While Sulayman al-Bassam was celebrated, where he also performed, things did not go particularly well in his home country of Kuwait: he won a prize at the theater festival in Cairo with his latest play “I Medea”, he received three prizes in Tunis, and in Beirut he played to a full house.

But in Kuwait, where he was actually invited to play three evenings this spring on the small country's biggest stage, he ultimately had to cancel his performances.

"You made the whole thing impossible," he says now, sitting in the evening sun that bathes the crumbling façade of the Beirut restaurant in a warm glow.

Lena Bop

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Impossible, since the Kuwaiti authorities set up the “committees”, which are highly valued in this part of the world for the purpose of delaying and creating uncertainty, and which all had to do their somewhat opaque work before he was allowed to appear.

"I keep saying it," he says, "there are no police officers who put you in jail." Censorship has a more subtle form: "One that always gives the other person the opportunity to say: No, no, we don't have anything censored."

Medea, a refugee woman in Europe

With “I Medea”, Sulayman al-Bassam wanted to stage a play that would transform the classic material into a drama in which Medea ended up in Europe as an Arab refugee.

It forms the second part of his "Ikarus Trilogy", the first part of which "Ur" premiered four years ago at the Residenztheater in Munich.

As is often the case with this dramaturge, “I Medea” is also a very political work.

His heroine is an indomitable woman who loses her identity in the face of Islamophobia and orientalist clichés in Europe and finds herself a refugee in a social class from which there is little escape.

Meanwhile, the area she comes from is being eroded by corruption and a perverted religiosity that abuses faith for political ends.

Sulayman al-Bassam's criticism goes both ways, east and west.

This spares him the accusation that is sometimes circulating in the Arab scene that he is producing a theater that serves Western performances – in order to get easier onto the stages there.

And it gets him in trouble, like in Kuwait.

Sulayman al-Bassam himself appears alternately as Jason, Creon and as the author in his play, which can also be seen this week at the "Arabic Theater Days" in Hanover.

His opponent is played by Hala Omran, who comes from an old Syrian family of artists and left her homeland at the beginning of the war.

The solitude of her Medea on the stage is complete.

Their language, an Arabic dialect from a Palestinian village that can hardly be localized even by Arabic listeners, offers just as little support as the minimalist stage design.

This minimalism is new to Sulayman al-Bassam's repertoire, and it's not just the result of a way of working that's been changed by the pandemic.

He expresses a desire for greater autonomy, because as important as it was, almost ten years ago, with "Rituel pour une métamorphose" (2013) to be included in the repertoire of the Comédie Française in Paris, as the first author from the Arab world, so What appeals to him is the possibility of reacting to changing circumstances with smaller, less expensive productions.

Even if that means in large parts of the Arab world

Culture as a fig leaf

In Kuwait, this minimalism paid off.

Instead of appearing at the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Cultural Center, whose website advertised Sulayman al-Bassam as an “internationally renowned dramaturge and director”, he switched to a private cultural center.

There he had asked an actor friend of his to explain the strange circumstances of the meeting in a short prologue before the start of the performance – without a ticket counter, with a private invitation, without a license.

He also used a brief improvisation in his play to respond to the recent acquittal in Kuwait of a former prime minister who had caused a stir in the country.

The politician, who was accused of corruption, had spent a while in prison before being released.

"Kuwait is in free fall"

says Sulayman al-Bassam, who describes himself as a patriot but not as a nationalist.

As everywhere in the Gulf, the culture was adopted for the purpose of washing itself clean, to which the West reacted enthusiastically given the large amount of money.

Enormous houses have also been built in Kuwait in recent years, but without anyone asking: "What does it actually mean to build a building for a national theater if there is no national theater at all?

Or a building for the National Opera without an orchestra?” The SheikhJaber Al-Ahmed Cultural Center alone, which opened in 2016, has two thousand seats.

And it's not the only one of its kind. "I," says Sulayman al-Bassam in his light-blue linen suit, straw hat, and Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses he doesn't take off, "I'm a Shakespearean Bedouin with no real roots residency, and soiling my shirt with these people .

.

."

He doesn't finish.

But he also said all the important things.