Co-curated with playwrights Hannah Khalil and Hassan Abdulrazzak (Manara Theatre)
All playreadings available individually or full day tickets for the four playreadings are available.
YOU BURY ME by Ahlam
12pm
Egypt | UK
You Bury Me is about six young people living in “post Arab Spring” Cairo. The old police state is propped up by a new, much harsher, military regime. This is a story about people longing to live how they want and and love who they choose. This is a story about a generation who fought and who lost. This is a story of Cairo and those desperate to rebuild it.
TWO HEADS AND A HAND & THE JOKERS by Zoukak
2pm
Lebanon
The Jokers visits those marginal characters who are alienated by their otherness. Using drag and larger than life characters, Zoukak provocatively asks what constitutes an outcast. At once vilified, but equally worshipped, these figures are idols and victims at the same time. They are a foil onto which society projects their dreams and anxieties.
Two Heads and a Hand is based on texts by Shakespeare. Can revenge ever be justified? What is the difference between violence and brutality? Numbed by brutality shown in the media, how far can theatre go to portray it on-stage? With bolshie irreverence and slapstick humour, Zoukak digs out key moments from Shakespeare plays and mashes them up into a collage for our current conflicts.
Zoulak is Lamia Abi Azar, Omar Abi Azar, Mohamad Hamdan, Junaid Sarrieddeen and Maya Zbib. As a collective they create and tour work and run one of Beirut’s liveliest venues.
NO DEMAND, NO SUPPLY by Sahar Assaf
3pm
Lebanon
In April 2016 Lebanese police broke up a sex-trafficking ring after four women successfully escaped from the Chez Maurice nightclub. They and over 70 other Syrian women had been lured to Lebanon with promises of employment and safety. They were incarcerated as prostitutes and subjected to violent exploitation and degradation on an unprecedented scale.
Sahar Assaf’s verbatim play combines accounts from four of the women with court records and documentary material to brutally expose the economics, politics and human cost of the sex trade.
Sahar Assaf is a Beirut-based actor and director and co-founder of Tahweel Ensemble Theatre. She is assistant professor of theatre at American University of Beirut and founder of AUB’s Theatre Initiative.
CHRONICLES OF A CITY WE NEVER KNEW by Wael Kadour
4:15pm
Syria | France
Chronicles of a City We Never Knew pitches violence and love against each other by telling a love story between two young women in Damascus in 2011. The play charts the transformation of the revolutionary movement in Syria from peaceful to armed conflict. Where does violence reside in seemingly peaceful choices, and where does love reside in violent ones?
Wael Kadour graduated at Damascus Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in 2006 and is now based in Paris. Chronicles of a City is his fifth play and received its premiere at La Filature, Scène Nationale in Mulhouse in January 2019.
