How Francis Ebejer Still Runs Malta’s Hidden Script: Villages, Hotels and Protesters Keep the Playwright Alive

Francis Ebejer beyond his words
A quiet afternoon in Ġnejna Bay, and the limestone cliffs seem to echo dialogue that was never spoken aloud. Tourists snap photos of the azure window that isn’t there anymore; locals shuffle out of the water arguing about parking tickets. Nobody mentions the playwright who once mapped this exact coastline with sentences sharper than the karst itself, yet his fingerprints are everywhere—in the way a farmer still greets a stranger with “Ħelow, ħanini,” in the stubborn refusal to separate church square from bar stool, in the national talent for turning tragedy into punch-line within three beats.

Francis Ebejer, born in 1925 a stone’s throw from the Mdina cathedral, is remembered internationally for translated plays and European prizes. On the island, however, his legacy is less parchment, more pulse. Ask a taxi driver on the Sliema-Ferry run whether he’s read “The Maltese Crow,” and he’ll shrug. Ask him if he’s ever laughed at a mother threatening to throw the figolla out the window unless the kids behave, and you’ll get a grin that proves Ebejer’s anthropology correct: Maltese life is theatre, ticket price included in the bread bill.

Walk into any band club in Għaxaq or Żabbar during feast week and you will see the Ebejer formula alive: brass competing with fireworks, village gossip louder than trombones, devotion and absurdity sharing the same beer can. He wrote it first; the villages simply never stopped improvising the script.

Beyond literature syllabi, Ebejer’s words have become social glue. Youth theatre group “Teatru Kontempo” in Birkirkara rehearses scenes from “The Ruzmari Tree” not because it’s classic, but because kids recognise their own nanniet in the stubborn grandmother guarding a single carob. Director Martina Vella, 26, says lines written in 1973 still get gasps: “When the actor yells ‘Jien nagħmel li rrid, għax jien Malta!’ the audience feels the island’s claustrophobia and pride in one breath. That’s Ebejer diagnosing us before we knew we were sick.”

The diagnosis has economic side-effects. In 2019, Valletta’s boutique hotel “The Saint Ursula” started offering an “Ebejer Literary Weekend”: staged readings in the courtyard, rabbit stew paired with scenes from “The Kite,” discounted room if you can quote a monologue. Manager Steve Calleja says occupancy jumps 30% during the off-season weekend. “We don’t sell Shakespeare,” he winks. “We sell the neighbour your nanna argued with in 1968.”

Even NGOs weaponise his candour. “Moviment Graffitti” projected lines from “The Cage” onto the Parliament façade the night developers carved up the Mistra coastline. “A country that cages its views will one day stare at iron bars” read the banner, Twitter exploded, and for three days Planning Authority meetings were actually attended by the public. Literature as crowd-control, Ebejer-style.

Yet the most intimate after-life happens in kitchens. In Qormi, 83-year-old Rita Micallef still keeps the playwright’s postcard taped inside her kitchen cabinet. He thanked her for the loaf of ftira she left at his sister’s wake; on the back he scribbled a line that never made it into a published play: “May your bread rise like our language, stubbornly.” Rita repeats the sentence every time she turns on the oven, which means Ebejer literally rises with the dough every feast day.

Scholars will continue to deconstruct his post-colonial motifs; tourists will google him if they’re stuck indoors on a windy February afternoon. But Malta keeps Ebejer alive in ways footnotes can’t capture—through village gossip that still sounds like staccato stage directions, through teenagers who laugh at a line they swear their drunken uncle invented only to discover it premiered at the Manoel Theatre decades earlier. The island is an ongoing matinée where the exit lights never fully come on, because the playwright refused to let the curtain fall on a nation that keeps rewriting itself between one sentence and the next.