Following successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and in London, Marta Vella and Davinia Hamilton are presenting six performances of their hard-hitting hit-show Blanket Ban at Spazju Kreattiv from this Saturday, International Women’s Day (March 8).
Here, in their home country, the writer/performers feel fiercely the restrictions on the freedom of women, and the lack of women’s self-determination when it comes to their wombs.
Marta and Davinia are clear that they love this country: they relish the Catholic kitsch the Eurovision fervour, the golden sun and the crystal-clear waters that lap upon these shores.
“Aesthetically the show is predominantly blue,” smiles Davinia.
“Blue was even our working title before we decided to call the show Blanket Ban. The beautiful blue sea surrounds the islands like amniotic fluids, beneath a blue sky if you look up to the heavens. Blue is also a reminder of the Virgin Mary, the lines of a pregnancy test, of baby blues and feeling blue.”
With great humour, the pair draw on their childhoods, on the shared Maltese experience, and on the food here in the show. (Of course, they love pastizzi, but would they plump for pea or cheese?)
However, Davinia and Marta are appalled and embarrassed by the strict laws that deny life-saving abortions to women in Malta and the case, in 2022, during which a 38-year old US citizen, Andrea Prudente, on holiday here was denied an abortion in Malta despite having a ruptured membrane at 16 weeks pregnant.
When her health was in danger, and her life, possibly, at risk, Prudente felt she had no choice but to leave the country for medical intervention. Her pregnancy was then terminated in Spain. The irony, that she chose this the sunny, happy, warm little island for her babymoon – a holiday to relax before the arrival of a baby- is stark.
In Blanket Ban, the playwrights’ address women’s concerns using news clips and soundbites from real interviews with anonymous contributors gathered over the course of three years – conversations with medical professionals and women who were driven to have illegal abortions here.
These are surely an unexpected base for a comedy show, and yet they are woven together with talented storytelling, warm humour and great empathy. It’s a multi-layered patchwork of their own experiences and fragments of culture, tradition and history, a depiction of a truly complicated situation. And what, for example, happened when the COVID pandemic closed the airport when traveling abroad is the only safe options for an abortion? Was there a bump in the birth-rate?
Below, as ever-present as the gentle waves which lap rhythmically against these shores, and provide a familiar soundscape in the auditorium, there’s an insidious fear that pervades the population. It’s especially the case if you’re a young woman unable to have an abortion no matter what the circumstances. But it dampens too the days of those who care about them; their partners and parents who feel the threat, the lurking risk of additional demands in an already struggling family, or of a teenager’s life turning on a six-pence.
Up until 2023, termination of a pregnancy was prohibited under all circumstances in Malta. Now, if the life of the pregnant woman is at risk, an abortion can be permitted after approval from a team of medical professionals and under specified conditions. Pro-choice advocates, however, continue to highlight that Malta is still a place where many women have no access to safe and legal abortion, and are forced to turn to desperate measures.
Blanket Ban is, therefore, bittersweet: thought-provoking fun entertainment centred on a sad and sobering state of affairs for those who find themselves in the throes of an unexpected pregnancy.
Although described elsewhere are a balancing act, this underplays the actor-activists’ perfectly-pitched pinhead precision along a tightrope high above the crowds, a heart-stopping high-wire along which they edge this weighty subject matter, with power and passion and bubbly-bright delivery.
Silence, Vella and Hamilton argue, is not the way forward and as they invite audiences to understand the current situation for the country’s women, they hope Blanket Ban will pull the wool from our eyes, birthing further discussion and triggering change.
After three years honing the show to perfection in the UK, they’re delighted to have been invited to bring it to Malta and hope to highlight the contradiction between the introduction of trailblazing social justice laws here alongside the continuation of some of the world’s strictest abortion laws.
Blanket Ban is part of the Spazju Kreattiv Programme 2024/2025, produced by Chalk Line Theatre and supported by Arts Council Malta.