The play focuses on two unlucky strangers and roommates in a new county, a professor in his political exile and the illiterate peasant who has left his family and village for financial stability and freedom. The two of them are friendless, and one of them can’t speak the language of the new place. It’s a night full of memories and wishes, full of fragile dreams and hard reality. It’s New Year Eve, and they have nothing to share except words.
The text is a combination of 3 pre-recorded monologues said by A, B, and C. Beckett wrote that “The B story has to do with the young man, the C story is the story of the old man and the A story is that of the man in middle age”. In the performance, 3 actors representing A, B and C were mooving together and whispering the text . The performance was done in an old factory of olive oil from the 18th Century in an isolated venue near a graveyard and a railstation.
The Final Month of the Fifth Year tells the story of Jaber, a Palestinian-Syrian playwright who escaped Syria and lives as a refugee in Gaziantep, Turkey. Jaber is a journalist, and works with a radio station that supports the Syrian revolution. Jaber meets Fadl, a 20-year-old young man who escaped from Aleppo, and begins writing a play based on Fadl’s life, following his difficult journey from Aleppo to Idlib and eventually Turkey. Two additional characters are introduced: Tuba, a half-Turkish, half-Syrian girl who was born and raised in Turkey and who works as translator in the same radio that Jaber works for; and Younes, a Kurdish-Turkish young man, who once had a short-lived relationship with Fadl. Jaber finds himself losing faith in himself and his ability to tell stories, as the complexities of Fadl’s history multiply and embroil everyone around him. Ultimately, Jaber’s attempts wear away at his relationship with Wash, his girlfriend, a character we only meet over video calls. Jaber begins, too, to question his sexuality, and most characters question their understanding of the concept of identity.
Before Dinner follows a single brutal night of conversation between a mother and a son. The mother is a schoolteacher, and the wife of a martyred Palestinian fedayi. The son is a theater student. Before Dinner is a play about generational struggle, and about the inheritance of a generation of young people who came of age during the Arab Spring. It is about what can be said and what can’t, and about the silences and absences that become deafening when parents and children can no longer hear each other. It is about the way successive disasters have forced specific cultural climates on each generation, and the different ways in which each generation finds itself haunted by defeat.
This text confront us with the simple questions about war, power and freedom- about our life under the daily violence, destroying the humanity and the future.
The text talks about a popular neighborhood in the old city of damascus, about a love story started from the balconies, about the fair of Time and it surprises, about the families rules and our wishes, about having a better future without loosing the love of your life. Eight characters telling a story of a city, while the young guy is mixing the past with the present and the future in his snooze.
Once They Die, They’ll Realize is the first of an identity performance series that was a part of the “Identities”project which aimed to research the process of putting the socio-religious rituals of the Arab World -particularly in the previously-called The Levant region, and the mixture of religions it accommodates (Islam, Christianity and Judaism)- in the form of theatre performance. This aim is to be achieved by researching a ritual’s movement vocabulary. With its form, indications and tokens; this vocabulary holds the possibility of being turned into an integral movement language that can eventually construct an identity of the Arab.