Masra7eyeh
This weekend we got acquainted with the appallingly horrible world of the Jordanian theatre works. I have never in my life witnessed such horrendous attempts at entertainment / art (it kills me to even mention the word “art” in the same sentence as “Jordanian theatre”). I have seen many, many, many elementary school plays that were in much higher standards than the ones we saw yesterday, which were apparently performed and directed by some of the most highly regarded and respected players in the field.
WOW.
Thursday night, a couple of friends and I went to Masrah Il-Thaqafeh to watch a “comedic” play entitled “‘Alam Digital”, directed and acted by “Professor” Mizher Yassin, who, in his own words, wrote over a hundred novels and over 15 plays. Half an hour after the scheduled time of 8:00, we get a very unpleasant surprise. The director has decided that for entertainment purposes, the audience will first be put “in the mood” with Habayeb, a Moroccan singer way too overdressed for the occassion and who successfully managed to give us a headache after 30 minutes of off-chord oldies.
It was then that we decided to check out a different play happening in the theatre next door called “3elmi 3elmak”, directed by Ghanam Ghanam. We had initially refused to go to that one because we think that its director is an imbecile, having been subjected to his inane company at the documentary screening of “Sabra and Chatila: The Past Continues” at Mohtaraf Al-Remal, where its director, Lebanese Hicham Jurdi, was a guest and was thus answering questions at the end of the documentary. That night, Ghanam asked a series of hey-I’m-a-great-director-and-I-think-you-suck-type-of-questions along the lines of “Why was there a river in the background in the first scene when the experience of Palestinians in the 4th scene is heart rendering?”
Walking into the second play, and with Ghanam’s disdainful questions to Hicham Jurdi in mind, I was expecting something of professional grade. Ha. HA! From the glittery party cones used as hats on the set to that over-exaggerated acting, the play at least successfully had me laughing my ass off at the sheer absurdity.
Unfortunately though, my friends could not handle more than 10 minutes of such high degrees of non-intentional humor, and so we decided to go back to the first play, in hope that the Moroccan Habayeb was done with her screeching. Needless to say, she wasn’t, so we hung around outside the theatre for 15 minutes, and went back inside only when the play had started, hoping that our hour of time wasted waiting for it to play were worthy.
The play opened with a man wearing a purple Halloween mask with the curly pink hair started blabbing on stage, with jokes along the lines of “Ma 3endo dameer, la motasel wala monfasel.” After Habayeb and Ghanam, we weren’t very surprised, but what really horrified my friends and I is the fact that the audience was actually laughing (their unexplained laughter eventually sent me into a wave of giggles, and in the end, we agreed that the audience is the funniest part about the comedy in Jordan).
Regardless, we decided to stick to the first 10 minutes of the play anyway, until sometime in the 5th minute, the actors started reading Quraan, reciting Hadeeth, and telling the audience to be better Muslims, prompting us to leave. I would have understood if the morals part of the play came towards the end, but in the 5th minute of a play tagged as comedic?
And that is the sad case of the Jordanian theatre scene. What really makes it much sadder is that it was much better 15 years ago.
