In Wall, David Hare conjures a vision of the future; drawing on history that is being written as we speak, his journies make faraway lands feel less distant, less foreign than we’d have them be. He speaks of a wall. Not of a particular point in time, but of a repeated event split by perspective; a solid structure separating Israel from Palestine. And Hare, as he states, has ‘acquaintances on both sides’.

His speech oscillates from the factual to the personal. Like a book, whose form certifies its text, he physicalizes his discourse and its affront on popular opinion through the subtle sliding of spectacles on and off his nose.

His expressions are amplified by the white cube that forms the stage. It becomes a space of projection, a sculpture of speech as he drops his papers one by one to the floor. This space could be anywhere. Its walls could divide anything the audience imagined that night – except one thing: the wall between us and him.

Hare talks of the wall as a social phenomenon, a geographic and political one. An architectural feature that turns rigid and real when soldiers guard its openings; faced with a barrage of fiery thoughts from single-file citizens within and without. You build a wall and suddenly you find yourself caught up in the barbed wire, watching shadows on both sides.

Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, two decades of globalisation and lightning cultural change. Yet in the Middle East another wall has been built, cutting through newly formed identities and developments. Of what significance is Hare’s story in this intercultural dialogue? Perhaps it is his exposition of ambivalence and complexity – the wall as symbol of religion, faith and destruction at the same time. A wall built on ancient, sacred ground; concrete roots under a shifting topsoil.

So I wonder – where will all this lead in a century of global noise, of wars fought on other people’s lands, of tensions that wrinkle the fabric of time?

Stovepipe aims to pick us up off the sidelines and deposit us bodily into the midst of the relief effort. Based out of the Bush Theatre’s new bar venue, Unit 18, the production transforms the boiler rooms and dead spaces below the West 12 shopping complex into a promenade performance space.

Designer takis’s sets are nothing short of lavish – and little wonder, with Hightide, the Bush and the National Theatre all backing the play in some capacity. There’s a conference centre, a hotel room, a café bar, a war-torn city street and more, and every new environment is further evidence of high production values and attention to detail. With the audience free to roam, everything – from the posters promoting fictional investors in the rebuilding programme to the papers in the office in-tray – must stand up to close scrutiny, and it does.

The performances, too, are consistently convincing and engaging. Shaun Dooley doesn’t quite reconcile British mercenary Alan’s caring and violent sides into a unified character, but as our guide it’s important he remain sympathetic, and keeping the lid on the violence helps achieve that. Eleanor Matsuura, meanwhile, infuses every female character in the show with distinct but equally potent varieties of strength, independence and (occasionally) warmth, in the hands-down best performance of the night. As Sargon Yelda’s Arabic interpreter puts it, “the Americans have a phrase: ball-breaker.”

So why does Stovepipe still fail to suck the audience in?

Maybe it’s because the design is too slick. The bar and office furniture looks like it was bought yesterday, brand new. Maybe it’s because the one time we actually visit Iraq is the one time the staging is necessarily representative rather than realistic, and the rest of our time is spent in Amman, Jordan, a staging post for forays into Iraq; like Alan, we feel like we’re between places, waiting for the real action to begin.

Or maybe it’s because of the play’s scattergun chronology, which flashes backwards and forwards with nearly every scene and offers very few narrative signposts to help us find our place in Alan’s story. Trusting the audience’s intelligence rather than patronising them is always the right call, but in this case the complexity of the plot requires us to keep disengaging from the moment in order to look at the bigger picture and see where the latest piece slots in – and getting lost in the moment is what allows us to care.

In January 2005, just like in October 2006, the world was still ticking to the beat of the White House; the Iraqi people were said to have taken their “[…] first step towards joining the free world and being a democracy […]”[1] through governmental elections just a few days before[2]; “the armies of darkness”[3] still carry out quasi-daily attacks on ‘coalition forces’ stationed in Iraq (including members of the Japanese ‘Self-Defence Force’); an “axis of evil”[4], albeit down by one member, simmers on the world’s back burner waiting for the US and UN’s next move; and “In Japan, [like most ‘1st world’ nations] television is king– people turn to it more than any other medium for news and entertainment”[5].

The first time I saw the Al-Murwass promotional flyer (Japanese version) was about a month before the 19-strong company actually set foot on Japanese soil. I believe they were still rehearsing in Baghdad at that time and when not rehearsing, they were dealing with the daily logistical problems that a war inflicts on the general population: problems of transport, food, money, security and an environment of fear and anxiety. Of the flyer I don’t remember much, unfortunately my reading ability in Japanese was not sufficient to understand all of the written information at that time, but I do remember four illustrative photos. The first was the image of a man playing a traditional ney flute in front of the Iraqi national flag. The second and third showed the company dancing in what appeared to be traditional clothing, and the last photo displayed a goatskin drum. I found out later on that the drum was the emblem of the company and the meaning behind the name ‘Al-Murwass’.

Also around that time, I was following the continual flow of media imagery and rhetoric through television and online press, from sources such as BBC World, CNN, BBC News online, The Japan Times, Le Monde and other agencies. The picture being painted at the time was similar to the one now: a sense of unrelenting extremism and violence in everyday Iraqi life held up against a backdrop of a widespread ‘war on terror’, a war that began shortly after September 11th 2001 with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in ‘search’ of Osama Bin Laden, and one that continues now in 2006.

This combination of mediatized war imagery (suicide bombs, US military interventions, hostage taking, anti-terrorism laws, untried prison sentences, Islamic fundamentalism etc.) and ‘Western’ political discourse placed the images on the Al-Murwass flyer in a negative context and triggered a preemptory Al-Murwass performance; not a performance in any physical capacity but one that took place on an ‘invisible stage’: the stage of the mind. Then, in February 2005, I got to see the actual show at the Tiny Alice theatre with a real cast, real musicians, costumes, voices, singing and dancing bodies and not once was the war mentioned.

In the following paragraphs I will explore how and why I constructed this ‘invisible stage’ and what relevance this has to perceptions of Iraq today.

Thinking about the media in all it’s different forms and applications (television, the Internet, printed material – newspapers, magazines, the performance flyer and many others), I tried to understand where my ‘invisible stage’ fits in. This led me to question my position as ‘receiver’ of information and how to determine its reliability. What if I, as the consumer of these media presentations, am forming an adverse judgment or opinion without knowledge or examination of the facts because I am not ‘able’, or more precisely, not ‘willing’ to experience the situations first hand? In the documentary War Photographer, about the work of photo journalist James Nachtwey, there is a passage of personal commentary that sheds some light on this question of personal prejudice:

“In the field what you experience is extremely immediate, what you see is not an image on a page in a magazine 10,000 miles away with an advertisement for Rolex watches on the next page. What you see is unmitigated pain, injustice and misery. It’s occurred to me that if everyone could be there just once to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child or what unspeakable pain is caused by the impact of a bullet or how a jagged piece of shrapnel can rip someone’s leg off. If everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and the grief just one time then they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person let alone thousands.” (Nachtwey/Frei, 2001)

These words come from the source of image-based media itself, and Nachtwey is disclosing part of the dilemma in his work here. The photograph and the moving image can only go so far in their portrayal of ‘reality’. The distancing that viewers experience between the image and the action it portrays is the space where prejudice begins to breed and proliferate. Not even after being personally subject to numerous acts of prejudice, not even after battling against prejudice directed towards others, and not even after being brought up surrounded by a pantheon of prejudice-fighting heroes, Ghandi, Biko, Mandela, King or Levi, am I immune to its existence. Because as the footprint of global Western media widens and incites more people to consume it, the impetus to examine the reality of others is increasingly taken away from us. The distancing between image and reality has almost become an innate factor, part of our modern social DNA, and the more the image tries to go deeper into its portrayal of reality the more we seek shelter from it and turn to media’s entertainment branch: a no man’s land without moral ground where prejudice roams free.

I therefore hold myself to blame for the creation of this ‘invisible stage’. I consumed the images. I did not make the effort to look beyond the overall picture of prejudice they formed. But to recognise and accept personal blame for this ‘invisible stage’ does not push the issue any further in my mind; to understand the influence of media with more depth one needs to look at its mechanics (form and constitution).

The face of today’s digital media has yet to fully materialize, becasue like the technology it relies on, the speed of change is incredibly fast. So the way we interact with media is an ongoing process of adaptation. Media is also becoming very close to us in our homes, in our streets, in our hands, it is multiform and like a new computer-virus, it is passed on and disseminated with global consequences. But what lies beneath the surface of modern media? What is the mechanism that exerts such influence over our minds?

In his essay entitled “Muslims and Others: Anecdotes, Fragments and Uncertainties of Evidence”, Rustom Bharucha raises the point that in the post ‘September 11’ world one may well “pass as a ‘Muslim’ or ‘terrorist’” if one happens to fit the identity “manufactured by governmental regimes and surveillance systems[…]” and that “once marked, ‘The Muslim’ assumes a hyper-real significance, regardless of whether or not it is linked to a mistaken or real identity […].”(Bharucha, 2004) On a day-to-day level, such a manufactured identity is made possible through the gross dissemination of images. It is the extent of image flooding and the voracity of our media consumption, that enables a figure like Osama Bin Laden, for example, to become the universal archetypal image of ‘terror’, when the most dangerous threat is not necessarily the immediate, belligerent one we are made to fear, but the long-term segregation his image brings by nurturing prejudice and strengthening the cliché association of Islam with radicalism.

This mindless repetition of imagery, mixed with slogans and speech is one indirect way of influencing an audience. A more direct means also exists, one in which media directors, editors and producers manipulate images, text and speech in accordance with objectives from company executives who share key relations and political agendas with government officials. This is the realm of what Noam Chomsky has called ‘manufacturing consent’. In this sense the case of the Japanese media, to which I was partial as a resident in Japan from 2001-2005, is no different. One only needs to take a quick foray into the recent history of Japan’s major television companies (notably NHK, the state-owned channel) to find records of image and information manipulation. “So common is the staging of fake news reports that it has its own name, yarase, meaning literally “made to do it”. Alex Kerr goes on to say that “The common thread in the yarase for foreign documentaries is to show how poor, miserable, seedy, or violent life is elsewhere, with the implied message that life in Japan is really very nice.” (Kerr, 2001:114)

This media juxtaposition of Japan as safe and sacrosanct against a dangerous outside ‘other’, like Osama Bin Laden or the war-torn Iraq, has been reiterated in my presence on several notable occasions. One instance in particular takes me back to a day in a Yokohama Junior High School, at the time of the US-led ‘search’ for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan in 2001. On that day a Japanese instructor of English stood next to me and delivered a speech to her class that implored the students to be grateful for the state of peace in their country and not to have to live in one of the more “troubled parts of the world” that they hear about in the news. That Japan enjoys a peaceful society is not an issue of great concern here, but that such a dividing and bias-inducing juxtaposition is reiterated at this important social level, in a school classroom, is testament enough to the stronghold and influence media has on daily life. So if I hold myself responsible for the constructions of an ‘invisible stage’, I also hold those in charge of producing that media and upholding these mechanisms of influence whether they be aware or unaware of the financial/political pressures applied from above.

So a year and a half after seeing the real Al-Murwass performance has my position changed? In terms of my initial prejudice towards the cast, well obviously yes, that ‘invisible stage’ no longer exists. This is thanks to the power of theatre and its ability to break cultural/racial clichés and prejudice. But I don’t think it’s the role of the theatre to rid the world of prejudice, the theatre is first and foremost a place of ‘fiction’, of make-believe and pretend, in which we like to see life from obscure and bizarre angles, it should leave didacticsm and moralizing to parents, teachers and professors alike. To quote Howard Barker: “…the play is not a debate, it is literally ‘play’, and like children’s play it is ‘world-inventing’, requiring no legitimation from the exterior.” (Barker) The influence of media in daily life has increased significantly over the last decade and will continue to do so over the next one too, and we, as its consumers, have become so intimately and unwittingly involved in it that we are less and less interested in looking at its ethics and shortcomings. Therefore I fear that this will not be the last ‘invisible stage’ that I experience.

Footnotes

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/01/29/iraq.main/ Cal Perry, CNN News Online, Sunday Jan 30th 2005.

[2] Iraqi national elections January 30th 2005.

[3] Source: “http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/12/20041206-2.html President and Iraqi Interim President Al-Yawer Discuss Iraq Future”.

[4] http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html George Bush State of the Union Address Jan 29th 2002.

[5] http://japanmediareview.com/japan/media/1047776795.php Jane Ellen Stevens. “Yomiuri Shimbun’s Reluctant Race Against the Internet”.

References

Barker, Howard, Arguments for a Theatre (Manchester, Manchester University Press: 1989)

Bharucha, Rustom, “Muslims And Others: Anecdotes, Fragments, And Uncertainties Of Evidence”. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements. Vol 5 Number 3 December 2004.

Chomsky, Noam, Media Control (NY, Seven Stories Press: 2002)

Kerr, Alex, Dogs & Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan (London, Penguin: 2001)

War Photographer. Dir Christian Frei. 2001 James Nachtwey. Christian Frei Filmproductions.

Background & Plot

The play opens at the dawn of the Abbasid Revolution (750 AD) and ends just after the murder of the play’s main character, the court scribe and creator of the Kalila Wa Dimna tales, Ibn Al-Muqaffa (circa 759-762 AD). According to the entry in Wikipedia, ‘Abbasid’ (Arabic: العبّاسيّون Abbāsīyūn) was the:

“Dynastic name generally given to the caliphs of Baghdad, the second of the two great Sunni dynasties of the Islamic empire, that overthrew the Umayyad caliphs from all but Spain. It seized power in 750, when it finally defeated the Umayyads in battle, and flourished for two centuries, but slowly went into decline with the rise to power of the Turkish army they had created, the Mamluks. Within 150 years of gaining power across Iran they were forced to cede power to local dynasties who only nominally acknowledged their power and cede the Maghreb to independent Aghlabids. Their rule was finally ended in 1258, when Hulagu Khan, the Mongol conqueror, sacked Baghdad. While they continued to claim authority in religious matters from their base in Egypt, the dynasty’s secular authority had ended. Descendants of the Abbasids live in modern day Iraq.”

Amidst the Abbasid revolutionary fever that has spread throughout Iraq and neighbouring lands, the poet/scribe Ibn Al-Muqaffa and his fellow poet Bashar are walking through the streets of Basra where a grand, bloodlust reception for the first Calipha Al-Saffah and his elder brother Al-Mansour is being prepared by the governor of Basra, Sulaiman, and the scheming courtier Sufyan. Sufyan intercepts the wandering scribes and challenges their presence as Persian imposters, but Al-Muqaffa’s alluring rhetoric wins Sulaiman’s approval and grants them safe passage. Asia, cousin of Al-Mansour follows Al-Muqaffa and persuades him that he is needed in Basra to rally the people through the ‘power of the pen’ against the brutal Calipha and his general who threaten the lives of Umayyid sympathisers. Muqaffa is rapt by Asia’s beauty and desires her love, but Asia is defiant and says “only in Basra would I love you”. Her plea is for Muqaffa to infiltrate the Calipha’s ranks and use the power of his stories to quell the tyrannical regime from the inside. Thus the fables of Kalila Wa Dimna become a political weapon, with a chance to change the political landscape. The history behind the Kalila Wa Dimna tales is complex and the entry in Wikipedia gives a mere whistle-stop tour of their history:

Kalilag and Damnag in Syriac or Kalila wa Dimna كليلة و دمنة in Arabic, is the name of the translation into Syriac of the Sanskrit Panchatantra literary work of fables originating in India. It was translated to Pahlavi Persian then into Syriac, then into Arabic, and from there to European languages. Thomas Irving (1980) further states that from North Africa the stories were carried south to Sub-saharan Africa, and on to North America by African slaves.

The book is about symbolic wisdom fables put in the mouths of animals. All the tales have a moral message, and many have a political undertone.

Two main figures are the jackals Kalila and Dimna (Sanskrit: Karataka and Damanaka). The main narrator is the philosopher (Hakim) Bidpai (Arabic: Baydaba, French Pilpay), who is asked for a fable by the king Dabshalim.

Later on in the play and Muqaffa has become the official court scribe and advisor to the Calipha. Al-Mansour demands a performance of Kalila Wa Dimna in honour of the military high-commander, Abu Muslim, but the performance is sabotaged and Abu Muslim killed. Al-Muqaffa is told by Asia that in one of her ‘visions’ his writing will cause a revolution and bring with it ‘the real religion’ and ‘the real empire’. In reaction to her vision, Muqaffa pleads with the Calipha to retire from the court and take leave. This request is denied and Muqaffa and Asia are kept in a room under surveillance and forced to finish the animal fables. Muqaffa hears that his tales are spreading amongst the people, and the political messages are beginning to take root, just as in Asia’s vision, but before Muqaffa can witness the effect of his words, he is summoned to court by Sufyan (now Governor of Basra) who tries Muqaffa for heresy and Muqaffa is murdered. Asia and Bashar continue to spread the tales after Muqaffa’s death in an attempt to put an end to Al-Mansour’s empire.

The Performance Space

Entering the space, the first impression I got was one of ‘depth’ and ‘energy’. The sense of depth came from the very simple yet effective use of black, gauze-like curtains drawn around the three sides of the stage (see the rough diagram from my notebook below). A simple change in lighting state would allow the curtains to invite or block the audience’s gaze, adding the potential for distinctive ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ layers to the performance. Sometimes these background ‘corridors’ were inhabited by the performers, sometimes they were the object of video projections and/or puppet and mask scenes, but by isolating parts of the space in this way and superimposing them as alternate layers to the whole performance canvas, the audience experienced alternate, meta-theatrical narratives that ran parallel to the play’s main story and action. Pluralism of action in space, in my view, is a pillar of any living, breathing theatre – it is part of the definition of a theatre ‘environment’. Part of the reason for this is the way we perceive life as pluralistic – in any given situation there are a mulitude of facets and angles, life is ‘chaotic’ in essence and exists in stark contrast to minimalism or singularity which is a man-made and heavily contrived state only sustainable and effective in short, sharp bursts. Finding the balance between the two states is vital in all art forms, and Kalila Wa Dimna is in that sense a well balanced piece.

The impression of ‘energy’ came from the live musicians tucked away behind the curtains stage left. Their space was small and barely lit by pilot lights; the effect was almost cave-like, a ‘cave’ in which the audience caught the occasional glimpse of silhouettes concocting mesmeric sounds. Live music, and the inclusion of the musician in performance is another pillar of the living, breathing theatre environment. Recorded sound is equally as valuable in contributing to the world of a performance, but by cancelling out the human source of the music we are stripping away another layer of the kernel of theatre: the experience of other people telling a story – and music is like language, another storytelling device that covers the gamut of human emotion. I would have liked to see even more inclusion of the musicians in this piece, perhaps with heightened lighting states that bring the muscians into focus at key points.

Performance ‘Memory’

In the main performance space there were four mirror-like (but transparent) movable screens arranged side by side, with a rough contour map of the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to Iraq inscribed on them from the beginning. These screens not only served as a changing dynamic in the architecture of the main performance space, but they became locus of ‘performance memory’ – silent and statuesque.

As the play evolved, the ‘Jackal’, a wandering character wearing a full-faced black jackal mask, ‘orchestrated’ the history of the performance by writing pivotal words, expressions and diagrams from the play, over the screens, so that by the end of the performance when the screens were lined up right at the front of the stage and a beam of light moved slowly across them, the audience had one last look at the ‘memory’ of the play. It felt almost like a testament or epitaph to the life of the performance, a statement reminding us that life exists within the walls of this theatre and it is worthy of celebration and remembrance just as it is on the outside. I have seen the device of writing on stage used time and time again in performance, but never with this level of focus and integration into the piece as a whole. In Kalila the inscriptions enhance the environment, they bring texture to the set, and meaning to play, and they form the leitmotif of the power of the written word.

The mythical dimension

The tales of Kalila Wa Dimna are “animal fables spun around the two Jackals and their dealings in the court of their king – the Lion. They are stories within stories; each tale unfolding and leading another beast’s dilemma, anectdote, tribulation.” (Excerpt from the Programme) The concept of a story within a story is what prompts the mulitude of layers in Sulayman’s Kalila, not only physical layers with action in space but also psychological layers within characters and overlapping stories. One clear example of this is the Jackal character.

This is a silent character, fully masked and dressed in black that roams freely around the space, at times intervening in the action in the main space by moving objects or simply watching other characters and, as mentioned before, by writing on the screens. The Jackal was extracted from the original Kalila tales, which feature a pair of Jackals, and personnified/physicalised on stage. The form of this figure with its dark and mysterious demanour, and the iconic shape of the mask was reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis:

“The jackal-god of mummification, he assisted in the rites by which a dead man was admitted to the underworld. Anubis was worshipped as the inventor of embalming and who embalmed the dead Osiris and thereby helping to preserve him that he might live again.

Anubis is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal holding the divine sceptre carried by kings and gods; as simply a black jackal or as a dog accompanying Isis. His symbol was a black and white ox-hide splattered with blood and hanging from a pole. It’s meaning is unknown.

Anubis had three important functions. He supervised the embalming of bodies. He received the mummy into the tomb and performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and then conducted the soul in the Field of Celestial Offerings. Most importantly though, Anubis monitored the Scales of Truth to protect the dead from deception and eternal death.” (Quote taken from www.egyptianmyths.net)

Through its recurring appearance in ancient mythologies, from Egypt to India and probably other cultures too, the presence of the Jackal on stage is in some ways the representation of an archetype; a figure whose primary function may not be fully understood by the spectator (and indeed does not require the ‘inflcition’ of clarity) but whose form with its mythological ramifications conjurs emotions that relate to a deeper/spiritual side of humanity. Thus, for me, the Jackal became a hinge between the animal tales of Kalila Wa Dimna being recounted and discussed on stage and the evocation of an underworld, a darker mythical element in the performance.

Poetry, formalism and anachronism

Given the depth and multi-faceted nature of most elements I have discussed so far, it is unsurprising that the language of the play should also operate with varying modes and layers. The overall feel of the language was archaic in its formalism, deeply poetic with constant recourse to metaphor and similie and an acute awareness of rhyme and rhythm, and contrasted with moments of ‘anachronistic’ speech (in the sense of it feeling distinctly modern), especially from Muqaffa in his asides and casual dialogue with characters such as Asia and Bashar.

Two of the most arresting metaphorical images that remained in my mind after the performance were as follows. The first was in Act 1 scene 3:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Three things are perilous: entrusting yourself to a woman, and be-friending Kings.

ASIA: What’s the third?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Testing poison for strength.

Particularly the last line quoted here, which for me portended to Muqaffa’s fate; his words become his own poison that out-do him in strength.

The second was in Act 5 scene 5:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Palace. The perimeter is the halo and the palace is God.

BASHAR: Why is it on fire?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: To see it! They used ropes of wool doused in tar. The sky is orange.

BASHAR: Black night opened its wreaking orange gob
Wide as an oven stoked on poor human sods!

Without the changes in register of language and the contrast they created in performance, this text could have suffered from being over-dense, but instead Al-Bassam never allows the audience to get too ‘comfortable’ with one style or tone and in this sense the language of the play has its own dynamic within the overall performance.

Multimedia

As I mentioned in the beginning, this performance was the result of a collaboration between artists, one of whom brought a fascinating visual depth the piece through the use of video and image projections, this was Julia Bardsley. Most notable were the projections of Arabic writing over the whole stage during major transitions, these moments worked as the ‘glue’ that held the hinges of the play together; then there was the more isolated video projection of a human eye – a very simple but strikingly evocative moment in the flow of the play. The eye, when seen up-close, has a rhythmical, mesmeric quality with the batting of the eyelid and the retraction/dilation of the pupil, it is also symbolic of the gaze – watching and being watched in a surveillance state and finally it represents the archetype of the all-seeing, omniscient god. In the latter sense the eye in Kalila reminded me of the great eye that appears between the hills of Hiroshima in Kurosawa’s last film Rhapsody in August – it is the eye of the storm, of destruction, but also of knowledge and power.