I looked at the comments beneath the timesofmalta.com report about the Renzo Piano theatre in Valletta - and yes, that's exactly what it is and what it should be called: a Renzo Piano theatre and not a roofless theatre - and decided to go for a long walk in the wind to try to forget the ceaseless assault of the ignorant, the petty, the small-minded and the thoroughly bigoted on the senses of those who are not as they are.
Malta is a curious place - a large town, really, and quite a backwater despite the many efforts to step things up - in which even artists and self-professed liberals have closed minds and little or no imagination.
You’d think they grew up in a sort of black box, cut off from all contact with the outside world. But come to think of it, that is probably what actually did happen, because in the pre-internet age, anybody who didn’t buy and read tons of magazines and London newspapers, topped up with other forms of exposure to reality beyond Malta, like travelling and finding out, might as well have grown up in a box.
It really is quite demoralising. You wonder what it is these people actually want, how they live their lives, how they would ever survive for just two months anywhere outside their comfort zone of Malta, that it really is no wonder they weren’t the slightest bit excited about joining the European Union because what happens beyond the limits of their restricted imagination does not exist for them.
Their minds are completely closed, rock solid set, and it is now too late to do anything about it: not at 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70. At that sort of age, the only thing that can get a person to open his mind and think differently is a life-changing event that triggers a major personal crisis. But unfortunately, that sort of thing generally opens the mind to bitterness and resentment, and a whole series of bad decisions, rather than freeing up the person psychologically and in terms of the way he or she looks at things.
The worst of it is the irrational thinking, the fruit of ignorance. Or is it the other way round - is ignorance the fruit of irrational thought? People pontificate confidently with scorn and contempt when the very basis of their argument is wrong, and when they are put right they become defensive and attack the source of correct information as a way of shoring up their delicate ego.
Look at this man, for instance, a Norman E. Grech commenting on the internet:
“ ... And our once majestic theatre, detroyed because we were a British military base has been turned into a roofless showground with green plastic seats! Just great! Hallas ja Malti bla lehen! ...”
"Our once majestic theatre was destroyed because we were a British military base" - but that is exactly why we had a Royal Opera House in the first place, because Malta was a British colony (not military base). If Malta were not a British colony, then Malta would not have had an opera house, because the arguments which apply now applied even more then: there are not enough opera-goers, in a town this small, to sustain one. And if we were not a British colony, there would have been no money to build one, either.
Who does Norman E. Grech think built the original opera house? Who does he imagine the architect was, and most pertinently, why in heaven's name has he not yet worked out why it was called the Royal Opera House?
In any case, and not to be rude or anything remotely like that, but I don't imagine that Norman E. Grech’s 19th-century and 20th-century antecedents were exactly filling the opera boxes or stalls or going to carnival balls there, so what is he on about? Of course, I might be entirely wrong, and his grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents might well have been sitting there alongside mine, but I think it more likely they were among the Sette Giugno looters and rioters trying to sack it just as they sacked the grand houses opposite it and threw furniture out of the window and held the silken knickers of is-sinjuri from balconies for the mockery and scorn of the crowd below.
If Norman E. Grech were alive and commenting on the internet in 1930 or 1870, he would have been ranting, raving mad with “lanzit” because the Royal Opera House was virtually the sole preserve of officials of the British military and the colonial government, and of the few Maltese who could afford the tickets and the very smart clothes required.
It is one of those ironies which are beyond the comprehension of the Norman E. Grechs of this island. I, who would have been a regular at the Royal Opera House had I been an adult in the same family in 1870 or 1930, think that what Renzo Piano has done with the ruins is wonderful and think that an opera house in Valletta is an absolutely absurd idea for the 21st century. Meanwhile, those who would have been effectively locked out of the Royal Opera House, who would never have seen its interior because they were too poor to buy tickets or even shoes, still less be on the guest list for grand parties there, who might not have seen even its exterior (we forget that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, thousands of people never left their village between birth and death and certainly never went to Valletta) are now holding up one of the ultimate symbols of their ancestors’ want, deprivation and social exclusion as a symbol of...what, exactly?
... And our once majestic theatre, destroyed because we were a British military base has been turned into a roofless showground with green plastic seats! Just great! Hallas ja Malti bla lehen! ...