During the Budget speech a fortnight ago, the Minister for Finance, Edward Scicluna, pulled a rabbit out of the hat by announcing that a possible revision of the current opera house site might be considered in the light of responses to a consultation process which is now under way.
Given the chequered history of this site over the last 77 years since it was heavily bombed during the Second World War and the inability of successive administrations to agree on what should happen to it, this promises to be an interesting discussion.
When Renzo Piano was asked to include the open-air theatre, he envisaged it as part of a social space: when events were not being held there it would function as an open pjazza. It also served to mitigate the strong backlash that Lawrence Gonzi was facing from a significant body of public opinion which viewed the building of the new parliament at the entrance to Valletta as an insult. They wished to see the old Royal Opera House re-built on the site.
Time has proved a great healer and the whole City Gate site – including the parliament, which is now admired as an outstanding, indeed ‘iconic’, building which merges the new with the old; the Triton Piazza; and the break in the fortifications to create a modern entrance to the World Heritage City – is acknowledged today as a marvellous success of which Malta is rightly proud.
But the old opera house site is neither fish nor fowl. There seems to be general agreement that its current use as an “open air theatre” has failed. The steel structures placed within the historic remains, the 1,000 green plastic seats and the ‘ERES acoustic enhancement system’ have combined to produce an aesthetically ugly structure. Moreover, its use as an open-air theatre has led to the most intrusive noise pollution, inflicting misery on many Valletta residents.
The nub of the problem is what should be done to rescue this site and to recoup the huge sums of money already invested in it?
A proposal has been made to build a roof over the site to protect it from the elements and to suppress the noise effects. This seems, to a layman, as the worst of all possible worlds. Not only is there considerable doubt whether the structure would take the weight of a roof, but also it would negate the purpose of retaining the remnants of the old site as part of Malta’s collective memory of a much loved, 19th century opera house. Architecturally, it would be another pig in a poke.
When Renzo Piano was designing the City Gate project, he envisaged the site as part of a social space, a public clearing in a busy city for citizens to relax. It would make far better sense for it to revert solely to this function, using it as an open space and a vivid memory of what had once stood there.
It would seem far more sensible for the government to cut its losses by building a state-of-the-art national theatre for contemporary performances in dance and theatre, rather than spend money on reinforcing failure.
Moreover, this could present an opportunity to build a long-awaited National Theatre outside the confines of Valletta to help regenerate an otherwise neglected area close to the capital.