Clarinet…or Beirut 1982
For more than ten years, the Palestinian artist, Fadi Al-Ghoul, 51, has been presenting his monodrama “Clarinet” (prepared and directed by Akram Al-Maliki). And again, after about two hundred performances in Palestine and several countries, it is hosted in Amman by the Traveler Festival for Open Spaces Theater, in its second session (Abdul Rahman Arnous Session), in which it won the Special Jury Prize. The writer of these words is allowed to see them on this occasion, and rejoices in them, as well as a good gathering of qualitative viewers. Perhaps it is a good coincidence that there will be a new opportunity to watch this monodrama that floats, with an attractive and taut theatrical play, in the atmosphere of the Israeli invasion of Beirut in the summer of 1982, while expressing the memory of that great event, and the turning point, in the Palestinian (and obviously Lebanese) national and human experience in such days. Among the advantages of this work, in which its musical and melodic levers and vocabulary, as well as its aesthetics in performance and movement, and the transmission of its sensory, affective and emotional rhythms, is that it does not evoke the hot moments from the furnace of that event, which is war, bombing and aggression, from political angles or with patriotic rhetorical references about resistance, valor and steadfastness, and that it passes on some slight of this, but rather succeeds in broadcasting its content Emotional, Palestinian to a certain extent, through the conversations of a child of about ten (Fadi al-Ghoul himself, the son of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, at that age), he tells his thoughts about what is happening to him and his family, what he watches, who he meets and talks to, about bombing planes, shelters, hotels, streets and lanes, and about certain and expected death, and about fear that is resisted by love of life, by telling about the beautiful, With sarcasm and sarcasm, about a musical performance, about a clarinet, about a radio reporting on Philip Habib, about a massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps from which the narrator escaped, and about details and facts that follow and intersect, pulling us into its atmosphere, its locations, and its known time in our perceptions. Really, Fadi al Ghul.
So, it is one of the countless stories of the Palestinian people in their abundant alienation. It is narrated by the young boy who takes refuge with his family from their home to Al-Sanayeh Square in Beirut, to escape death that might be caused by treacherous Israeli bombing, then they are taken to a hotel where they stay with other families and families. Music is central to this theatrical work (70 minutes), which begins with a piano piece, and ends with a clarinet played by the child narrator at the grave of his mother, who dies during the war, before the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which the child, his grandmother, and his sister escaped when they were able to go out of the back door of their house into the emptiness. And there are passages that overlap and separate, in which we know about his mother, his father, the fedayeen, and the girl Noura, whom he loves and then disappears, as if she had died, and about his friend Ashraf, who escapes with him during a raid, but the shell kills this friend. The ghoul is distinguished by apparent proficiency in the expressions of voices, their intonations, and their differences, with an elaborate presence of various and numerous sound effects, and the play was generally given the ability to spread the dramatic, charged and full direction, in the senses of the viewer who receives this work with great attraction. And that is all before the rice is scattered on the fedayeen in their farewell, as they leave Beirut for new exiles, and among them is the father of the child who tells and tells, and takes our imaginations and our understandings to that Beirut passage from the time of the long Palestinian novel, from emotional and human entrances, in which there is a lot of subtle and profound.
Fadi al-Ghoul had said that he chose the clarinet because it is like his weapon, because his blowing on it is an expression of hope, and the Palestinians, despite everything, are optimistic. And a significant amount of optimism, I think, was spread by this play in us, those who watched it and delighted us with the enjoyment it created in us, despite its tragedies, optimism that there are competencies with high capabilities in the scenic arts in Palestine, who are able to renew and make the beautiful and the most beautiful. Thank you, Fadi Al Ghoul. Thank you, director of the Traveler Festival for the Arts of Open Spaces, artist Hakim Harb.
