Rabih Mroué

How Nancy wished that everything was AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE

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13, 14 NOV 8.30 pm

PALLADIUM

National Premiere
It took Rabih Mroué’s exquisite humour to put on stage, in collaboration with Fadi Toufic, the Lebanon war and not because the director and actor was born in the land of the cedars but because of his sense for the social function of the theatre, for his surreal vein in transforming facts into abstractions, in his ability to reduce hard and tragic truths in soft and dangerous absurdities: to ask without qualms difficult questions.
Triggered in 1975, the tragedy in that happy middle eastern haven that was Lebanon has taken the shape, in over thirty years, of one of our times’ worst nightmares: the breaking down of a society in violent factions that saw the willing participations of all the monotheistic religions, triggering a war of bands that has become chronic and endless through inertia and wrathful multiplication.
The portraits of the “martyrs” have decorated the walls of the city of Beirut since many years: they now interact on stage through monologues full of anxiety and paradox, in a precarious balance between farce and tragedy.
In tackling such crucial issues, Mroué stresses the accent on the nature of theatre, on the relations between the actor and the public, on the use of technology as a spectacular means and as an instrument of an authoritarian media strategy, to the extent that his work deserves to be defined as a “performance” for its emblematical value and not simply as a short-lived utterance.

Born in Beirut in 1967, Rabih Mroué is the author of numerous theatre works of which he is also director and interpreter, staged in his home country and in several European cities.

A show presented within the European Festival TEMPS D’IMAGES 2007.

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