Combating the culture of death

THE ARTS:Iraqi Jawad al-Assadi left behind the paradise of Karbala, and now he finds that his only true home is the rehearsal room, he tells Mary Leland.

For a writer who doesn't like the word "missionary", Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Assadi suggests something of the evangelist. His testament is the power of the theatre to change the way people think, the way they feel and the way they observe the world around them.

In Cork, with his play Bath of Baghdadfor the Midsummer Festival, he is currently looking for lighting equipment for an old cinema he is renovating as a theatre in Beirut, but it is possible to suspect from his work and from a single meeting (with the assistance of interpreter Ghinwa Mamari) that light, illumination and the quality of reflection are crucial to his own creative personality.

Rejecting the missionary imagery, al-Assadi deals with political and religious issues without ever actually getting into either politics or religion. There is an enormous background to the script for Bath of Baghdad, for example, but it is essentially just about two middle-aged brothers finding a small accustomed space for themselves in the midst of a cataclysmic situation. Born in 1947 in the city of Karbala and taking his primary degree at the Baghdad Theatre Academy, al-Assadi is regarded as one of the foremost theatre practitioners of the Middle East, a poet as well as a playwright, an artist rather than an activist, committed, he admits, to finding in the theatre "a way to open a window through which people can see light, see hope, see the components of their lives".

The early components of al-Assadi's own life were contradictory in a way which may have been typical of his country. Karbala is a holy city, its atmosphere charged with religious ritual and observances, its shrines and mosques the revered destination for millions of pilgrims from all over the world. Such an environment doesn't encourage debate, but it is also richly theatrical and ripe with symbolism. For al-Assadi, the theatre is a place for questions rather than for faith. He says that now, in leaving his home, and eventually his homeland, he left a kind of paradise, forced out by the insistent fundamentalist ideology which paralyses intellectual discourse.

That is a culture of death, he believes. "It looks as if this culture, this virus, is spreading, metastasising itself through all Arab society. So here is the real struggle, the conflict between two groups: those who want society to progress, to move on; and those who want to revert. By the time I graduated, the political situation had become very complicated, and all those who were working for democracy and for intellectual freedom were targeted by the regime: actors were arrested even as they were on stage. I had two choices - to stay and submit or to leave and survive."

He speaks of such events only because these are a journalist's questions; although anchored to his creative priorities, he seems to carry the lightest of political baggage and certainly there is no hint of the victim or the dispossessed. The theatre, especially the rehearsal room, is his home now, his paradise. He is a writer who has found his story, and in his working life could be described, in the words of William Galinsky, director of the Midsummer Festival, as a combination of Brian Friel and Michael Colgan, and as prominent in the culturally interactive Middle East as David Mamet in the US. "Jawad's work is not about blaming anyone," says Galinsky, "it's just about facts."

All the same, some of those facts are exceptionally blame-worthy and while we carefully avoid mentioning the war (or almost), it has an insistent presence behind the scenes. Explosions and the crumbling of shattered buildings interrupt Bath of Baghdad, while corruption, invasion, migration and displacement are all part of his themes, as in his play Women in War, which examines the treatment of Arab asylum-seekers in the West.

The baths have a symbolism which might be lost on western audiences. They are the place for a ritual cleansing in preparation for a religious festival, but there is also the commonplace function: the cleansing of the soul, the informal revelations which follow on the warmth, the washing and rinsing and shared intimacies or secrets hidden from the life outside. In this case, the bath, or hammam, has yet another meaning, as part of an ancient tradition whose ghostly visitants seem to frame the two frightened, bewildered brothers in a panorama of history and its memories, linking them to idealised structures that are crumbling as the building itself is collapsing.

'I think that everyone who is forced to leave his first place, his home, his friends, his society, the place for which we make our art, then all places can become home," says al-Assadi.

"It is as if when we have once lost our paradise, it is lost forever. My work for the last 30 years has been the search for that lost place of peace and security, but in fact I have lost both the paradise I had to leave and the one I am looking for. It is an illusion, it doesn't exist." So what is there left? "Only the rehearsal room; society is only the actors. My feeling now is that the theatre is my home, the place which allows me to do what I want to do in my life. Home is the place where I can work."

That place is Beirut, always considered the capital of civil society for Arabs. Again, we don't mention the war, but discuss instead what William Galinsky calls the cultural conversation which has not been had between the US, the UK and the Middle East.

If the greater accessibility of artists, writers, film-makers and musicians from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon could be seen as a kind of collateral benefit, as opposed to collateral damage, from the terrors of the last few years in the Middle East, al-Assadi sees it as a process which began before the Americans and their allies arrived in Iraq. It was a breakthrough led by emigrating intellectuals. Although he has worked on Brecht and Genet, the writer who had the greatest influence on al-Assadi was Chekhov, whose characters vary from the absurd to the existential, but who all together make up the value of the "real theatre" by mapping the social condition.

"I have two reasons to keep writing. I find my tongue in the theatre while in the street I keep silent. Secondly, perhaps more important, is the fact that in the theatre I am able to create an atmosphere, a contact between the performance and the audience. I can start a dialogue, I feel I can make people think about what is pleasure, what is human, what it is which makes them different, which separates them from the pain and confusion outside but which still keeps them in contact with their ordinary lives. And I see this dialogue working in another way too: it is true that there is an increasing fundamentalist domination in Arab society but there is also a growing presence of free-thinking intellectual questioning. And in the West there is a growing understanding that to close the door on Arab culture will only widen the gap between us."

The European premiere ofBath of Baghdad is at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork tonight and runs until Sat as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. www.corkfestival.com