Drowning Lilies
*****
Conjoined twins are exploited by their mother and a group of vampiresque gawkers, and finally ripped from one another and their true love. Summed up in this way, Drowning Lilies comes across as melodramatic and tired - but nothing could be further from the truth.
Written and directed by Simon Bartolo, Drowning Lilies is an extremely artistic and poetic work, so visceral and intense that I left the theatre feeling physically uneasy. Littered across the piece are haunting songs and poems by Chris Galea (who also plays poet/love interest Edmund Zanter); they seem strange at first but their minor-key oddness is soon revealed to be an integral part of the performance.
As the attendants at the freakshow that is Lily Fogli (Sephora Gauci and Dorothy Baldacchino), Joseph Paul Vella, Veronica Stivala, Gilbert Micallef, and Olwyn Jo Saliba are truly horrifying in their leech-like admiration and desire for the money and otherness which the twins represent. The four of them make a up grotesque chorus, each member more unsettling than the last.
But it is Loranne Vella as La Signora Fogli, the twins' mother, who really steals this show. Thanks to the stylization of the piece, her acting is always menacing, never ridiculous - though at times, certainly infused with black humour - and although her treatment of the twins is disgustingly exploitative, Vella portrays the mother with such commitment and passion that the audience can never wholly cease to feel for this war-time widow whose sole opportunity to earn a living is by charging members of the public to see her daughters.
Drowning Lilies is not for the faint hearted, and is certainly not light fare. But it is a bizarre and wholly satisfying work which, if it were not so intense and unsettling, one might want to see developed into a longer piece.
Rachel Lynn Brody
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