At the centre of the play is the Daher family tragically divided by civil war. Zyad (Eli Saad) and his teenage sister, Mona (Sana’a Shaik), live in Paris, while their brother, Marwan (also Saad), lives in Beirut, awaiting a visa and supported by his brother. The play opens with Zyad, an academic, thinking aloud about his proposed book on the causes of instability in Lebanon as an endearingly rebellious Mona repeats a friend’s statement that as a Lebanese she is “a potential terrorist”. In a shift to Beirut we are introduced to Marwan who has moved into a flat in Beirut with his Tante Najat (Danielle Dona), who lives mostly in a more prosperous past. When he speaks harshly to his Sri Lankan maid-of-all-work (also Shaik) she calls him a “fucking Lebanese”.
It seems that this little territory, home of the Phoenicians and the great cities of Byblos and Tyre, suppressed by various conquerors over time, made a French mandated territory following the partitioning of the Ottoman empire in 1923, has sunk to its nadir after 12 years of civil war. However, as we become deeply involved in the various perspectives offered to us through the characters, we come to value the ways in which each of them struggle to survive as individuals in intolerable circumstances. We appreciate also that their difficulties are not really grasped by the West as illustrated by Zyad’s likable French girlfriend (Delphine Vuagnoux).
We view the struggles imposed by war from the rectangular balconies of Beirut flats, underlining how limited and limiting their occupants’ lives have become. Marwan, for instance, manages to sustain himself by jogging back and forth, imagining a future in which he will become an elite athlete. His neighbour, Rima (a charismatic Neveen Hanna), imagines her small balcony as an art gallery in which her ambitions to hold a free and independent art show will be realised. In a haunting and beautiful highpoint, Marwan and Rima come together in the unbounded middle space and dance gently and sedately as if Lebanon had taken on its former graceful shape again.
However, the younger generation holds the key to the future. Rima manages to send her war-obsessed brother, aka Steve McQueen (a brilliant Mansoor Noor), to Paris to keep him alive, and Zyad can’t prevent the passionate and proud Mona from returning to the Lebanon she loves. The origins of Lebanon’s troubles that Zyad seeks to uncover in a magnificent monologue are in a sense just as arbitrary and universal as the reasons why, in the end, Lebanon will rise again from its ashes.
