A GLIMPSE OF LEBANON’S CIVIL WAR ‘FROM THE VERY EDGE’
By Laura Wilkinson
Daily Star
Oct 30 2008
Lebanon
Irish theater company performs Wajdi Mouawad’s ‘Wedding Day at the
Cro-Magnons’
DUBLIN: With a Lebanese setting, a Canadian writer and an Irish
production company, "Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’" was inevitably
going to be a perplexing piece of theater.
Staged at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre Studios from October 15-25,
this is the first Irish production of Wajdi Mouawad’s work. The
Lebanese-born Quebecois playwright, actor and director is a renowned
figure in Canadian and francophone theater. The recipient of several
dramatic awards, he drew particular attention in 2005 for declining
the prestigious Moliere Prize to protest against what he saw as French
directors’ consistent overlooking of contemporary playwrights.
Most recently in September, Mouawad wrote an open letter to Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper concerning the elimination of federal
grants in the field of culture. Describing his letter as part of the
"Resistance," he called the government’s move a "declaration of war"
on artists, and accused them of "rupturing the strange pact, made
millennia ago, between art and politics."
Meanwhile, Bedrock Productions brought "Wedding Day at the
Cro-Magnons’" to the stage last week, in an illustration of the
playwright’s intense and provocative style of writing.
Mouawad’s play was written in 1994 and appears to fall into the
genre of tragi-comedy. Set in a Beirut apartment besieged by falling
shells, "Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’" portrays a family caught
in a perpetual waiting game as they prepare for the wedding of their
only daughter. There’s one problem: The groom doesn’t exist. Along
with the sexually frustrated neighbor Souhayla, the family members
repeatedly battle their ennui with teeth-gritting humor and violent
language. Moments of breaking point provide heart-wrenching reminders
of the realities of living in a war.
Born in Lebanon in 1968, Mouawad and his family emigrated to France
in 1977 before eventually settling in Canada. Themes of war, memory,
identity and redemption recur in several of Mouawad’s plays – the
award winning "Littoral" (1997), for example, follows a young Lebanese
in Canada who chooses to bury his father in war-torn Lebanon. Such
themes resonate throughout "Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons.’" Yet
there is a distinct absence of hard politics; nor is there much of
a Lebanese context.
"The play doesn’t really have historical content," says producer Alex
Johnston of Bedrock Productions.
"The characters aren’t interested in Lebanese history. To them, the
war is almost like a natural phenomenon," he says, referring to the
recurring thunderstorm in the play.
"It’s out there and it’s annoying and it’s dangerous, but it’s
not about them, it isn’t being fought for them. At one moment the
characters are totally aware that they’re in a play, and the next
minute they’re lost in a private panic about whatever’s going on
in their lives. I think this is Wajdi’s way of saying that the war
drives people nuts."
As the title of the play suggests in its use of "Cro-Magnon" – the
archaeological term that refers to the oldest modern homo sapiens in
Europe – Mouawad seems to be more concerned with basic representation
of human relationships. His characters suffer from a lack of various
freedoms – physical, emotional, sexual – and illustrate a haunting
sense of personal defeat as the war effectively holds them captive
in their own home.
As parents, Nahza and Neyif are ultimately failures – their attempts
to provide their family with security or comfort are effectively futile
gestures. Amusing statements such as "compared to the Armenians, we are
limp dicks," allude to the tragic reality of their impotence. On two
separate occasions in the first half of the play, their two children,
Neel and Nelly – in an absurd state of hysteria – accuse Nahza of
being "dead." The imposing neighbor Souhayla displaces Nahza’s role
as the nourishing, providing, mother, bringing over a multitude of
home-cooked dishes, while Nahza only has "rotten potatoes." Ironically,
in the Lebanese social context, Souhayla is herself a "failure:"
an unmarried virgin approaching 40.
There is a painful suggestion of the loss of family as an institution,
which echoes the broader deterioration of the state. As the country
weakens, the family disintegrates, with a sexually void older
generation and a fleeing younger generation. Nelly’s anticipated
marriage to a mysterious "European" mirrors the loss of the younger
generation who left Lebanon.
The bride-to-be additionally suffers from irregular bouts of seeming
narcolepsy – indeed she spends most of the play sleep-talking. Her
catatonic state is reflected by the play as a whole; erratic changes in
tone, pace and mood convey a general sense of confusion. This catatonia
recalls a familiar motif of artistic representation in post-Civil War
Lebanon: collective amnesia. The family is suspended in a state of
waiting; they spend their time bored or hungry; alternatively, they
invent events, such as the wedding, or self-aggrandizing stories. The
action in the play is therefore absurd, as no action is finished –
everything is futile.
Director Jason Byrne brings out the intensity of Mouawad’s work. The
sound effects, which were taken from "live" recordings, coupled
with repeated black-outs that recall power-cuts, create a genuinely
disturbing atmosphere. Byrne’s cast executes the fluctuating levels
of comedy and intense drama with the utmost fluidity, unsettling the
audience by flitting between dead-pan sarcasm, biting witticisms and
outright violent attacks on one another.
Johnston describes the intention behind Byrne’s direction as showing
respect for the "live" nature of theater.
"Right from the start, [Byrne] didn’t want to create any kind of
illusion that we were in a naturalistic set and that we were somehow
pretending that it was a real Beirut apartment. The play isn’t written
like that, and Jason went with the grain of the play," he explains,
noting the minimalism of the set, where for example there is no glass
in the windows but the actors don’t pretend that there is.
"The seating for the audience sort of flows onto the stage space at
one corner, so it’s like you’re sitting in the room. They actually
do make it work in your imagination – you feel like the bombs really
are falling and that the actors might get shot."
The team made no changes to Shelley Tepperman’s English translation of
the text. The strong Irish accents however, especially when coupled
with words like kneffeh, a string of expletives, or some risque
turn of phrase during a rather awkward sex scene, gave the Lebanese
setting an amusing twist. The language of the play as a whole –
with its machine-gun-like flow of curse words, sexual references
and violent imagery – makes for an uncomfortable theater experience,
especially with the apparent threat of bombs overhead.
As another country dealing with its own problems of identity and
conflict, Ireland would appear to share extensive common ground with
Lebanon. Johnston highlighted the special significance Lebanon has
for Irish people, mostly due to the Irish involvement in the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon.
"[In Dublin] there’s a memorial to the Irish soldiers who have been
killed on active service with the UN," he notes. "Forty-five of them
were killed while serving in Lebanon, which considering the small
size of the deployment, is a very large number. There are many Irish
ex-servicemen and women who have very strong links to Lebanon."
In terms of approaching taboo issues and in turn clarifying a
conflict-ridden collective memory, Johnston suggests that the Irish
production of "Wedding Day at the Cro-Magnons’" doesn’t necessarily
need to be shown in Lebanon.
"I personally believe that it’s a play which is meant to be watched
by people who have not experienced anything like the Lebanese Civil
War," Johnston remarks. "There was of course a civil war in Ireland,
but it was in the 1920s so it wasn’t within the living memory of
most people and it wasn’t anything like as savage as what happened
in Lebanon. Even the worst violence in Northern Ireland wasn’t as
terrible as Black Saturday, or Karantina, or Damour, or the Sabra and
Shatila massacres. No straightforward realistic play could contain
and represent events like those. What I think Wajdi Mouawad has done
is write something that shakes people up a bit, and gives them just
a glimpse from the very edge. That’s the best that a play can hope
to do, I think."
Bedrock Productions relayed the intensity of Mouawad’s writing with
an exceptional cast, and an intimidating, exuberant style, delivering
a powerful theater experience.