The subservient contemporary artistic vision clashes with a bitter reality

Is sarcasm enough to present a critical vision that clashes with a bitter reality?!.. This is what director Tawfiq Al-Jabali tells us in his latest theatrical work “The Subsidiary” Which was presented on the sidelines of the activities of the twenty-fifth session of the Carthage Theatrical Days on the stage of the Teatro Theater in the city of Tunis. It is a theatrical work whose title is vitality and contemporaneity, whether at the level of treatment, performance, or the issue at hand… an issue that was and still is the primary Arab concern among creative writers and poets, about Palestine. The crimes of genocide and displacement… are an issue that imposes itself on Arab media and creativity… but how did the creative people express this issue? Most of them may tend to resort to a hollow approach that is closer to screaming. And howling and repeating resonant phrases and slogans in an exaggerated theatrical performance, a throaty performance similar to what we see on the pages of the news and on the tongues of the media.

While “Al-Jabali” comes; To mix sarcasm with pain… and spin an artistic work that combines modernity, or what playwrights today call the thorny and elusive term “postmodernism.” Which relies primarily on the actor and on criticizing human behaviors more than presenting a traditional artistic vision, director Walid Al-Daghasni describes it in his book honoring “Tawfiq Al-Jabali and the Question of Post-Drama”… as returning the text to a narrow circle and elevating the foundations of post-modern spectacle.. In post-dramatic theatre, the author’s text dies and the energies text is born, according to the expression of Jean-François Lyotard. «Al-Jabali» From the usual, traditional form of theatrical writing, there is no theatrical character with dramatic dimensions and clear features and details, while the characters rely on chaos in dealing with their personal features or in performing successive hysterical behaviors, as if these characters accurately express the state of mass hysteria that the Arab peoples suffer today in practice. Anxious and ambiguous reactions to the hysterical massacres that reality is witnessing!

Al-Jabali presents: In «affiliate» Or the dependent curse, as he wanted to call it, in reference to the curse that befalls humanly decrepit societies, societies that retain the causes of destruction within them, and thus curses continue upon them… where there is no escape, in the “dependent” curse. You will find a non-stop release of a group of amazing acting energies, whether in the acting performance that satirizes the situations of these characters or in the group movement performance.. “Ghazal Al-Jabali” From the Arab reality, in its weakness and fragmentation, there is an exceptional theatrical case that presents to us levels of indifference and “immaturity.” The psychological condition that has afflicted many people in their forms of interaction with reality. We find a group of women chattering in vain in empty side conversations, giving insipid sentences with incomplete words or meanings, quarreling, and moving randomly with their bodies that reflects the extent of the human chaos in which these people live in the face of a painful reality.

While, in contrast, another man lives his suffering, a man who carries the burden of searching for meaning in his life while failing to find the words that express the truth of his reality, which he is unable to understand, this appears The man sitting in a wheelchair expresses his psychological torment and disappointment in a reality that he is unable to live with or express. A complete separation seems clear between this man concerned with searching for meaning and these talkative people. It is as if this helpless person expresses the Arab intellectual who is lost in the chaos of reality and the reality has become harsher and harsher. Ambiguity and confusion that cannot be re-read and interpreted, a confused reality in which the owner of the heart and pen has lost the compass of vision and the tools of sensory and verbal expression.

The show does not carry direct messages. It is clear as much as its reliance on expressing meanings in the theatrical image, in addition to these useless dialogues that took place between these women, we see them at the beginning of the show walking in line, carrying a group of suitcases as if they were miniature screens during which successive images of the children of Palestine were displayed, an eloquent expressive scene about the state of genocide and displacement they are experiencing. The Palestinian people, in light of the empty chatter of those around them from the Arab societies, did not stop director Tawfiq Al-Jabali from continuing to keep pace with reality, as he always seeks to present a mixture of… There is a wonderful interplay between theater and the latest modern-day image technologies. It is able to present theater with a cinematic imagination, an imagination with which you will not feel that you have been transported to the cinema. It does not transport the viewer to the cinema screen, while it is able to sweetly and weave details together with skilled tailoring skill, able to intertwine cinema and theater into one unit. To find yourself transported to a third medium that brought together two contradictory worlds in great splendor and creativity, in the final rain scene that transformed the actors and the stage into another place and world, a parallel world to which the heroes of the work moved, the stage turned into reality. Completely new.. The scene was executed as if we were in one of the European theaters and not on the stage of the Teatro Theater in Tunis, then the most luxurious and important scene or “Master Scene” The main scene of the show is when the hero is split in half and begins to judge himself for what he was unable to confront, achieve and reveal. We see the helpless hero standing behind a white curtain and then himself materializes in front of him. Here, Al-Jabali was able to transfer one of the means of cinematic tricks to the stage. The audience sees the hero embodied in front of him. His essence is the vision of the eye, as if his soul had emerged from his body to see himself as he really is, to see his weakness and brokenness, and to speak with himself and judge her for all the weakness and betrayal she had committed, and therefore he did not The director excels simply by producing meanings that have depth and impact in dealing with the Palestinian issue or in his sarcastic criticism of the worn-out Arab reality through his eloquent portrayal of these societies preoccupied with gossip and idle talk, or their intellectuals who are crushed by this reality, unable to influence it or interact with it, and who are tormented by his retirement to the point of reaching suicide by abstaining from life at all. All of these meanings were addressed by Al-Jabali in a very contemporary and modern theatrical form to confirm that he is a director aware of his contemporary reality, whether in keeping pace with his current issues. Or in how these issues are dealt with, it is a way out that does not lose its vitality. 

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