JIDARIYYA

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Edinburgh International Festival

„Jidariyya” is a performance on the agony of living and dying , an incantation at the crossing between spirituality and modernity which tries to draw out the ultimate essence of our last shouting into this world. Philosophical deepening of the problem of human life’s meaning, “Jidariyya” is a complex and intense composition of the young Palestinian National Theatre on a play written by a famous Arab poet after his second heart attack. The insolvability of the issue turns this performance into a very imaginative and provocative artistic quest . The successive appearances of death fighting the characters representing desire and the will to live are inspired by various cultural references, among which the biblical is one of the most important.
The staging has a majestic power to overwhelm the common sense, constantly revering the ultimate limit that once crossed didn’t let anyone return. The poetry invades the stage when the main character, a man in his hospital bed, offers a perspective on life sliding from objectivity to profound subjectivity. The hospital is not only the place where the ill man is stripped off his individuality, but also the antechamber of death – the frequent visits of the doctors who can’t defeat death become part of a flowing hallucinatory stream of unconsciousness . The reality of dying can no longer be reduced to what we commonly recognize as reality, thus the doctors begin singing, endless series of questions are raised, the poet arrives at the answers through the appearance of an ideal double and first love reappears – all that while the final clock is ticking. Human dignity is kept until the very last moment with the help of that double who doesn’t let the poet desert his life until all his dreams have been dreamed and all his questions have been raised.
The main element of the scenography is a slight black slope crossing an illuminated background. Instilled with the power to fascinate the mortals, it represents the path of the souls of the dying people to the point of no return. The background is changing color, conforming to the state of mind of the hospitalized man. Like in a musical that surpasses realistic conventions, soon after the doctors have left the room the main character begins to walk and to relate to his ideal double, running into the room chasing after a writer’s desk which doesn’t let them write the final poem. The bed is slowly lifted to vertical for creating a moment of extreme sensual depiction of the first attraction between man and woman. Dying connected to machines that record physiological states is just as strange as the appearances from beyond or from the past. While past, uncertainty and death mingle together, the poet still desires to find the true meaning of life and to write courageously for the last time.