Times2 caught up with writer and co-director Malcolm Galea to find out more.
“I’ve always had an affinity for boċċi,” he smiles. “One of the houses I grew up in, in Birżebbuġa, had a boċċi field right opposite. It was comforting going to sleep, hearing the click of the boċċi balls and people celebrating at the end of the game. I was dismayed, therefore, to find a couple of years ago that the place is now a car park, and these ideas triggered the idea for this show.”
“The story focuses on a boċċi team which is facing closure because one of the players has recently died. He’s an old man who slipped on his own boċċa and, with a generous dose of dark humour, died just before the show begins! Another character is getting married, and his girlfriend doesn’t allow him to play any more. That leaves the team with only one player, Osmar (played by Joseph Zammit). Osmar is really good at boċċi but impossibly arrogant and consequently nobody wants to play with him. However, if they don’t and there isn’t a team, then the boċċi club will be forced to close down.”
“And boċċi could even be facing extinction for real,” he adds. “It’s an inherent part of the Maltese identity but if you asked Chat GPT to name the top 20 cultural activities in Malta boċċi wouldn’t even be on the list. As a game played mostly by Maltese men – women don’t really play professionally – and because the influx of people moving to Malta from other countries haven’t really taken up the game, sadly it has all the hallmarks of a dying tradition.”
“Boċċi is actually a fun game and a sport that everyone in the community could enjoy and benefit from playing – and even an elderly out-of-shape person can get involved and be great at it. It would be brilliant to think that this musical, apart from being great entertainment for a summer evening, would help reinvigorate Boċċi, and even make it ‘Instagram sexy’!” Galea laughs.
During a research and development phase for the musical, enabled by Teatru Malta’s Studio Francis Ebejer initiative, Galea and a group of theatre professionals unravelled the history and dynamics of boċċi as a sport. The Boċċi Federation was formed in the 1980s, Galea explains, with four divisions, each of which included as many as 12 teams.
“Now, there are only three divisions, and the third is only half full,” he says sadly. “Luqa and Kalkara are the most recent teams to close down since the previous season, which is what happens when a team is no longer able to field enough players. In a team there are three players and three reserves, so you could technically run with just three people.”
When a boċċi club dies, it’s also a shame for the families whose livelihoods depend on the snack bar, he explains, and then boċċi fields are often on premium land and there’s the thorny question of what then happens to them when they’re no longer used.
In the show, a depressed elderly man called Jes, played by famed composer Philip Vella in a surprise casting choice, runs the boċċi bar. Working for him is an African gentleman named Jonathan (played by Adam Ryan). He’s the only English-speaker of the show with the rest of the characters conversing in Maltese.
Meanwhile, across the street, there’s a house owned by a woman called Marta (played by Becky Camilleri) who took out a huge loan to renovate it in order to sell it.
“She’s hoping to make lots of money because of its great views over the boċċi club and across to the sea and she’s worried about what the club’s closure will do to her profits. The story is essentially about this young woman trying to keep a boċċi club open for selfish reasons while pretending to care. Inevitably she develops a soft spot for all the people involved,” Galea grins.
“I thought it would be fun to do a musical about these issues, a summer comedy with heart, and so I invited Maltese music maker Matthew James Borg, whose music I love, to collaborate. I’d met him once, at a TV interview, and we joked about creating a musical together one day.”
The show will be performed on boċċi fields across Malta, with a live band and an inventive minimalist set.
“We reuse all the things you’d expect to see in the boċċi field in different ways,” Gales explains. “For example, a beer crate is arranged as a tombstone for a cemetery scene, and so on.”
“It’s going to be great fun!”
Boċċi : The Musical is a collaboration between Teatru Malta and Galea’s own company Give or Take Productions, co-directed by Malcolm Galea and Philip Leone-Ganado of Teatru Malta. The show stars Teatru Malta’s Troupe with musical direction by Albert Garzia, vocal coaching by Sean Borg and movement coaching by Jacob Piccinino.
