Not everyone was pleased that life was coming back to the old place.

The neighbor across from the abandoned house that Julien Boutros and Karl Hadifé turned into a stage for a few evenings made no secret of his displeasure with the sudden brisk activity in his alley.

An alley where you can be happy in the dark if the electricity hasn't just gone out.

According to Karl Hadife, the neighbor got himself a megaphone, played terrible songs and responded to attempts to speak with a gun and his pants down.

But only in one evening.

All the others allowed actors and spectators to play the leading and supporting roles in the play that Julien Boutros and Karl Hadifé brought to Bourj Hammoud, a simple-people neighborhood away from the center.

"Farha" it's called, and so many people want to see it,

that more events will now be added to the eight planned events.

Perhaps even around Christmas, to show the play to the emigrants who traditionally return home for the holidays.

Lena Bop

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"Farha" is the Arabic term for a celebration that is about to take place in this unusual theater.

A young couple is getting married.

But before the party begins in the backyard, where the 1.5-liter bottles of Pepsi and rolls sweating under cellophane are already waiting, the audience can take a peek through the keyholes.

The spectators are divided into four groups, receive routing slips with different routes through the house, climb from one floor to the next and on each floor are given access to the innermost rooms of the people who have moved in here for the duration of the play.

The plaster is peeling off the walls everywhere.

The dramas performed in the living rooms are different.

None lasts longer than ten minutes.

All together meet in the heart of a society,

It's about loneliness and poverty

For example, on the fourth floor of Avo (Mazen Kiwan) and Carmen (Kathy Younès), whose living room carpet has been rolled aside to make room for the rehearsal of their evening tango performance, but which, before the first bar, becomes a mini lesson on the subtle beginnings of domestic violence.

Bashir (Ramez Awad) on the third floor also loves his gun.

Mumbling halfway incomprehensible things into his whiskey glass about the nonsense of marriage and children, he cleans his rifle and takes aim at the spectators who stand in a semicircle in his living room and quickly retreat as he rushes onto the balcony, driven by sudden restlessness.

The whole house is about loneliness and poverty.

It's about bigotry and nostalgia, reality and appearance, private and public life.

This is one of the reasons why the piece is reminiscent of the performances called “X Apartments” that Matthias Lilienthal brought to Beirut years ago, in exactly the same quarter.

But Karl Hadifé, who, contrary to the trend, only recently returned home from abroad, where he and his partner now want to revive the old "Cinema Royal" right at the beginning of the dark alley in Bourj Hammoud, prefers to name Aki Kaurismäki and Thomas Winterberg.

Filmmaking is closer to him than theatre.

He made a spooky short film about the explosion in the port called Beirut 6:07.

"I can't be without my close-ups, without details," he says, recalling the apartment of Mansour (Faek Homaissi), the cheerful old man who papered the walls with photomontages of himself next to the world's celebrities.

Or the widow Samira’s (Rita el-Achkar) fine tea service and the slide rule on her cupboard – both relics from a past in which larger sums left the house than today, when, noblesse oblige, she asks her maid to pay for two of them to buy packs of cigarettes.

The maid's name is Tigist (Selam Makarsa) and she comes from Africa.

She is the only character in "Farha" who does not play a separate scene.

She stays in Samira's kitchen, which is her living space, holds the smartphone under her ear, the tea towel in her hand and turns her back on the viewers.

"The play is also a social experiment," says Julien Boutros, who taught theater at a Beirut school for years but recently quit his job.

"We wanted to see if people would find it weird to just walk through Tigist's kitchen on their way to the grand finale in the backyard." But the results so far have been sobering.

Tigist remains the most invisible of all the invisibles in this house, who seem more than ever to have fallen out of time in these days of crisis.