“Cancer changed my life for the better.” With this short and unusual sentence, Sawsan Shorba summarizes her 13-year journey with a disease that raises panic just by mentioning it. As for her, she not only calls him out loud and tames him, but also brings him to the stage with her.
The disease has moved through the Lebanese actress’s body from the breasts to the bones, lungs and glands, and is currently settled in the liver. He took her hair and her health, but clearly gave her a lot in return. She tells Asharq Al-Awsat that she put the words into practice and began to live her day as if it were her last, benefiting from every moment of life. “Because of cancer, I brought theater back into my life after a break.”
Sawsan treats her illness using her artistic passion and love for life (the actress’s Instagram)
A treatment session and an exercise session
Today, between one chemotherapy session and another, Sawsan spends her days exercising. She is preparing for a new play entitled “Morphine,” written and directed by Yahya Jaber. She admits that the treatment combined with daily exercises is very tiring, “but my enjoyment of theater gives me supernatural strength.”
The title of the play, and the actress’s long history with the disease, may suggest that the artistic work is highly dramatic or that it is a lecture on cancer, but the surprise that awaits the audience is the comedy on which the text is built. “Like a number of directors I dealt with, Yahya Jaber noticed my comedic abilities,” explains the actress, who has always dreamed of working under Jaber’s management. She adds that this time her experience with cancer will be put in a form that makes people laugh instead of making them cry.
Sawsan Shorba says her dream came true to work with writer and director Yehia Jaber (actress’ Instagram)
Love toxins and cancer
In the play, Sawsan appears alone on stage, performing two characters. The character “Suheir” is her relative, who was killed by her addiction to tranquilizers due to a toxic emotional relationship, and her character is the one who does not want to meet Suhair’s fate despite her addiction to morphine due to the cancerous invasion.
Whoever has not yet found a trace of comedy, Sawsan reassures him, saying that laughter is guaranteed since “the play is strange, and the strangeness in it results from the absurd delirium embodied by the two characters of Sawsan, the “morphine,” and Suhair, who lives inside her memories of Beirut in the seventies and with her friends Farid Al-Atrash, Abdel Halim, and Faten. Hamama, and Najwa Fouad.
From the rehearsal rehearsal: Sawsan as “Suheir” (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Jaber placed the duality of love and illness, and the duality of tranquilizers and morphine, in an unexpected context. The writer, known for his elitist and popular texts at the same time, makes sure that every spectator finds a reflection of himself in the story. Among the topics that the play addresses in a funny way are: the complexities of the human soul, moral corruption, the vulnerability of women, and destructive love.
Makeup, nail polish… and a mastectomy
It is not the first time that Sawsan has brought the disease with her to the theater, but there is a big difference between the plays “Volare” and “Morphine.” In the first, the onlookers could hear the actress crying while she was performing her role, but this time she made them laugh.
A poster for the play “Volare” presented by Sawsan Shurba in 2022 (the actress’s Instagram)
But where does the laughter come from if the brutal disease is a hero on stage? Sawsan answers that she allows herself to talk about cancer in a funny way because she has the experience. “I don’t belittle another person’s pain,” she says. This is my pain, and if I mock it in the play, that is my business and my story.”
For a laugh, she tells the audience, for example, how she went to the mastectomy surgery in all her elegance and beauty, and that day she did not forget to put polish on her nails even though she knew in advance that it would be removed before the surgery.
Sawsan is keen to make herself up and apply nail polish before every treatment session (the actress’s Instagram)
Morphine treatment with “morphine”
Sawsan Shorba does not mind appearing on stage with her head shaved, and she is reconciled with the matter, as her accounts on social media show. But in “Morphine” she will appear with a wig, to avoid arousing emotions and provoking the audience, and to preserve the comedic identity of the work.
She bets big on a play that might save her from her addiction to morphine, which was imposed on her by excruciating pain. Usually, morphine treatment requires hospitalization, but Sawsan took it upon herself to reduce the dosage of the medication. “For morphine’s sake, I bear the consequences of the pain of coming off morphine. I reduced the amount from 40 to 5 milligrams per day, and I feel that the play will completely cure me of it.”
Not afraid to forget her lines or stutter due to fatigue and medications, she has trained to endure. She remembers how she insisted on traveling and acting during the most extreme periods of pain and health deterioration, without letting anyone feel that she was in pain.
Sawsan reduced her daily morphine doses for the sake of the new play (the actress’s Instagram)
Challenge pain with hope
Between February 9 and February 25, Sawsan Shorba will appear at the “Mono” Theater in Beirut to plant a question in the heads of attendees: “If I can turn my misfortune into comedy, why do you turn your lives into drama?”
Some of them will come out of curiosity to watch an actress suffering from cancer give a long monologue on stage, and some of them will come to appreciate the art, but no matter how different the motives are, the goal of Sawsan Shorba and Yahya Jaber is the same. Challenge pain with hope.
Sawsan does not do anything in this context, as her personal solidity and spiritual immunity came by nature. Her confession is only a confirmation of the matter: “When I learned 13 years ago that I had cancer, my reaction was not harsh. “So far, I have not cried or complained once about my illness.”
Behind the scenes of training with Yahya Jaber (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Her eyes sparkle whenever someone praises her strength, which brought her back to her first passion, which is theater. Admiration and flattery make her responsible for moving forward despite the sensitivity of the situation, but she is armed with her inner peace and her ability to endure.
Music and dance
There is no significant decoration on the stage except for a piano, in front of which Sawsan repeatedly sits to play. “There is a lot of music and dancing in the play,” explains the actress, who has played the piano since childhood and specialized in music composition and its history in conjunction with her studies in theatrical arts.
Music plays a major role in the play (Middle East)
She is the one who believes that the voice of the Armenian-French artist Charles Aznavour cured her of her first cancer. She hears her heart telling her that the cure this time will be through laughter.
