A new feature of this month’s events-packed Spring Festival is theater productions, the first of which premiered at Rawabet Theater on Monday.
The productions are part of Tomorrow sidebar, a program supported by Bank of Palestine, which granted funds to young artists to produce their projects. The sidebar kicked off with Lebanese production “Upstairs,” a gripping drama about an elderly Lebanese couple facing a few domestic problems in the aftermath of the civil war.
The stars of the show, Roaa Bazieh and Jad Hakawati, who also wrote and directed the 40-minute play, were careful not to use too many props on stage, maintaining focus on their performances instead.
The story starts and ends with a birthday; the beginning shows the husband and wife taking pleasure in their matrimonial bliss. By the end of the play though, the husband is left alone; his wife is long gone.
Bazieh and Hakawati vividly reenact the transformation of their characters, from their old selves to their teenage years, via a series of flashbacks whereby they reminisce about their love and delightful bickering.
With remarkable subtlety, “Upstairs” illustrates different facets of Lebanese culture, exploring the impact of the civil war on ordinary citizens. Political, social and economic symbolisms are tightly interwoven in the script.
After giving her husband the balloons for his birthday at the beginning of the play, the wife tells him that her throat is dry and wants water. Her husband, who says he’ll fetch it, keeps stalling till the very last scene. In the context of the Lebanese war, the water becomes an allegory for peace; a privilege that took them 15 years to acquire.
The war is recreated on stage in several forms: As bombs shook their home, the audiences hear the blast, seeing the lights flickering and the couple plunge into despair.
Although the play seems to center entirely on the pair’s small domestic arguments, the latent subtext is far greater, expounding several contemporary concerns such as gender roles and the unification of a deeply divided nation.
The wife, who remains reliant on the husband to fetch her water from the well, reiterates the gender roles in the ‘Arab’ world. The husband is always the provider; the wife is the dependant one.
“Upstairs” is essentially a tragicomedy; the desperation and agony the couple are forced to suffer charges the atmosphere with tension, while their interactions and unique quirks provide an abundance of comic relief.
Although it was difficult for many members of the audience to understand the play in its entirety because of the Lebanese dialect, they still roared and applauded as the curtain went down to mark the beginning of a highly promising season of Arab theater.
The Tomorrow program continues on Friday with “City of Mirrors” by Lebanese director Roger Assaf at the Geneina Theater. Tel: (02) 2362 5057.
