This... Horse of Troy

Feelings of chagrin, frustration and numbing impotence gripped those of socio-cultural vision, far-sightedness and good sense when newspaper campaigns orchestrated by self-anointed 'experts' in aesthetics, architecture, and the arts scuttled Renzo Piano's Valletta plan, years ago.

Time now proves them guilty of arrogance, dullness, tasteless brashness, anachronistic bigotry, and bulldozer tactics.

Our culture lost, not Piano, but the opportunity of that superb vision impacting minds for 20 years. Instead, millions streamed through that sick zone named 'City Gate'.

They were impacted by that incongruous, yawning monstrosity's diesel-coated tarmac, its roaring, fumes-spewing buses, its woofer and tweeter CD soundscapes, gaudy trappings, its babbling, swearing, vulgar obscenity.

When such a cultural black hole constitutes a capital city's anteroom there is cause for grave alarm: no sane person changes his home's entrance into a garage.

Yes, we make our environment, but it repays our high-handedness - by making us. What makes us is the entire fabric we live.

We are made, too, of what we know to happen in our spaces. For instance, consider how St Elmo's tragic abandonment hurt us. Then there's what we know to be happening in our economic, educational, relaxation and political spaces. Crucially, it also is what we know happens (and doesn't happen) in what should be our questioning and searching spaces.

Is it concern for tourism that makes us despair at splendid wooden balconies, portals and louvers disintegrating on many architectural Valletta gems?

Answering 'yes' would be profoundly worrying. Instead, one valid reason is so that minds may stop learning to accept decadence, indifference and laxity. Crucially, however, we should aim to help minds actually reject decadence, indifference and laxity. Instead we should yearn for innovation, vision, creativity, beauty, and relevance. Those buildings concretise visions of architects, their doings 'documented'. We don't look at their work, perhaps. Still, it works upon us, touching and driving us.

That's what 'cultural products' do. A warning: industrial/ commercial overtones attached, nowadays, to that phrase add disaster to tragedy.

'Cultural products' work upon us. Our society now (belatedly) recognises it erred to shelve Piano's design. It's never too late, true, but the minds Valletta's entrance wounded are not cityscapes - rehabilitating minds is immensely difficult. Reviving Piano's design is commendable. But there's a horse-fly in that ointment.

In Piano's plan, the Opera House site sported a noncommittal wooden block Making Parliament of that wooden block while - ostensibly - reviving Piano's plan is rolling out a Trojan Horse.

And all I said earlier now boomerangs back at us. Should tourism dictate Parliament's location? If Parliament needs moving, should it so utterly dominate us and our city?

'Ad honestam populi oblectationem' - the Manoel Theatre's sculpted motto - means 'to meet the public's needs'. What motto, is there to explain why Parliament needs to be in Valletta? Whose needs? Let's say it's a need - why render practically inaccessible Valletta's prime site? Why not Bavière, or St Elmo?

Then: a Parliament loaded onto an arts complex - ominous (subliminal?) message. Art is art only when questioning/challenging status quos.

That brings me to the 'sufficient' three Valletta 'theatres', each at the city's edge, away from frequented zones. The Manoel Theatre sports an A3-size noticeboard outside; the Mediterranean Conference Centre has nothing.

St James Cavalier, nearer to the public's haunts, has one at each entrance. Their façades are permanently bare: it's useless - unlike theatres everywhere, they cannot impact cultural sensibility with posters, they know it.

So the throngs mill around commercial attractors - untouched by cultural posters, their absence an incredible feature. Unable to touch people directly, the 'theatres' solicit niche audiences, pandering to tastes that shun questioning or searching; potential audiences are abandoned to the winds. And this - in a city devoid of higher education establishments.

I saw some 30 punks - they weren't together - in extreme attire and hairdos, thrilled by a Così fan Tutte in Poland, hordes of teenagers enthused by Theodorakis' ballet Zorba the Greek, youths thronging to Goethe's Faust, vibrant audiences, all over Europe, the likes of which our insensitive, non-visionary policies cannot even conceive. This latest blow will complete the (successful) alienation process.

Please, Prime Minister - pause and listen. Think. It's yours to reverse.

Prof. Schranz lectures theory and philosophy of theatre at the University of Malta.