SAMAR KOKASH / OMAR ALJBAAI

Samar was all set to become an actress in Damascus, just like her mother, with the encouragement of her supportive father. She would get married and have kids. As an adult, Samar saw her life unfold as planned – until 2011. Involved in humanitarian efforts from the very beginning of the Syrian revolution, she was eventually arrested, right in front of her daughters. When she was released after three years and four months of imprisonment, everything lay in ruins: her career, her country, and her relationship to her daughters, who had become refugees in Belgium. On stage, as Samar plays out her own life, an unsettling shift begins to occur: testimony becomes a theatrical act. Between voice-overs, archival footage, and direct address, an entire world of characters, memories, and situations emerges in this spare setting, in which reality at times resembles fiction. How does one re-enact one’s own life? And how can we transform catastrophe into an act of transmission? To write such a subtle self-fiction demanded the seasoned eye, inner experience, and precision of a man for whom theatre is shaped by a sense of emergency. Himself a former inmate of a Syrian jail, Omar Aljbaai has created a striking piece at the intersection of documentary and allegory, its minimalist staging intensifying the force of the beings and their stories as they appear.

Performance in Arabic and French with French surtitles