Larinġa Mekkanika: A Play for Gen Z and Valletta 2019

Staged at the Valletta Campus Theatre, at a time when so much social and political turmoil was happening in Malta’s capital city, Larinġa Mekkanika found its hyperbolic tone caught up in an unholy juxtaposition of sorts, a feverish dream, something banal that felt deeply wrong.

by Maria Theuma

Picture by Lindsey Bahia

 

 

My first encounter with A Clockwork Orange dates back to my years as an undergrad, reading English. Its title was on one of the ‘required reading’ lists that we were assigned each week for our courses. Burning through the list for that particular week, I did what was expected of me to do: I read Anthony Burgess’s novel and watched Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the same name. I had been made aware beforehand, mostly through cultural commentary, of the distinguished nature of the story, with its notorious episodes of ‘ultraviolence’. I also knew that Kubrick’s very close film interpretation harboured a singular, prescient and outsize influence in the cinematic canon, that it was considered a true ornament of its genre and era. Other than that, I didn’t know much.

Maybe it was because I had been expecting to be completely blown away by the expansive world of A Clockwork Orange that I had been told so much about; maybe I thought that I would emerge from my viewing experience with a renewed sense of enlightened understanding of the world’s state of affairs—of all those terrible things that had been unfolding before my generation’s eyes. We, and by ‘we’ I mean ‘Millennials’ (a label that, many a time, we have felt the need to reject for ourselves as too narrow and limiting, but that, over the years, we have learnt to exist with), had spent most of our lives being told that we could do or be anything we set our minds to do or be. The global financial crisis was just about to hit. Back then, we had just started to see the fine cracks in the system. Many of us chose to look away.

 

Maybe, and most probably, it was because I lacked the emotional intelligence and attention that was necessary for me to get it—whatever A Clockwork Orange was supposed to be about, that is. But what it was, I just didn’t get. To me, the story’s absurdities and surreal, over-the-top silliness, both in its novel and filmic form—those very traits that had established the narrative’s unequivocally agreed upon genius—seemed too aged, too self-important to contemplate with any serious consideration. Unnecessary, even.  

 

 

Of course, every generation has a slate of stories and cultural phenomena that define them. For instance, the coming-of-age films that my friends and I think of as being representative of our generation articulate, in their overwhelming majority, a sugar-coated, rose-tinted view of the world. These were the films of the mid-noughties, such as Mean Girls, Legally Blonde, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, around which we cultivated a cultic reverence and to which we turned to see our own experiences and aspirations mirrored, albeit aware that what was being reflected back to us was, essentially, showing us fluffed up, bubblegum scented versions of ourselves.

When each of us, eventually, embarked on our respective university journeys, we armed ourselves with what an era of chick flicks (free and stripped of the obligation to deliver ‘good cinema’), together with reality TV (then in its prime), had taught us—that the only knowledge that mattered was that which was corny and bright-eyed. In the universe that we inhabited, Elle Woods graduated college and her toxic ex-boyfriend got what he deserved, the Plastics’ reign of terror at North Shore High School came to an end, Lizzie McGuire and Gordo hooked up. And thus we walked around, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, harbouring a firm conviction that, no matter what, the bad ones amongst us wouldn’t escape due retribution. For the good, all was and would be well with the world.

In this regard, nothing about A Clockwork Orange seemed candid or familiar to me. Kubrick’s revelation, in all my (admittedly crass) earnestness, appeared to me as mere evidence of a monumental yet fleeting moment in film history. I bought the DVD disc of the film at a discounted price from the clearance sale rack at a department store in my hometown, dutifully watched it, diligently wrote my essay, sat for my exam, and spent the next part of my early twenties trying to figure everything else out. So much for the mystique of a film once mired in controversy and banned for its nightmarish vision. 

 

 

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University explains, in her book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, that millennial traits are marked by the ‘economic squeeze created by underemployment and rising costs’. The front cover of her book urgently directs its reader to the problem of millennial self-indulgence and conceit: it shows a photo of a bare midriff with a pierced navel, and the words ‘Generation Me’ tattooed just above the band of a pair of low-cut jeans—an iconic wardrobe staple for those of us who spent our teenage years watching and taking style cues from Paris Hilton’s red carpet appearances on E!.

Born in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Millennials are now in their twenties and thirties. I was born at the height of the standard millennial range and, if I were to be completely honest, I find Twenge’s description of my generation’s personality to be quite accurate, at least in its broadest sense. In essence, Twenge’s generational analysis claims that, growing up surrounded by adults who over-emphasised our worth and our happiness for the greater part of our lives, us Millennials turned out a misadjusted, disenfranchised and, fundamentally, selfish bunch. Looked at in retrospect from this perspective, what I experienced when I first read and watched A Clockwork Orange made sense. 

 

 

We couldn’t really imagine a world in which, through our cultural footprint, we would in any way leave ourselves open to accusations of culpability or complicity, and, yet, that world is exactly the one we ended up living in.

 

 

A Clockwork Orange, published in novella form in 1962 and adapted to film in 1971, is a satirical black comedy that depicts a near-future society where youth subculture reaches peak levels of extreme violence. The story follows the teenage protagonist and narrator, Alex, who, together with his band of thugs, or as he calls them, ‘droogs’, commits brutal acts of violence, or ‘ultra-violence’, in the underworld of Manchester. Alex and his friends rob, maim, rape, vandalise and eventually commit murder.

Authorities become intent on reforming Alex—he is arrested and the State’s Minister of the Interior subjects him to a form of aversion therapy called the ‘Ludovico Technique’, which, as the behaviourist experts of the State promise, will remove his criminal propensities forever. This treatment consists of forcing Alex to watch violent films and feel induced nausea. These films have, as ‘emotional heighteners’, soundtracks of symphonic music. After his treatment, Alex, now a reformed delinquent, finds that he can no longer contemplate violence or listen to Beethoven, who once was his favourite composer, without feeling desperately ill.

When the film adaptation came out, the conversation around it took a heated turn. Despite its box office success, it drew an immediate outcry from the public. It was given an X rating in North America, film critic Paul Kael called it ‘pornographic’, and the Catholic Church forbade its members from watching it. But what made A Clockwork Orange especially controversial was the spate of copycat incidents that followed: a series of real-life crimes that resembled some of the violent sequences in the film. Kubrick and his family received death-threat letters in the mail, and the director himself had the film withdrawn from UK cinemas in 1973. It remained unavailable until his death in March 1999.

 

 

In 1987, Burgess published a stage play under the title: A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music. Burgess wrote songs for it, inspired by Beethoven and Nadsat slang, the latter being the Russian-flecked-cockney in which Alex, the protagonist, narrates the story in the novella. As part of Żigużajg Festival, which happens to be Malta’s most popular arts festival for children and young people, Teatru Malta staged Wayne Flask’s Maltese translation of the play, under the title Larinġa Mekkanika.

 

Possessed by a kind of provocative spirit that, to my knowledge, had never before been worked into theatrical entertainment for young audiences in Malta (I was told by the company’s marketing executive, Alessia Caruana, that some necessary changes had been made to the play, in order for it to be considered appropriate for viewing by an audience aged fourteen and over), the main challenge that Teatru Malta faced was that of responsibly handling the narrative’s stylised violence with discipline and nuance, without stripping it away from its original significance. Even if you’re against the idea of fourteen-year-olds watching ‘ultra-vjolenza’ (ultra-violence) unfold before their eyes, you cannot not consider commendable the fact that it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen a theatre company determined to take on in Malta. 

Director Sean Buhagiar transplanted the story to a familiar social context, to a (sometimes) sickening effect, in the best sense of the term. At times, his direction turned a clash between the characters into graceful, choreographed movement. Buhagair was never too intrusive, however. In this adaptation, the roots of the story remained clearly and hair-raisingly defined.

There was a daring to it—the setting was limited to the most basic elements which were brought in and off the stage as necessary, and, overall, the direction positively seemed to be more invested in allowing space for the young actors to interpret their roles than in generating self-importance. He used the Valletta Campus Theatre’s space, which was surrounded by an audience, to his advantage, by making use of its different entry points and aiming the action at all sides of the stage. It cultivated in the audience an uncanny feeling of discomfort at what seemed to be simultaneously something and nothing in particular, as though each one of us was being continually menaced by something that only we could see from the corners of our eyes. 

In Kubrick’s interpretation, A Clockwork Orange sports a fashion language of its own, which, despite (or, perhaps, due to) its utter simplicity, has had an enduring legacy. Donning white outfits and black bowler hats and canes, Kubrick’s droogs are classy yet dangerous, rebellious yet uniform, perverse yet chic. Their crotches are covered with codpieces, and therein we find our collective id embodied.

In Teatru Malta’s Larinġa Mekkanika, the droogs were given a makeover, their make-up and wardrobe re-invented to include bedazzled jackets, white face paint and blackened circles around the eyes. In a sense, revising the iconic optics of A Clockwork Orange, which communicate so much with so little, was a bold move on the part of Teatru Malta—a move which the production mainly managed to pull off thanks to the uncanny ability of the droogs (played by Stephen Mintoff, Benjamin Abela and Monique Dimech Genius) to retain a constant hint of mischievous glint in their blackened eyes, while giving the audience the sensation of gazing into dark souls throughout the entire performance.

 

 

Alex, played by Jamie Cardona, was reimagined as both a seething villain and a brat. Cardona’s performance blazed like a bonfire; he waltzed around the stage, thrashing and terrorizing the rest of the characters, he wept, shrieked, was dragged around screaming.

His take on Alex was carnivalesque; he managed to juxtapose violence with glee, and sometimes it was hard to tell if he was laughing or crying, or something else entirely. Cardona is a natural—there was a purity to his impulses which had the audience following his every move and word.  Here, credit is also due to Flask and his translation, which relished in the wordiness of the Maltese tongue. Already syntactically challenging in its original form, the language of A Clockwork Orange in translation inevitably demands an inventive and playful approach. Flask endowed his Alex with a rhyming-teen slang that disintegrated as the play progressed, with symbolic effect. 

At one point, Alex uttered “Qed nikber” (I’m growing up), and it was the only moment where Cardona allowed his character to let his emotional guard down. Almost marked by a sense of decent human sweetness, it was a telling moment for the audience, one which necessarily entailed empathising with its subject. There is no simple explanation for it, of course. Growing up isn’t ever a choice, it’s an inevitability, and, ultimately, when Alex was given the power to choose, he chose violence.

Just like A Clockwork Orange’s Alex, Larinġa Mekkanika’s Alex was depicted as someone who loved beauty—Beethoven’s music above everything—and the audience couldn’t help but feel that, in that moment, with its semblance of something like self-realisation, Alex could see the prospect of growing up and leaving behind his old way of life. Things turned out differently for him however, and, already a comic reduction of a hero at the beginning of the play, he was, by the end of it all, reduced, because of his own desire for destruction and chaos, to a mere shell of himself.

Perhaps, the most unsettling feature in Teatru Malta’s Larinġa Mekaninka was the presence of a cameraperson on stage, who followed and captured on film the characters’ movements throughout the play’s entirety. The filmed footage was then projected onto the walls of the theatre, in real time, suggesting a large-scale social media live feed of sorts, which provided the audience with an added layer of visuals through which to witness the action happening on stage.

 

 

Every time a member of the audience chose to shift the direction of their gaze from the stage to the theatre’s walls, to watch it all happen from the camera lens’s perspective, the play was turned into a commentary on the often dehumanising effects of the age of technology and the internet, with its contemporary systems of continual visual broadcasting, such as reality TV and social media. It all felt disturbing but relevant. After all, considering that the story of Larinġa Mekkanika revolves around the point of view of a teenager, any twenty-first-century adaptation intending to preserve the urgency of the narrative voice of the original work must attune it to the ways in which today’s youth forge most of their connections through virtual means. 

 

Demographically speaking, in 2019, Larinġa Mekkanika’s Alex, age fifteen, belongs to the Generation Z cohort. The Żigużajg young adult audience that Teatru Malta primarily intended its production to be watched by, are Gen Z-ers too. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the latter have spent most of the past decade filming themselves through front-facing cameras and meticulously honing an understanding of an online version of themselves according to their peers’ feedback. This is supercharged by the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as the result of an act of negotiation between personal worth and public wealth, and sometimes this can even become a potential source of profit.

After all, the home to many self-made celebrities of Gen Z is, in fact, the video-sharing social networking app, TikTok.  In this sense, the meaning behind Teatru Malta’s interpretation of the play, with its crushing and constant awareness of oneself as some form of public spectacle, would not have been lost on the average Maltese teenager sitting in the audience. Where Alex and his droogs even aware that they were being filmed? If so, did they also uniquely feel pressure to play up or play down their personal and public lives? Were they expected to challenge what was expected of them, just for the sake of being watched?

 Technically, we never witnessed the characters directly engaging in social media use on stage. The virtual projection of their own selves and story always happened at the fringes of the space that they physically occupied—an idea that was made literal by the walls-turned-film screens of the theatre’s inner perimeter, demarcating both the limits of the action on stage and ours, as an audience. Without these references to the twenty-first century zeitgeist of the virtual ‘I’, the time in which Laringa Mekkanika was set could have been any time. But, with that, the time was and is, essentially, now. In its depiction of unbridled chaos, as it dug into a particular darkness, it seemed to consciously chime with our own increasingly bizarre present.

 

 

The play opened in the last week of November, amid escalating levels of official fretting and political unrest in our country. At a fundamental level, A Clockwork Orange tells the tale of a state that has gone too far, that has entered a dimension beyond its covenant with the citizen. The vision of paradisal order which it promises, through extreme intervention, is but a sham, since it achieves the ‘goodness’ that it promises through vile methods and a lack of morality. 

Staged at the Valletta Campus Theatre, at a time when so much social and political turmoil was happening in Malta’s capital city, Larinġa Mekkanika found its hyperbolic tone caught up in an unholy juxtaposition of sorts, a feverish dream, something banal that felt deeply wrong. Seated along with the rest of the audience, I felt a dual impulse: the feeling of alarmed detachment coupled with the realisation that what was happening on stage could, outside of the theatre walls, and in the context of our country’s present, congeal into something that would be somehow more disturbing than the sum of its ridiculous parts. 

 

 

Given the unpredictable nature of everything that had been happening (and continues to happen) in Malta, I think it’s safe to say that the timeliness of Larinġa Mekkanika was a matter of pure coincidence. After all, the story intrinsically lends itself to political discussion. The Minister of the Interior (played by Mikhail Basmadjian) was reincarnated as ‘Sur Dimech’, a Maltese ‘Ministru’, whose first appearance on stage the characters themselves demanded the audience stand up for.

The films that Alex was forced to watch while undergoing the Ludovico Technique treatment consisted of several video clips showing footage that had been taken from broadcast journalism on current affairs and internet viral videos depicting a world that is rife with conflict and tragedy. Projected on the theatre’s walls as a moving collage of sorts, the audience was forced to watch it all along with Alex. We are all complicit and, at this point, we have been left with no choice but to look at the horror we have created. 

For all that, even if coincidence had not been the case, Buhagiar would have been doing what a thousand other directors would have done: probing unsettling events in contemporary society through the medium of entertainment, ‘reshaping’ the unattractive forces that seemed to be, outside the parameters of theatre, so difficult to resolve. Is Larinġa Mekkanika a violent play or is it a play about violence? As a textual artefact, it’s probably simultaneously about neither and both, however, one thing is certain—a retelling of its narrative in twenty-first-century Malta gives a clear message: that it is often through our own pragmatic indifference in the face of injustice, corruption and other forms of violence that we create the complicity required for all of it to go on unchecked.

When theatre feels too chaotic, maybe it’s a sign of how close to the edge we are. It’s often because it reflects a real-world danger that we might prefer was out of sight and mind. Larinġa Mekkanika was a reminder that when we choose to ignore that danger, we ignore it at our peril. 

 

 

If, for Millennials like me, self-actualisation turned out to be a failed project, for Gen Z (typically considered to be born after 1995) that failure is, in itself, an inescapable and ordinary condition to live in. To secondary school students on their Żigużajg festival school trip, the act of watching a play about a teenage boy, who could be their peer, unleash havoc on stage might not seem that different from how they have had to watch everyone else around them in real life capriciously wreck everything. To Gen Z, the reality of inheriting a world that cannot be lived in feels dangerously close. 

A few weeks ago, the ‘OK Boomer’ catchphrase and meme aimed at the baby boomer generation (often defined as those individuals born between 1946 and 1964), to dismiss or mock attitudes that are stereotypically attributed to them, went viral all over the internet. It embodied the spirit of Millennials collectively facepalming at the climate crisis and global disaster towards which we all seem to be heading—and not much else. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Millennials do not seem to be moving past this sense of intergenerational conflict anytime soon. 

 

 

The prospect of Gen Z, on the other hand, shifting the conversation towards cross-generational solidarity is exciting. There is something about the fact that Gen Z is the generation that has openly grown up in precarious times that those of us with millennial experiences can never quite figure out. Over and over again, in recent years, while Millennials #cancelled boomers and gave themselves a pat on the back, Gen Z has been open to the possibility of conversation and change. From student protests against gun violence in the U.S. to Greta Thunberg’s environmental activism, Gen Z has been getting things done. 

In Malta, a sixteen-year-old who received death threats after a speech at a protest in Valletta, was told by police authorities that, if she wanted those threats to stop, she should ‘stop voicing opinion’. It’s, at best, interesting to think that, just a mere couple of weeks earlier Maltese Gen Z-ers had been sitting in a theatre in that same city, watching a play about the consequences of an oversaturation of authoritative force in society.

As someone who still interacts with the world as a young person, the possibility of change happening as soon as Gen Z start to vote, of power being granted to a group of people that is still on the younger side, and that has not yet had the chance to, and might never, mess things up, brings me joy—and hope. God knows we need it now.

Maria Theuma is a PhD student within the Department of English at the University of Malta. She likes drinking Bloody Marys, watching figure skating and reading online forum threads about JonBenét Ramsey.