But at the same time we also show a wider context – about Maltese society, about the sense of impunity… It’s 2023, and the main suspects for planning Daphne’s murder have not even sat on the dock yet. Justice has not yet won , so we have to keep telling this story.”
“I agree with Kim that Daphne’s assassination was a defining moment in Malta’s history. It was our ‘twin towers’, our ‘Kennedy assassination,'” adds actor Alan Paris. “Each of us remembers where we were and what we were doing when Daphne Caruana-Galici’s car was blown up.
That is why I am honored to tell this story and will continue to do so until justice prevails.”
The creators of the show are quite skeptical whether justice will ever win completely, they sigh that people’s memory is short: even after the unprecedented protests in Malta, corruption scandals have continued. However, the show has caused a wide resonance. Malta’s ruling politicians have tried to ignore it, but it has received an award among theater professionals as the best show of the year in Malta, and it has also been performed in Belgium, Italy, Austria and Cyprus. The response of the audience in other countries has surprised the director Herman Grech:
“People know that similar horrors have happened near them or right here in the neighborhood, and unfortunately, we cannot always take things like freedom of speech or the safety of journalists for granted.”
Investigative journalist Sanita Jemberga is one of the few people in Latvia who have seen the show about the murder of Dafne Caruana-Galicija. Jemberga knows the author of the play, journalist Herman Grech, well and has also seen his other productions. She highlights Herman’s ability to portray the conflicted personality of Daphne, who was loved by many and despised by just as many. “His plays are characterized by the fact that they are not flat. There are no clear light and dark characters, they show that the world is complex and make you think about it that way,” says Jemberga. “Daphne is shown from all the different sides of her personality, making it clear that a good journalist is never a simple journalist, his job is not simple and Malta is not a postcard country. Behind this beautiful layer of seas, churches and ancient culture, there is a black, dirty politics that has led to the European a journalist is killed in the country. This story of both Daphne and Malta is told very delicately in this play. I would say that anyone who is interested in the world, in journalism, in the merging of power with the criminal world, is worth seeing this show.”
Director Herman Grech believes that journalist Daphne Caruana-Galicia was not killed by one person, she was killed by the system. Six years after the murder, only the direct perpetrators are behind bars, but the most likely mastermind of the murder could be tried only next year. Meanwhile, Grech and the actors continue to tell this story on stage, forcing them to put aside the phone with the countless news headlines for an hour and a half and read one of these news properly, this time in the language of the theater.
2023-10-05 15:28:56
#story #shook #Europe #theatrical #murder #Maltese #journalist #Daphne #CaruanaGalicia
