Political Theatre Between Wars Staging an Alternative Middle East

Home , Demarcation line, Saadallah Wannous

Sahar Assaf

What makes a play political in Lebanon? What does it mean to engage in political theatre?

n Lebanon, between 2013 and 2015, I directed six plays. The plays’ general themes were religious and political corruption, patriarchy, prostitution, homo- Isexuality, manual laborers in a private university, and rape as an interrogation technique in armed conflicts. Other subjects included the Lebanese civil war and Lebanon’s collective amnesia as a result of the absence of a serious reconciliation process, dictatorship and megalomaniac leaders, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plays had different styles. While some plays were text-based and presented in traditional proscenium theatres, others were research-based and presented in found spaces. They were in Arabic or English. What the plays have in common is a clear political dimension. Reflecting on some of my recent work led me to contemplate a seemingly simple question:

Why do we do political theatre and for whom?

In order to provide an example of what Michael Kirby calls “the archetypal example of political theatre” in his essay “On Political Theatre,” he turns to Alexander Tairov, who wrote in Notes of a Director:

In 1830, at the Theatre Monnaie in Brussels, the play La Muette [The Mute] was being performed. In the middle of the performance, when the words “Love for the Fatherland is holy” rang out on the stage, the revolution- ary enthusiasm . . . was communicated to the auditorium. The whole theatre was united in such powerful transport that all the spectators and actors left their places, grabbing chairs, benches—everything that came to hand—and, bursting from the theatre, rushed into the streets of Brussels. Thus, began the Belgian revolution.1

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 This is undeniably an ideal scenario. As a theatre director myself, I cannot imag- ine that anything would be more satisfying than witnessing audiences bursting from my theatre (or any theatre) into the streets of Beirut to start a long overdue revolution. But to reduce political theatre to one that aspires to start a revolution, topple a regime, or change the status quo is deficient. How many examples could we draw from the history of world theatre? It was not the great theatre of playwright Jalila Baccar and director Fadhel Jaïbi that ignited the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia in 2010, but the act of self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi. However, Baccar and Jaïbi’s theatre remains political par excellence.

In a seminal essay titled “Writing for a Political Theatre” that first appeared in PAJ in 1985 and was published again from the archive in 2016 to celebrate PAJ’s fortieth anniversary and the critic’s one hundredth birthday, Eric Bentley states, “People speak of political theatre as very special. But in the theatre anything can become political by a sudden turn of events outside the theatre.”2 In a simi- lar vein, Maria Shevtsova claims that “‘Political Theatre’ is only ‘political’ in a particular society in time-space and place and its resonance as ‘political’ varies according to socially defined groups of people. Nothing is absolute, universal, or essentialist about political theatre.”3

When Baccar and Jaïbi planned to present Khamsoun in Tunisia in 2006, the censorship office, officially known as lajnat iltawjeeh al-masrahi (the steering com- mittee for the theatre), wanted to delete 286 words form the play. The author and director refused. The play tells the story of Amal, the daughter of leftist parents who was raised as a Marxist and sent to France to study, only to return to Tunisia as a dedicated Muslim. In Tunisia, she gets involved in the mysterious suicide of her friend, a young teacher, who blows herself up in the courtyard of the school where she works. The play opened in France at the Odeon theatre, but as a result of the pressure exerted on the authorities by artists and intellectuals, Jaïbi was summoned to a meeting with the Minister of Culture who asked him to cut six sentences (instead of 286 words). Jaïbi refused again. Finally, the authorities permitted a staged reading of the play on the occasion of World Theatre Day in 2007. This time, the government asked only that Jaïbi remove the word “flag.” In the original script of the play, the young woman blows herself up under the flag; however, in the censored version, she blows herself up under a carnation plant. Clearly, the play’s ideas are political. The Arabic title Khamsoun means “fifty,” and it refers to the contemporary history of the country.

Jaïbi refused to comply with the proposed censorship that would have him remove names and dates from the play since it speaks for the past fifty years of Tunisian history, making dates, events, and places important to contextualize the play in a specific time and place. In line with Shevtsova and Bentley’s reflections

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 on political theatre, this contextualization of the play in the current time and place is what ultimately makes it political. Although the play harshly criticizes the extreme right and left, Baccar and Jaïbi’s original point was not making a political statement per se. As Jaïbi told Syrian Journalist Rashid Issa in 2008, Baccar wanted to honor the communists who passed away and who are forgot- ten, namely Ahmed bin Osman, who died in a car accident in Morocco after he was expelled from Tunisia, and Noureddine Ben Khader, who died of cancer. Jaïbi said, “They left as if they’ve never existed. The two men shared [former president Habib] Bourguiba’s prisons and the torture that ruined their bodies. This was the first spark [for the play]. Jalila said she will not accept that the two great men should disappear, and others after them, without telling their stories. The story of the left in Tunisia is not taught in history books.” This was the first idea that led Baccar and Jaïbi to talk about the contemporary history of Tunisia after independence. Jaïbi continues:

We wanted to talk about the living memory, the modern history of Tunisia and the history of the left, about repression, torture, and the current reality. Why our ideas of democracy became replaced by Islamic extremism? Why Tunisian women wore the head veil? Why extremist Tunisian men are blowing themselves up in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why the current system is pushing the Islamists into prisons? For all these reasons we wrote a text saturated with what’s happening around us, of course, because we do not write in solitude in our offices.4

This intention resonates deeply with the concept of a “theatre of politicization” as articulated by Saadallah Wannous, the late Syrian playwright. In an interview with the Syrian journalist Sifian Jabr in 1989, Wannous explains how this concept differs from Political Theatre. He argues that the theatre of politicization is not an agit-prop theatre nor does it intend to preach or to make political statements in support of a particular ideology. Instead, “it is the possibility of awakening the consciousness of a spectator to ask questions and to try to find answers, theoretically but also practically, meaning to try and change their destiny.”5 Exactly one year before the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, Jaïbi presented Yahia Yaïch, a play that tells the story of a man named Yahia Yaïch, who receives the news of being deposed from power, is arrested, and then tries to commit suicide. The play speaks about his hospitalization and the difficulties encountered in collecting the documents for his prosecution. Jaïbi wrote and directed the play before the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. After the revolution, many critics read the play as a fulfilled prophecy. Despite its clear political statement, the censorship authorities allowed the play to be performed in Tunisia. When it was first presented, many drew parallels between the main character in the play and the previous president, Habib Bourguiba, who was impeached by then Prime

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, based on a doctor’s report claiming Bourguiba was mentally incapable to rule. Whether the play had any effect on the succeed- ing political events is not important; what matters most is that it became part of the cultural discourse.

In Lebanon, I do not see theatre leading to serious political action. In fact, the problems that the Lebanese people have faced since the end of the civil war in 1990—political corruption, deprivation of civil rights, underdeveloped infrastruc- ture, and, most recently, a shameful garbage crisis—have culminated in public responses no more dramatic than a few street protests, which did not ultimately trigger a larger political movement or revolution. I cannot conceive of theatre starting a revolution in Lebanon. In the last twenty years or so, the only time an artistic event provoked people to burst into the streets to express their anger was when Hezbollah supporters engaged in civil disobedience to express their condemnation of a satiric TV show that caricatured their leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Although theatre may not be able to start a revolution, that does not constitute sufficient reason to deter us from doing political theatre. As Bentley strikingly notes, it is the “little effect on someone somewhere sometime” that we are after; this “little effect,” when discovered, is what makes my experience of any play I am working on complete.6

When I directed Saadallah Wannous’s Rituals of Signs and Transformations at Babel Theatre in Beirut in 2013, I was thrilled at the opportunity to do a play that exposes religious hypocrisy. The play, translated by Robert Myers and Nada Saab and produced by the American University of Beirut, is set in nineteenth-century Damascus. It dramatizes the story of the arrest and imprisonment of the Naqib al-Ashraf, a prominent religious figure, by the chief of police, an employee of the Ottoman empire, who works under the Wali of Damascus. The chief arrests the Naqib for fornicating with his mistress, who is also a prostitute, in a public space. The Mufti of Damascus, another equally prominent religious figure, seemingly sets aside his feud with the Naqib and concocts a scheme to save him from prison by exchanging the prostitute with the Naqib’s wife. The play exposes religious and political corruption and the oppression caused by the patriarchal system. It also treats the theme of prostitution, most dramatically when the Naqib’s wife, after saving her husband from prison, insists on a divorce and then transforms into the most renowned prostitute in Damascus. There is, moreover, an explicitly gay subplot that involves a sexual affair between two of the Mufti’s bodyguards.

As soon as I finished the table readings and moved into the next rehearsal phase, I realized that, as a director, to focus simply on the story as a vehicle for exposing religious hypocrisy would render the play shallow. I began to see the different layers of the character of the Mufti, the most corrupt and Machiavellian

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 religious figure in the play. I started to see other aspects of his humanity such as his insecurities, the absence of love from his life, and his suppressed humanity broke my heart. My attention shifted from the idea of religious corruption to the person who is the Mufti. But the question remained: for whom is this play if not for religious hypocrites who probably wouldn’t watch the play nor make the connection even if they did?

I have learned not to spend much time pondering the question of who is the audience for a play during the process of mounting it. Discovering the audience through the experience of staging a play as a whole, however, offers me closure. One night after a performance of Rituals, the stage manager told me that a young man had asked to speak to the director. I went to greet him and he introduced himself as a student at the Lebanese American University, a private university in Beirut. He wanted to ask me why, at the end of the play, I had chosen to use the sound of the adhan (call to prayer) chanted by a woman. At various points in the performance, the audience hears the call to prayer, chanted by a male, as background for the Mufti’s monologues. But at the end of the play, after Almasa (the Naqib’s wife who has become a prostitute) is stabbed to death in honor kill- ing, the audience hears the call to prayer chanted by a woman as Almasa’s dead body lies on the ground and her brother, who has just murdered her, screams “I am a man, I am a real man.”

This sound effect is not in the original play; it was my interpretation of the death of Almasa. Her death, for me, gave voice to other women, and I represented their voices by having a woman’s voice take the place of that of the man. In Islam, women are not allowed to call the adhan because, according to many religious scholars, a woman’s voice is considered awrah, meaning “sinful,” and its presenta- tion in public is unlawful. Therefore, it was not surprising that this young man would want to know why I chose to use the call to prayer chanted by a woman at the end of the play. The disturbed look on his face made me think that I would be facing a confrontation with a disappointed audience member.

Cautiously, I turned the question back to him, asking, “Why do you think I used it? You tell me?” Something shifted in his energy as he said, “I used to be a member of Fatah al-Islam,” which is a radical Islamist group that, in 2007, engaged in combat with the Lebanese Army in a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of the country. “I left because they would not allow me to object to anything. I understand why you did this [female chant the call to prayer], to expose the oppression.” What I had interpreted as a disturbed expression on his face was actually a look of discovery, a moment of understanding. That last moment in the play helped him to better understand his own decision to leave the extremist group. Such a reaction empowers me as an artist who makes political theatre. It

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 A scene from Watch Your Step. Photo courtesy Ziyad Cyblany/AUB Theatre Initiative.

Top: Audience members touring Khandaq Al-Ghamiq in Watch Your Step. Bottom: Audience members stopping at Najah’s house in Watch Your Step. Photos courtesy Ziyad Cyblany/AUB Theatre Initiative.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 is true that we may perform primarily for spectators who think like us, but that does not render our work less effective. It is for this young man, whose name I cannot recall, that I did this play. Wannous, on the other hand, said that he wrote Rituals for his daughter.

When I directed The Rape by Saadallah Wannous at Irwin Theatre in Beirut in March 2015, I knew that I would have many spectators in the auditorium with strong opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I knew they would not like seeing Israeli characters on stage who were neutral or, dare I say it, even good. Having lived in Lebanon all my life and witnessed many aggressive actions by Israel, I understand this emotional stance. But since I was trying to remain faithful to the playwright’s vision, my aim was not to fuel emotional reactions; rather, it was to understand the complexity of all the characters in the play, which required that I move beyond my bias in favor of the Palestinian cause and people. Wannous wrote The Rape in 1989, two years after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada, and he based it in part on La Doble Historia del Doctor Valmy by Spanish playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo. It dramatizes the use of rape as an interrogation technique by the Israeli Shin Bet in the West Bank during the first intifada, and it follows two parallel stories. One revolves around the family of an Israeli interrogator who is suffering from sexual impotence, and the other around a Palestinian family whose eldest son has been arrested as a so-called political dissident and whose youngest son is on the verge of being disowned for working at an Israeli construction site.

The Rape is one of the very few Arab plays that treat layered and complex Israeli characters. It constituted a very daring political statement in the early nineties when it was first performed, and it seems even more daring today. At the end of one of the shows, I was standing at the door to the auditorium when I heard an annoyed audience member say to his partner, “Next year we will see a pro- Zionist play in Beirut.” He obviously did not appreciate the play, but there is no doubt that the play left a strong impression on him. It pushed him outside his comfort zone, forcing him to confront nuances and complexities. The play does not appear to take a clear position on the political conflict, but instead focuses closely on the personal experiences of families on both sides of the divide. It is an excellent example of the theatre of politicization that Wannous advocated, in which the aim is to “push the spectator to think about his problems in a deep and radical way and also to confront the possibility of radically changing his reality.”7 What brought my experience of The Rape full circle was the reaction of one my friends and an emerging writer, Adham Dimachkieh, who wrote for an online cultural magazine in response to the production: “Saadallah Wannous transformed me into an apostate, challenging my deep-rooted fundamentalist

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 beliefs since from this moment on I will demand two rights: The right of the Palestinian to his motherland and the right of the Jew to search for his humanity and his future outside the myth and the bloody godly promise.”8 It is for Adham that I did this play.

Elements of contestations in both plays discussed above were contained within the limits of the proscenium. A different example of political theatre I have presented recently is the play I conceived and directed in 2014 under the title Watch Your Step: Beirut Heritage Walking Tour. It generated conflict by confronting audiences physically with the location of the play and by offering them a blatantly false narrative about their past. Watch Your Step, a play about the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), took the shape of a site-specific promenade performance. It took place in the Khandaq al-Ghamiq neighborhood of Beirut, a war-torn area that became a demarcation line during the civil war and that separated the city’s east and west. Khandaq al-Ghamiq became a silent character with a major role in the theatrical story. The main storyline of the performance, narrated by the guides leading the audiences, constituted a fictional narration of the architectural and social history of the area. This narration was interrupted by scenes based on true stories of families of the disappeared, of the kidnapped and killed, of fighters, and of people who suffered various other kinds of harm during the war. The scenes were staged in seven different locations on the three main streets that constituted the trajectory of the promenade.

Audience members were picked up at the American University of Beirut and transferred to the performance site in buses. Upon arrival, they were divided into two groups of fifteen persons each. Each group was assigned a guide who took them on an architectural and historic tour. While on tour, the guide invited the audiences into houses, where they witnessed staged scenes on the war that were seemingly unrelated to the main story the guide was narrating. At various points, the guides became involved with the staged scenes. The two groups followed different trajectories and only met at the end of the tour in the final location: a construction site. When the audience reached this point, one of the guides would leave to arrange the return transport on the buses and soon after the audiences would hear him fighting with men from a local militia. The other guide would also leave the construction site to check on his colleague, and the audiences would be left unattended, hearing the fight escalate and their guides being dragged off. Eventually, location managers would arrive at the construction site and take the audiences back to the buses.

This site-specific piece was created to force the Lebanese audience of our day to confront the legacy of the civil war. Twenty-seven years after the end of a war

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 that tore the social fabric of the country, no substantial measures aimed at reconciliation and establishing a truthful historical record have been taken. This failure to deal with the past constitutes an ongoing cost that Lebanon continues to pay in the form of non-stop political violence. Fear and distrust are defining elements of this political violence. In the absence of any official measures to remember the nation’s civil war, theatre becomes a medium to acknowledge our tragic legacies. I wanted to remember the war.

In the process of doing research for the play, I was walking through the Khandaq al-Ghamiq neighborhood, trying to figure out the exact locations for various scenes, when I stumbled upon an old house that did not look like anything else on the street. I knocked on its door, thinking I would ask the inhabitants if I could use it as a location. The inhabitants turned out to be an older couple living with their niece. They invited me in, and, as we sipped our coffee, Najah, the matriarch, began telling me how she and her husband had survived the war living in this same house. She had been born in it and lived her entire life in the area, even during the war. She said that during the war, the only time she did not live in the house was temporarily, when she felt that her adolescent boys were becoming excited about the possibility of joining local fighters. She would then leave, taking them with her, going either to the south or outside the country to Egypt or to Cyprus, and she would return to the house only when the situation calmed down. The war ended, and her two boys and one girl never held a gun.

I asked Najah to become the storyteller in the play and to narrate her love story and the story of Beirut before the war. She accepted. During the tour, both groups would stop at Najah’s house for coffee and stories about how she met her husband. When she began to talk about 1975 and the start of the war, the guide would interrupt her, telling the audience that it was time to leave. The two guides functioned as a representation of the Lebanese living in denial about their past. They see the war on the facades of the buildings but they suppress it in their memories.

Najah passed away seven months after the performances of Watch Your Step were presented and only one day before the first screening of a video version of it. Watch Your Step aimed at forcing the audiences and performers to remember the war. It ended up being a recorded memory of a love story and a family that survived the war without participating in it, and of Khandaq al-Ghamiq. This neighborhood constitutes a living memory of the war, and today it is threatened by a proposed modernization project—just another symbol of the collective amnesia of the Lebanese. Seven months after the performances ended, I realized that I did this play for Najah and for Khandaq.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 On May 20, 2016, in Al-Jumhuriya, a Syrian online intellectual platform that started soon after the beginning of that country’s uprising in 2011, Lebanese journalist Khaled Saghieh published what he called “an initial attempt” to record his journey as a Lebanese leftist passing through the various stations that formed his political consciousness, including the Lebanese civil war. In the short autobiography he offered, the theatre seemed to have had a major effect on forming his political consciousness. He writes:

By the end of the war, a play by Roger Assaf and Nidal al-Ashkar arrived in the city [Tripoli], and another by Rafik Ali Ahmad. I don’t remember the titles of the plays. I don’t remember if they were two plays or one play. But I remember that this theatre gave me a deep feeling that the world incarnated on the stage is the world that I want to belong to, to be a part of, and part of its history and its future. There was a lot for me to grasp and it offered considerable compensation for the isolation that the war had imposed upon my generation.9

It is striking, though not surprising, that Saghieh cannot remember the name of the play or whether it was one play or two different plays he witnessed, but he remembers the feeling of belonging that theatre offered him, the feeling of the possibility of the existence of an alternative world somewhere else. Whether we call it political theatre or theatre with a political dimension is not important; what matters most is that such a theatre has the capacity to instill within us the assurance and the possibility of other ways of seeing and existing.

One of my favorite definitions of theatre appears at the opening of the filmWith Jerzy Grotowski (1980), in which Peter Brook says: “For Grotowski theatre is not a matter of art, is not a matter of plays, productions, performances. Theatre is something else, theatre is an ancient and basic instrument that helps us with one drama only, the drama of our existence and helps us to find our way towards the source of what we are.”10 I do theatre because, as far back as I can remember, theatre was the only thing that mattered, the only thing that made sense to me in this turbulent world. I only think of my audiences when I meet them after the performance. When I am in the process of bringing any play to life, my answer to the question about whom play is for is always the same: It is for me.

NOTES 1. Michael Kirby, “On Political Theatre,” TDR: The Drama Review 19, no. 2 (1975): 132. 2. Eric Bentley, “Writing for a Political Theatre,” PAJ 112 (2016): 42. 3. Maria Shevtsova, “Political Theatre in Europe: East to West, 2007–2014,” New Theatre Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2016): 142.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 4. Fadhel Al-Jaibi, “Rashid Issa youhawer moukhrij masrahiyat khamsoun fadhel aljaibi fi demashk [Rashid Issa interviews the director of Khamsoun Fadhel Al-Jaibi in Damascus],” Assafir (2008), translated by author, http://www.moc.gov.sy/index.php?p=64&id=5755. 5. Saadallah Wannous, “Saadallah Wannous yatahadath ila almouthi’ Sifian Jabr ‘an masrah altasyees walmasrah alsiyassi” [“Saadallah Wannous speaks to journalist Sifian Jabr about Theatre of Politicization and Political Theatre”], Filmed 1989, Youtube Video, 6:47, March 2011, translated by author, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYZi9UO7GvY. 6. Bentley, “Writing for a Political Theatre,” 50. 7. Wannous, 2011. 8. Adham Dimashki, “Saadallah Wannous Sayarani Kha’inan” [“Saadallah Wannous made me into an apostate”], Skoun, translated by author, http://skoun.net/theatre-8/. 9. Khaled Saghieh, “’An Alyasar w shayateen ‘oukhra: mouhawala ‘oula liktabat sirat thatiyat [Of The Left and Other Demons: an initial attempt to write an autobiography],” Aljumhuriya (2016), translated by author, http://aljumhuriya.net/35014. 10. With Jerzy Grotowski, Nienadowka 1980, directed by Jill Godmilow (2008, Facets Multi-Media, Inc.), DVD.

SAHAR ASSAF is an actress, director, and assistant professor of theatre at the American University of Beirut. She recently co-established the AUB Theatre Initiative with playwright and English Professor Robert Myers for which she co-translated, co-directed, and starred in Shakespeare’s King Lear at al-Madina Theatre in Beirut, the first production of Shakespeare in Lebanese colloquial. She is a member of Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and a Fulbright alumnus.

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