In the thirties of the twentieth century, the writer Agatha Christie came from London to the city of Amuda in Syria, where she lived with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, for a period of time, and there she wrote her diary, “Come Tell Me How You Live,” in which she narrated pictures of her adventures in life in Syria and Iraq. .
After less than a hundred years, Haitham Hussein was forced to emigrate from his small city of Amuda to Damascus and from there to multiple stops: Dubai, Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul, all the way to London, where he wrote his biography, responding to Agatha Christus about how he lives, and in which he depicts the paradoxes of his journey to search for a safe haven. For him and his family.
It is said: “Writing theater is, in a way, knowing how to tell our story.” But the past ten years have undermined the axioms. Instead of asking how, we began to ask: Why do we talk, and about what? Thus, these four texts come today to answer these questions in their own way, and carry the concerns of their writers “here and now.”
A text depicting the city as he sees it: two elderly people guarding public toilets on a street in Damascus; Where stories seep out from under dirty bathroom doors, another about a young man who spends most of his time in the kitchen, unable to work and interact with others, and instead tries in vain to stop the water dripping from the tap so as not to drown him, and a third text about a faltering relationship between a Syrian young man residing inside... A Syrian woman residing in Germany. As the two try to maintain the connection that unites them in the face of the difficult circumstances of their lives, a final text sheds light on the mentality that prevails among Syrian artists in “Despora,” and affects their work mechanisms and their relationship with cultural institutions, by shedding light on the rehearsals of a theater group preparing for the play “The Return of Danton.” With projections on the Syrian situation.
Taken together, the texts of this workshop form an image that resembles its spaces with the questions of these spaces, or with the absence of questions, with the blurring or dominance of memory, with confusion, with boldness, with violence, and with death. Stage masters.
