Opera house site plans not good enough (1)

Like a good many others who go to plays and concerts all the year round, I have serious doubts whether Renzo Piano's design for the opera house site, with all its expensive state-of-the-art equipment, will be worth the expense and the bother. The open air theatre is meant to be used in spring/summer when we are mostly unlikely to have rain, but when inevitably we suffer the deafening explosions of petards produced by the festa maniacs with whom we are plagued, not to mention planes landing and taking off at Luqa and the multitudinous noises Maltese youths are so fond of producing especially in the summer months.

Can anyone do something to repel these great enemies of serious music and theatre-making in this or indeed any other Maltese open air venue? Francis Zammit Dimech, who has argued so strongly and so pluckily for a normal enclosed theatre on the site, is suggesting a removable roof for Mr Piano's theatre.

This would protect performers and audiences from wind and flying dust but not from Malta's infernal noise. Malta is no longer the Malta of the 1950s and 1960s when the redoubtable Warren sisters at MADC could get on the phone to the local air officer in command and get him to delay planes' departures that would have polluted the performance of open air Shakespeare at San Anton. Even they, however, could do nothing to change the dates of the nearby Balzan festa, but at least they could change the dates of the MADC performances so as to avoid that one festa. How can one avoid festas if one has a theatre programme that goes on for months in the festa season? Can Edward de Bono's lateral thinking provide us with a solution?

To mention a different matter, what is going to happen to car parking in Valletta when the Palace Square, Freedom Square and the Yellow Garage area in the ditch below City Gate can no longer take any cars? I presume that those demigods, the members of Parliament, will still have special parking facilities, but what about their humble worshippers? What about the 1,200 people who will defy festa noise by attending a performance in Mr Piano's theatre? Will they all have to bus in, or will Austin Gatt and the Valletta Local Council draw out new car parks from their top hats?

Mr Piano has come up with some exciting concepts, but the politicians must now show us that they definitely know how these concepts will be applied in a manner that will make people's lives a little better.