Manoel Theatre

Where it sits. The Manoel Theatre stands on Old Theatre Street in the northern quarter of Valletta, a couple of blocks off Republic Street and a short walk from the Grand Master's Palace. You could pass the entrance without noticing it. There is no grand portico, no flight of steps, no forecourt: the theatre presents a modest doorway in a terrace of ordinary limestone houses, opening into a small courtyard. Everything is inside. The building occupies a tightly constrained plot in the city grid, and the auditorium was shaped to fit rather than the other way round, which is precisely why it has survived largely unaltered when grander theatres were rebuilt.

Who built it and why. In 1731 Grand Master António Manoel de Vilhena paid for the theatre out of his own pocket, at a reported cost of two thousand scudi, and it went up in under a year. The dedicatory inscription over the entrance states the purpose in Latin: ad honestam populi oblectationem, for the honest recreation of the people. That phrasing was a political statement. Vilhena was making a case that public entertainment was a legitimate object of the Order's spending in a city otherwise defined by fortification and religion. The theatre opened on 19 January 1732 with a performance of Merope, a tragedy by Scipione Maffei, acted by knights of the Order rather than professionals. It is among the oldest theatres in Europe still in regular working use, a claim usually placed third behind the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza and the Teatro Farnese, and second in the group that still operates continuously as a public playhouse.

The auditorium. The interior is a compact oval of gilded and painted timber. Three tiers of boxes, over forty in total, ring the space on carved and gilded fronts, above which runs a shallow gallery, and the whole is capped by a trompe l'oeil ceiling painted to suggest a shallow dome open to a sky. The capacity is around six hundred, and the topmost row is close enough to the stage that an unamplified voice carries without effort. In the Order's time the boxes were assigned by langue and painted accordingly, so an audience was legible as a seating plan of the Order's internal politics. The proportions produce a warm, immediate acoustic that suits chamber opera, Baroque repertoire and spoken theatre, and modern productions are staged with minimal amplification for exactly that reason.

Decline and recovery. The theatre was renamed the Theatre Royal under British rule and lost its position when the far larger Royal Opera House opened on the main street in 1866. It slid down the scale of respectability, served as a cinema in the early twentieth century, and during the Second World War was used as a shelter and hostel for people bombed out of their homes. It was in poor condition when the Maltese government bought it in 1957. A careful restoration followed and the theatre reopened in 1960; it now operates as Malta's national theatre, with a season running roughly from October to May, an annual Baroque festival, orchestral concerts, drama in Maltese and English, and a Christmas pantomime that is a fixture of the local calendar.

What a visit involves. There are two ways in. Guided tours run during the day, taking in the auditorium, the boxes and usually the stage and backstage machinery, and a small theatre museum in the adjoining rooms holds costumes, playbills, models and material on the building's history. The other option is simply to buy a ticket to whatever is on. Seats are inexpensive by European standards, the boxes are genuinely worth the modest premium, and an evening in a room like this with two hundred and ninety years of continuous use behind it is a different experience from a tour with a torch. The courtyard bar operates before performances and at the interval.

Getting there and timing. From City Gate, walk up Republic Street and turn left up Old Theatre Street; it is about ten minutes on the flat, with a short climb at the end. The lanes around the theatre are narrow and stepped in places, and the building is historic, so movement inside involves stairs to the upper tiers. Evening performances put you in this quarter after dark, when the streets around Old Bakery Street and Archbishop Street empty out and the carved corner niches are lit, which is one of the better walks in the city. Book performances ahead in season; the house is small and popular productions sell out.