Rabih Mroué’s show rides the history of Lebanon – Catherine Cornet

Rabih Mroué started doing theater in the nineties in Beirut. In the wake of a generation of Lebanese artists born shortly before or during the civil war, which took place between 1975 and 1990, he addressed the fundamental issues of the following period: heroism, sectarianism, the narration of peace, responsibilities of politicians.

Today he is one of the most important protagonists of the Middle East art scene. His works, always performed in Arabic, have been subtitled in many languages ​​and are staged from Japan to the United States. Rabih Mroué has lived for ten years in Berlin, Germany, but the historical and political material he brings to the stage always comes from Lebanon.

Among the many innovative expressions pioneered by Rabih Mroué are his famous ones non academic lectures (non-academic lessons). Already in 2004, when she still worked and did theater in her spare time and with little money, she only showed up on stage. The first time she had only her notebooks in hand to comment on. Then over the years she added a computer with which she projected images, consulted archives, questioning herself and always playing with the representation of the public.

Reality without memory
In the show Riding on a cloud (Riding the cloud), staged on 2 and 3 November as part of Romaeuropa festival 2022 and created with Maxxi – National Museum of 21st Century Arts, on stage there is not the brilliant Rabih for a “lesson”, but the younger brother Yasser. As Rabih Mroué explains in an interview with Internazionale, Yasser was hit by a sniper bullet in Beirut in 1987, when he was 17 and the Lebanese civil war was about to end. Yasser did not die, but the bullet pierced his skull and caused him partial paralysis and aphasia, the loss of the ability to express himself and understand words.

It is Yasser who asked Rabih to be able to “tell” on stage his difficulty in restoring reality without memory. And if Rabih wrote the script, it is Yasser who has inhabited the stage since the show was first produced in 2013. “My brother’s life on stage has become a story in itself,” comments Rabih Mroué. “First he insisted on showing me everything, his letters, the photos, the interviews I did about him. I felt a great responsibility in having to represent what he asked of me. Then I wrote this text and it is he who recites it. His name is his, and the things told are mixed with the real ones. The show makes us reflect on the question of how much we put into creation: what invisible line separates the character from those who embody him? What do we add to our private life? The director? If I’m acting Hamlet, is it me or the actor acting? It’s funny to think that now the real Yasser is rehearsing in Rome to play Yasser on stage ”.

After twenty years of theatrical productions, Rabih Mroué has given life to a repertoire of shows and academic readings that can be performed years later without changing a comma, because even if it often starts from the most recent episodes of Lebanese current affairs, on stage does an impressive conceptualization job. Who is afraid of representation? (Who’s Afraid of the Play?) Was created in 2005, and is on stage in Japan these days. The pixelated revolution is a performance in which many images filmed with mobile phones during the Syrian revolution are projected. It was created in 2011 and still runs today. “The only thing I had to change unfortunately was the tense. Now I’m talking about the revolution in the past ”, notes Mroué. But what emerged from this research remained perfectly valid.

In the cinema, in the independent film of 2008 I want to see of Lebanese directors and artists Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Mroué appears alongside Catherine Deneuve to visit war-torn south Lebanon. Between fiction and reality, his character plays with double identities: is he an actor or the true guide of the French star?

Since 2007 and since his show And Nancy wishes it was all an april fool’s joke had a worldwide success, Mroué constructs an exciting reflection on the narration of history. So did many Lebanese artists of his generation, who had to work through what happened during the civil war. Since then, there have been numerous other tragedies that have touched Lebanon, a country “in free fall” as Mroué writes in the presentation of a festival he organized in Berlin entitled This is not Lebanon.

The civil war, his brother’s bullet, the explosion at the port of Beirut in August 2020 are all events where there has been a before and an after, and the whole show is centered on those moments that make a watershed. However, Mroué does not want to tell the story starting only from the incidents: “The explosion at the port of Beirut was a traumatic event for many Lebanese, who are now fighting for a trial, so that the exponents of the corrupt political elite are judged for what they did ”, continues Mroué. “In my work, however, I try to tell the story not starting from events or traumas of this kind. For me, the storytelling of events is a trap that hides other dramas. I am thinking, for example, of the lives broken by the economic disaster: imagine an elderly man who has saved his entire life for retirement and today has nothing left to cure himself and face old age. It is not an event in itself, but it is precisely what is killing the Lebanese ”.

The show is full of emotion, the subject is dramatic. But what is fascinating for the director after almost ten years of representation is the space that the show has taken in the life of his brother. Yasser did not study theater, he was not a professional. And slowly, concludes Mroué “performance after performance I see him mixing what really happened to him with what he tells on stage: the show has become part of his life. And he is so attached to this show, because he presents and represents his story of him, at the same time ”.