Theatre of nightmares and comedy of errors

The Valletta ent-rance site affair is becoming increasingly unpleasant. Lawrence Gonzi has not budged an inch from his starting point. This weekend's nod towards 128 artists who expressed concern at what is being prepared is likely to turn out into further confirmation that the Prime Minister has a set mind on this one.

The Renzo Piano plans have been available for months. Throughout this period, public opinion, as expressed in the media, has been by miles and miles against the plans as they stand. A number of experts argue against leaving a walled city like Valletta without a main gate, in contrast to cities elsewhere where gates are preserved even when the early walls are no more.

These experts found little articulated backing. Not so the criticism regarding the other two parts of the Piano project. These are the location of a new House of Representatives, where Freedom Square is now situated, and converting the old theatre ruins into an open air theatre.

Piano's plan for the new House attracted criticism because the building will be placed on stilts.

That is a matter of taste. If realised, the finished product might be seen to bear the famous architect's innovative imprint.

The criticism of the plan came mainly from other directions. Building a new House for the benefit of our representatives and their unavoidable requirements, some hold, will be a cavalier waste of money. Even if it is felt that the existing precincts at the Palace in Valletta are not adequate, there are existing buildings in our capital city which could be converted for that purpose. St Elmo is cited as the main such edifice.

For my money I would leave the House where it is, in the old Palace armoury, and develop offices and meeting rooms across the square. And that would only be necessary because a few years ago the government squandered an opportunity to take over the existing Casino Maltese building to use it for offices for MPs, giving the society alternative premises elsewhere. The road to our Parliament is riddled with good intentions, wrongly executed, fitting perhaps the way we tend to pervert the nature of democratic politics.

Time moves on. The Casino Maltese opportunity is gone. Gonzi stubbornly insists that the new House of Representatives should be located at the Freedom Square site. Thereby he prejudiced the whole project. For with that site taken up, the old theatre site could not be enlarged to house a modern arts centre, including a proper theatre.

Which is why Gonzi's apparent concession to the artists who petitioned him in midweek, whereby he will enable them to meet Piano for the master to "explain" his proposals, is simply a bad joke. Piano will explain a fait accompli. If fresh expressions of informed public opinion are to lead anywhere, it is Gonzi who has to shift his position.

The simple fact of the matter is that Piano was bound by strict parameters. The Prime Minister did not tell him, here are City Gate and the space behind it up to upper South Street, please see what you can do with them.

By all accounts he left him free to (re)design City Gate, which is appropriate when dealing with a man of the famous architect's standing, but then prioritised the location of a new House of Representatives large enough to make up for the space shortfall in the existing Palace location. Gonzi probably included a financial parameter, which is as it should be.

Given his space parameter for the new House there was little Piano could do regarding the site on which the old theatre ruins rest without peace. It is part of the prime ministerial joke that Gonzi now tells us that the old theatre site is too small to develop a modern theatre, which is why it was Piano himself came up with the idea of using the old theatre footprint and ruins for an open air theatre.

The Prime Minister is telling us that Piano jumped once he was pushed. If meeting the architect is going to be anything but a waste of everybody's time, the approach should be different. Piano should be asked something along the following lines: If you had the space behind the Valletta entrance at your free disposal, can you give us an outline of how you would develop it?

Many thousands of euros spent on the Piano brief may seem too late to ask him that. Yet, seriously speaking, it is not. Piano, already famous, will move into immortality. Gonzi, as happens to all good men, will be eased out of the premiership. The project at the entrance of Valletta will remain.

If the site is prejudiced with the foundations of the new House of Representatives having been laid, I doubt that any architect would want to revise Piano's plans. Above all, with space for the new House already committed, the old theatre site will be simply a residual - which, so it would seem, was what was left to Piano in the first instance.

Manchester United, the football team I support, play in the Theatre of Dreams. Gonzi does not support them, which is one reason why he has dreamt up a nightmare of a theatre complex.