A National Vision Atelier sat down with recently reinstated Artistic Director of Teatru Malta, producer and director Sean Buhagiar to find out a little more about his vision as the next chapter of Malta’s National Theatre company unfolds!
This is your second term as Artistic Director of Teatru Malta. Looking back, would you have done anything differently over the course of the first three years? Of course I would have. We always said that we wanted to take risks, we wanted to make groundbreaking theatre, work which was not being produced on the island. That is risky, and when you take risks, you are bound to make mistakes too. As Bernard Shaw put it, success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same mistake a second time. Evaluating the choices we make is necessary and we owe it to our public. The mistakes we made will inform future decisions. But we will also keep making new mistakes. We cannot play safe, we are the ones who need to take risks, we owe it to our sector. What I would not change is the vision. It takes more than three years to provoke a cultural shift and we are really very proud of what we have achieved in only three years. Teatru Malta has built a solid
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reputation, but it would be very arrogant to say we had a perfect run. We have had very successful productions and less successful ones, but we have always produced work with integrity and with the sole objective of bringing quality theatre to our public. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Judging from our first three years, I think we will get better at it. Describe a typical day in the life of AD of one of Malta's youngest PCOs Oh boy. (Beatles fans will get this). Well, no day is really a typical day. It very much depends on the production. We could be brainstorming ideas on our new poster because we just scrapped the last version, we could be trying to see how over 100 school kids are doing running around rehearsal rooms for the first time, picking up and smelling a publication of new classic theatre plays in translation, consoling artists doing an outdoor theatre piece who just got to know it might be too windy. I don’t think we have typical days, It’s the unscripted part of making
