Perhaps he carried this huge loss until his last moment, and confided his grief to his companion, Latifa Multaqa. That multi-functional and multi-dimensional theater was a dream that tickled the ambition of Antoine and Latifa ever since they were concerned about the stage and the laboratory. This was at the height of the Lebanese theatre’s brilliance, before the small country’s wars struck it.
But the irony is that they came back and regenerated it from the womb of ugliness, and made it a bright oasis in a gloomy desert during the eighties of the last century. “War on the Third Floor” and “The Slug.” Two works with which Latifa Multaqa inaugurated the second birth of the Dream Theater in the early nineties, with the advent of the so-called peace. Antoine stood at Multaqa one winter evening, greeting his and Latifa’s guests who had ventured into the alleys of the Mar Mikhael area to attend the first show. Yesterday’s comrades are here, as well as his students at the Lebanese University, who were tainted by passion, effort and perseverance.
Fortunately for me, I was there, a young journalist, learning the alphabet of the profession in the confines of the now defunct Al-Safir newspaper. I returned from that evening with a collection of photos that Professor Obido Pasha took with pleasure. When I whispered to him that I had tried to write something about what I saw, I wish he would find a way to publish it, he promised me well, and quickly fulfilled his promise, “because the material is worthy.”
It was not long before Beirut became abuzz with something unexpected: the Multaqa family was on the verge of a major loss. The owners of the “Maroun Naqqash Theater” decided to restore it no matter what the cost, and the goal is… to turn it into a sewing workshop.
“Yes, a seamstress, you imagine?”
Antoine Multaqa said it in the tone of a father grieving for his child, as he received me in his humble house in Ain El Remmaneh. I had joined the An-Nahar family, and decided to investigate the truth of the matter in the hope of conducting an investigation. The truth is that I did not believe it for two reasons: First, because the thread of clothing in a happy homeland has become far more important than the thread of minds and tastes. Second, because I was expecting to meet Lawrence Wargrave, not Antoine Multaqa. I was still the young boy, fascinated with horror and amazement by the character of the judge-executioner in “Ten Young Slaves.” And I was faced with another “meeting”, which I thought was false, but it was authentic and authentic: allied with honesty, no matter how widespread hypocrisy was, and rebelling against distortion until the last breath. I was confused about the matter, and the exceptional actor achieved his goal.
This was his daily battle with generations of his theater followers, many of whom joined the “Lebanese Theater Circle.” His obsession is to extract from him, as a director, the maximum of their talent pool, and to be, as an actor, a role model for them to emulate.
To the extent that he embodied mystery, hypocrisy, and cruelty in the depths of the isolated palace, and tyrannized its residents in order to achieve justice that had strayed from his custom, he was clothed with cunning, cunning, and circumstance, and he set about unraveling the mystery of Mrs. Leidner’s murder at the hands of her husband, the condescending professor. He is the detective Ercole Poirot in the series “Murder in the Castle”, based on the model “The Ten Slaves” from the novel by Agatha Christie. “Lebanon Television” showed this work in the first half of the 1980s, and many people may not remember it, perhaps because of the war conditions at the time, and perhaps because it did not get its share of re-showing like its predecessor. I wish the official screen would dust it off, in honor of one of the giants of the Lebanese stage.
Antoine Multaqa did not rejoice in the recovery of the Maroun Discussion Theater, but with his departure he took away a piece of our memory that we will never be able to recover. Goodbye, Your Honor.
