Last week was a very perplexing one. First we had the announcement that the Prime Minister had only discussed the durability of Maltese stone with Renzo Piano, and regarding the roofless joke in bad taste had remained as obdurate as a Pharaoh in the Exodus. This led me to believe that all was lost.
We artists and intelligentsia have been battling against this waste of taxpayers' money for the last six months. When the letter of protest to the Prime Minister, of which I was one of the signatories along with some heavyweights like Fr Peter Serracino Inglott, was delivered on Wednesday, Minister Austin Gatt appeared on national TV wearing a smirk and a half informing us that, as Malta is a democratic country, we artists, all 128 of us, must accept the government's decision. I wonder if he realised that he is a walking contradiction as only supremos of totalitarian states utter things like that in public!
My letter, which had been penned when the original announcement was made, appeared on Thursday in this august newspaper. Thursday was the day when The Times online carried the news that, after all this time, after all that rhetoric and ink had been wasted, the Prime Minister decided to arrange for a meeting to be held between Mr Piano and the 128 signatories of the letter. A bolt out of the blue of a volte face if I have ever seen one.
The Prime Minister tends to shoot from the hip where culture is concerned, maybe because he knows that the rank and file of Malta does not give a monkey's toss whether the theatre has a roof or not and whether the entrance to our capital city looks like it is, what Mr Piano is proposing it to be or is merely a couple of broomsticks tied across with some rope. Dr Gonzi knows that the greater part of the electorate is utterly indifferent to the most common denominator of culture. I feel that this government would prefer hoi polloi to live in blissful ignorance than have their grey cells honed and sharpened by exposure to the arts of whatever kind. It is so much simpler.
Malta offers a lot considering its size but, believe you me, its potential is so much greater. I have, on many an occasion, whether when writing this column or reviewing musical events, something which I have been doing since I was 17, pointed out facts and suggested tactics and strategies for the betterment of culture in Malta. I will never stop trying to move the powers that were, are and will be, from introducing strategies that will expose everybody, all and sundry and not just the good and the great, to music and art. I have no agenda, hidden or otherwise, but I strongly and very sincerely believe that a cultured Maltese nation could be a reality, irrespective of class, background or education.
I will elaborate on just one point that the Prime Minister made last Thursday, namely that "it does not make sense to build another theatre like the Manoel Theatre". Of course it doesn't Dr Gonzi. Who on earth gave him that idea? This monumental problem arose simply because the exhaustive consultation about what to do with the Opera House site should have been held a year ago at least and not now when the only solution is to reverse the process completely and start from square one. There is no other way.
The writing on the wall has been crystal clear for years. The opera house site is a highly-charged emotional pot-boiler, which each successive government since World War II dabbled in at its peril. Seven decades on it still is. The only difference now is that the majority have mercifully given up the idea of building the theatre as was while I believe we all agree that a fully-functional traditional opera house would be pie in the sky. Nevertheless, when Jesmond Mugliett had originally proposed having Parliament there, the idea had sent out shockwaves and it was temporarily shelved till after the 2008 election.
Last summer, we were presented with the Piano plans that shifted Parliament to Freedom Square because it's much larger and gave the arts the roofless joke as a palliative.
Now the Prime Minister claims that the open-air theatre was Mr Piano's idea. With all due respect to Mr Piano, the primus inter pares of contemporary architecture; a man whose achievements and creations I greatly admire, if so, I am afraid that he has not understood Malta's climate nor Malta's traditions. Nor has he examined the precise requirements of Malta's cultural situation. Why should he? Architects work according to the briefs they are given. He has obviously not been given the right facts. In fact, not having given him a brief strikes me as mightily peculiar. It's tantamount to giving an Eskimo carte blanche to build a theatre in Republic Street! The result would probably be an igloo! An artistic igloo, no doubt, but an igloo all the same!
Culture has been tossed like a hot potato from Dolores Cristina to Mario de Marco who, like St Jude, seems to be the rifugium peccatorum for governmental lost causes. While I am confident that Dr de Marco will do a good job of it, I must reiterate that culture has now been removed from education to rejoin tourism after a million reasons had been given only one legislature ago as to why it did not make sense for it to be there in the first place. It is clear that the Prime Minister's office is treating culture just how the late Guy the Gorilla reacted to toffee-wrappers. I am appalled.
kzt@onvol.net