Review: BLANKET BAN, Southwark Playhouse Borough

Following an acclaimed run at Edinburgh Fringe, Maltese co-writers and activists Davinia Hamilton and Marta Vella's Blanket Ban is now home at the Southwark Playhouse for the next month.

Born in 2019 and following three years of research with pro-choice activists and Maltese women directly affected by the law, this "docu-play" is a critical look into their home country's abortion ban.

So much, yet so little has changed in the months following Blanket Ban's Edinburgh Fringe run. In November 2022, the Maltese government amended their abortion bill to only allow them if the pregnancy risked the mother's life or health, following a lawsuit involving a US woman being refused an abortion during a life-threatening miscarriage.

Perhaps now the title should be changed to Decorative Blanket Ban as Davinia Hamilton suggests when telling the audience this fact? However, it's not enough. After all, this fact is followed by them revealing Malta's president likened abortion to the Holocaust in early 2023.

While the narrative fluctuates between documentary-style interviews, dramatisations of Maltese women's life-altering stories and visceral explorations of Malta's culture, Hamilton and Vella's simplistic yet powerful storytelling doesn't escape the emotions behind this piece. The anger, frustration and exasperation they feel is valid as you watch women spend thousands to secretly get an abortion abroad, buy pills at risk of a prison sentence during the Covid lockdowns or forced to carry an unviable foetus to full-term. Each story is treated with the empathy it deserves, when Hamilton and Vella aren't literally clowning around with Malta's (lack of) sex education that is.

It's easy to assume Malta is a backward country due to the lack of reproductive rights for women, but Blanket Ban is as much a complicated love story to Hamilton and Vella's home country than it is a necessary political critique. A liberal pro-LGBTQIA place while carrying deeply Catholic beliefs, it's through their pride that they want to engage in these deep conversations. That's not to say there aren't moments of necessary levity, as Hamilton and Vella strut around the stage flailing I Heart Malta fans, dance to Darude's "Sandstorm" and extol the virtues of the Eurovision Song Contest. When Vella says "I love Malta," in an impassioned monologue near the end, you believe it.

What also helps Hamilton and Vella's simple storytelling is the sparse, yet vibrant imagery. No big props are required, with Holly Ellis' lighting making something as simple as a golden ray capture the nostalgia of a sunny Malta beach. Sometimes it is difficult to make out Tom Fitch's creative projections, but they are effectively used, with standout moments including the motif of a serene ocean symbolising a child in the womb and a Facebook chat with a (male) "medical expert" spouting outlandish conspiracy theories, capturing the ever-erupting chaos of the internet.

The world is becoming increasingly uncertain for women and their reproductive rights and Blanket Ban is an urgent reminder we need to keep fighting. Led by Davinia Hamilton and Marta Vella, who treat its topics with as much warmth and humour as they do respect, this is a heart-shattering and engaging play that inspires all of us to stand up and inspire change.

Blanket Ban is at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 20 May

Photo Credit: Ali Wright

To post a comment, you must register and login.