Edinburgh 2022: Review: BLANKET BAN, Underbelly Cowgate

Blanket Ban presents a difficult task for critics. Its message is undeniably powerful and painfully necessary. But it is the critic's task to judge a piece of theatre on its aesthetic value and not on its political or moral content, no matter how agreeable or urgent that content might be.

As a piece of devised theatre Blanket Ban is a chaotic collage of ideas without depth to underpin its message. It is artistically bland, crass, and clunky.

For the most part stripped of any theatricality, it consists of two Maltese women, Davinia Hamilton and Marta Vella lecturing the audience about Malta's morally reprehensible relationship with abortion rights. They discuss their lived experience and share personal anecdotes. Their pain is raw, their anger is poignant. They paint a picture of how morally bad Malta's stance on abortion is. But there is nothing beyond that.

The whole experience plays out more like a protest or a documentary than a piece of theatre. Facts are declared and demands are made. Fine, but in telling rather than showing it squanders its opportunity to get under the skin in the way that real theatre does. Truly great theatre can stay with you for years because it is able to transcend rationality and strike electricity straight into the heart of one's emotional core. This does not do that.

There are some theatrical elements peppered in but they are garlanding, a thin veneer that neither shines a light onto the issues nor deepens the play's analysis of abortion. Take the sequences where one of the performers flails around dressed in blue rags; the idea is to evoke poetically the spirit of the sea but it comes across as tacky and unpolished. Another frivolous sequence uses recorded interviews with various experts and commentators projected onto the stage. Whilst interesting it is artistically derivative and overused to the point where they swirl into one.

Hamilton and Vella strive to create a rounded picture of their home nation's cultural identity. Despite its record on abortion, it is actually progressive and welcoming in many other respects. But again, this information is told too bluntly rather than shown to have any emotional resonance.

In short, the creative team seem to misunderstand what theatre is capable of. In demanding crassly our moral attention instead of inviting us to contemplate, Blanket Ban is a bit like someone handing out flyers gratuitously on the Royal Mile. The really good shows don't need to advertise themselves in that way: mere word of mouth is eventually enough.

Good theatre does not need to demand that its audience adopt a moral stance. It just invites them to consider it. Needless to say, this is a shame in the context of Blanket Ban. Why waste the opportunity? A play with even the bare bones of a narrative could be infinitely more powerful than one that respects its audience enough to not nag them into adopting a moral stance.

Blanket Ban plays at Underbelly Cowgate until 28 August

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