The protagonist of Tony Cassar Darien’s Il-Kennies tal-Ġenna, held in Pjazza Teatru Rjal, Valletta, Ġanni, is an honest man. However, he has lost the one woman he loved and has also been treated unjustly by his employers at the bank where he used to work.

To take care of his daughter, he accepts to take on a job few middle-class men would normally take on: that of sweeping the streets of his beloved Valletta.

His love for the city, his reflective nature and his Christian concern for the poor and downtrodden make him bewail what he sees as the decline of Valletta and the rise of a generation that is careless both about its environment and about civil behaviour. When I see how our capital city has changed, it is difficult not to sympathise with Ġanni.

Populism and the ceaseless desire to please the visitor at the cost of the local have made Valletta less pleasant to visit.

I find it easy to understand Cassar Darien’s nostalgia for the departure of the Teatru Rjal, whose Custodian (Marta Vella) summons up what audiences there were like.

But did he wish to make us similarly nostalgic for the bars, dance halls and brothels of Strait Street, where soldiers, sailors and airmen were fleeced of their money?

It never bores

There is a number of short or long monologues spoken by characters associated with the shady activities of this street, like the ex-policeman Wenzu (Mario Micallef) and the former barmaid Gracie (Nathalie Micallef), both of whom make Strait Street sound (unconvincingly) like fun.

There is also a long monologue, spoken pathetically by a transvestite (Carlos Farrugia). About this last, I am not sure if he is meant to stand for misery that is past or present, but perhaps it belongs to any age.

The play’s long first act introduces Ġanni and his philosophy, but there is far too much about the Valletta of the past and it felt like yet another attempt to make the Valletta of the past come to life, an ongoing activity as 2018 gets closer.

What happens is that when Ġanni (played engagingly by Kris Spiteri) is allowed to have the main share of the audience’s attention, it becomes practically a second play. At the end, Ġanni’s health gives out, leaving the audience think Valletta needs a real Ġanni in its midst.

Perhaps the author should not have been made to rewrite his piece the way he did. From being a reflective, faintly poetic monologue, it has now become an example of the people’s theatre that is today fashionable and of which I now begin to tire.

Josette Ciappara’s direction gives the production much visual variety, using dance sequences (Alison White and music by Dominic Galea) and other ensemble scenes.

I greatly admired Pierre Portelli’s set, basically an elegant white silhouette of the Valletta skyline, that is moved in part from time to time, creating visual variety and acting as screen for the many visual projections showing people and places. Structurally, the piece is broken-backed, but at least it never bores.