Syrians act in playback theatre to heal war trauma
beirut — The young Syrian woman walked on stage and began telling the story of her brother’s kidnapping in the early years of her country’s civil war, wiping away tears as she recalled the 2013 incident that changed her life.
The woman, who identified herself as Mae from a government stronghold in the central city of Homs, said Ihsan’s kidnapping in 2013 turned her into a more tolerant person, despite the eight-year conflict that has killed more than 400,000 people and displaced half the country’s population.
Inside the theatre in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, Syrians from other parts of the country who support rival factions listened carefully to what she said. Once she was done, 10 Syrian actors dressed in black began re-enacting what Mae had just said, one of them screaming: “Ihsan, I miss you a lot!” Another walked on stage and said: “No matter what our religion or ethnicity is, we are all Syrians.”
The group of seven men and three women has been training for three months to do “playback theatre” during which members of the audience tell their stories and then see them re-enacted on stage — an initiative to get war victims to talk through their trauma, initiate dialogue and help forge reconciliation.
The training was organised by Fighters for Peace, which was founded in 2014 by former Lebanese militia members who took part in their country’s destructive 1975-90 civil war and are now
peace activists. They have been using playback theatre for years as part of their campaign to promote peace. Despite the mostly friendly atmosphere in the hall on the on the top floor of a building in Beirut, tensions boiled over at one point, reflecting the bitterness and hate that nearly eight years of war has
created in Syria. Once they were done reacting, a young man in the audience stood up angrily and shouted at Mae, screaming that the government was to blame for everything that happened over the past years in Syria in a tone that showed he did not care about her brother’s fate. —