From Mr J. J. Schranz
I fully endorse Astrid Vella’s excellent suggestion. In my article in The Sunday Times some two weeks ago, I had indeed proposed St Elmo, as well as the Auberge de Baviére to serve as possible alternative sites for moving Parliament to another location should it be deemed necessary (but why should it so be deemed?) for it to remain sited in Valletta. Proposing the Mediterranean Conference Centre (MCC) is an absolutely perfect proposal.
The former “Knights’ Hall” has lost much, its original design, except for the two, splendid, long corridors. The former large central courtyard, roofed over as it is, will never manage to come anywhere near to looking and feeling like a performative space. When it was constructed it was conceived as a conference hall, and that is precisely what it looks and feels like. For a large theatre, it lacks the proportions, its set up is cold, failing completely to give that welcoming and embracing “hold” which a theatre absolutely needs to give if it is to make audiences inside it feel they belong to the space and to each other, It is irrevocably doomed to lack that intimate quality so crucial to a performance space – “intimacy” is not a matter of size, it is a question of design, proportion, structure, relationship between performance space and audience space. On all those matters, the MCC is an abject failure. There simply is no other way to put it.
On the other hand, that large space could so easily, and with reasonably controlled costs, be made to house Parliament – a Parliament for some 60 representatives, let us not forget that. The space necessary for that could so easily be a space that does not repeat the tragic error of appearing, by its very nature and design, to be confrontational – and there will still be more than ample space around it, above it or below it, to accommodate much of what is necessary for Parliament to function as it should.
Ms Vella rightly stresses that she is not advocating that the Opera House site be built to exclusively accommodate opera – I quote her: “… but a National Theatre which would serve the needs of all live performances such as concerts, musicals and opera (I also add dance, which must have been forgotten) that cannot be staged properly at the Manoel, MCC or St James due to inadequate facilities.” The functionality of the space would be a key factor in a prime location like that, a location that is at the very core of the frequentation factor of our capital city. A golden location like that simply cannot be highjacked for a space that will debar the vast percentage of Malta’s citizens from living it. I do not say “from visiting it”! Parliament does allow visitors, everybody knows that. But a handful of “visitors’” tickets to Parliament is not what Malta’s citizens deserve for the location that is the foyer of our capital city! That space MUST be lived!
In my recent article I challenged what is being given as one of the major reasons for Parliament’s move out of the Grand Masters’ Palace – tourism. Tourism! Is it tourism that has for years been urging the paving of Valletta and Mdina streets, and the restoration of State-owned palace façades and interiors? Is it concern for tourism that makes us despair as we walk through this diamond of a baroque city and find our eyes irritated by the sight of splendid wooden balconies, portals and louvers disintegrating on so many of Valletta’s architectural gems – simply because the upper floors of so many noble houses are (ab)used for storing goods waiting to be sold in the glitzy, brilliantly lit shops that take over their ground floors? The noble nature of our capital is lost, buried, hidden, as many of its splendid homes are denatured. Walk through Mdina and see how its magnificence works upon you. Walk through much of Valletta, and see how you have to raise your eyes up to the upper stories to capture some idea of what many of its buildings are. Those buildings concretise visions of generations upon generations of architects, draughtsmen, sculptors, master masons, masons, their doings “documented” in stone, evidence of their quest, there for us to stroll by. We don’t look at their work, perhaps… still – that beauty could work upon us; it could touch and drive us, if we let it. But strolling through the main streets of our city it is not the architecture that impacts us. Art and a sense of culture are absent from our city. Remember that Valletta is a rare thing – a capital city without a higher education establishment inside it. It is a city whose theatres are at its edges, and those theatres know it: they do not put up that splendid array of posters, which theatres in capital cities do all over the world. Our theatres know they are off the beaten track, and they know that it is useless for them to put up the poster attractors they need. The result? Our city’s fabric dismally fails to stimulate a desire for art, for culture, for food for the mind and for the spirit. Shame upon us if the restoration of our city’s facades has our tourists in mind, and not the minds of our children, our youth, and our future generations! Any temptation to say that it is tourism that spurs the desire to improve the poor fabric of our city is to be refuted point blank – as should be challenged and refuted any vapid statement that it is tourism that is urging the move of Parliament out of The Palace! The rehabilitation of our capital city’s fabric is desired avidly so that it could impact minds, feed souls and spirits, raise our aspirations
Cultural products do that. Neuroscientist Wolf Singer, head of the Frankfurt am Main Max Planck Institute for Brain Research since 1981, says human genius’s explosion at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries came about because the grounds for it “…were prepared and rendered conceivable by our experiences with cultural products. This world was always there and the brain has probably had more or less the same combinatory skills since ancient times. What was not there before were the developments in music, theatre, art, and literature.” Singer does not have in mind the industrial/commercial overtones layered nowadays onto that phrase – what he has in mind is a culture’s doings, its way of being, its way of living, how that culture questions itself and the way of life that makes it what it is!
What our city needs is for it to be SEEN as pulsating with artistic and cultural life by all who walk into it and stroll through it! It needs to be such as to impact eyes and ears of all who get into it. What does it do instead? It pronounces that, as a capital city, its raison d’être is nothing but buying and selling – the temple of its culture is just that!
Imagine, adding to that a building dominating its entrance, a building announcing to you “here, you are only allowed to step in if it is deemed that you may be allowed to”.
Valletta’s “sufficiency” of theatres draws only fixed niche audiences. Those theatres cannot do otherwise. They are out of sight – and “boghod mill-ghajn, boghod mill-qalb” as our language so perfectly puts it: “far from the eye, far from the heart”.
Ms Vella’s proposal is the best one so far!
I repeat my plea of my recent article – please, Prime Minister… pause. Listen. Think. It’s yours to reverse.
John J. Schranz