Omar Abusaada Alors que j’attendais

While I was waiting

Having lost consciousness, Taim, thirty years old, is admitted to hospital. He has been severely beaten, following his mysterious disappearance while crossing one of the many border checkpoints scattered across Damascus. After the father’s tragic death fifteen years previously and the scandal it provokes, the family seems unable to cope with this latest ordeal. The painful secrets this memory stirs up bring about irrevocable changes in each of them. For the duration of his year-long coma, Taim senses, simultaneously, the upheaval in his own family circle, and in his home town, Damascus, now a strange, cruel place. From this state of powerlessness and withdrawal, the audience is taken on a journey into the core of the emotions.

Omar Abusaada’s highly original brand of theatre uses real life as its basis. From here, the audience is plunged into the intimate lives of those caught up in the current conflict in Syria, far away from the anonymity of events relayed to us by the media. In his previous work, Antigone of Shatila, a group of around thirty Syrian and Palestinian women from the Shatila refugee camp bore witness to their lives as refugees, by projecting themselves into the figure of Antigone. This new collaboration with the compelling author Mohammad Al Attar cements this fruitful partnership. Using documentary theatre as the vehicle for fiction, Abusadaada’s piece never strays from the issues it addresses. Indeed, this coma-like state is no different from that of the story of Syria today - caught in the midst of a grey area, between life and death, hope and despair.