The Factory

The playwright Mohammad Al Attar and the director Omar Abusaada continue to deconstruct the complex struggle over their burning homeland, Syria.

In the “Factory” they shed a light on the alliances between money and power in Syria before and after the revolution, and expose the war trade and its traders, investigating a true story: In 2010, right before the Arab Spring, in the northern Syrian border, a cement factory is inaugurated by the French interests company Lafarge; it is one of the biggest foreign investments in the country. The popular anti-Assad revolution and its culmination into a bloody strife will define the future of Syria, but the factory will continue its operation at any cost.

The two Syrian artists, who continue to report the total disintegration that is Syria in with poetic terms, return to Onassis Stegi with a tale from the core of the clashes.

Syrian actors come up on stage to chronicle a dark business game, against the background of a broken country.

Credits

Director: Omar Abusaada

Text: Mohammad Al Attar

Stage design & costumes: Bissane Al Charif

Video: Rami Farah, Samer Ajouri

Light: Denise Potratz

Assistant director: Amer Okdeh

Masks design: Mohamad Omran

With: Ramzi Choukair, Saed Al Ghefari, Lina Murad, Mustafa Kur and Saleh Katbeh (Music)

Coproduced by: Ruhrtriennale with Volksbühne Berlin

Thanks to: The legal NGO Sherpa & Marie-Laure Guislain, ECCHR & Claire Tixeire, Jobran Khanji, Muhannad Al Ibrahim, Mohammed Al Hariri, Matthieu Fauroux and Aron Lund for their precious time and help during the research to make this play.

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The Syrians Omar Abusaada and Mohammad Al Atar join the OCC for the third time. In 2012 they took part in Meeting Point 6, the Arab Spring focused festival of contemporary art, with two performance-lectures. They were back in 2016 with the fiction drama "While I Was Waiting", a performance-protest about a country in intensive care. The trigger was the true story of a young man who, after a brutal beating by soldiers, falls into a coma.

The Syrian revolution and the long and bloody clashes that followed have been the exclusive fare of the author Mohammad Al Atar for the last seven years. His first endeavor, "Withdrawal", was presented in 2011 as a chamber play in a flat in Damascus with a couple of refugees as main characters.

They have recently completed their based on major ancient tragedies trilogy with Sophocles’ "Iphigenia". It follows Euripides’ "Trojan Women" (2013) and Sophocles’ "Antigone" (2014).

Omar Abusaada during his theater studies in Damascus, was encouraged by his teachers to involve himself systematically with political art. While writing and directing plays, in 2002 he compiles the Studio Theater group, whose first performances are presented in 2004. Seven years later he will join forces with the writer Mohammad Al Atar and together they will find the artistic voice to record the events that raze Syria. As part of his research, he has for many years been visiting remote villages in Syria, Egypt and Yemen – countries that have been devastated during the last ten years –, organizing performances and workshops involving the inhabitants. Despite the obvious difficulties, he continues to live in Damascus, as one of the few remaining independent artistic voices in his homeland.

Mohammad Al Atar born in Damascus in 1980, studied literature and theater in Goldsmith, University of London. Since 2011, his writing prowess is almost exclusively directed at the events of the Arab Spring and the ensuing bloody clashes that rage unrelentingly.

His first work, "Withdrawal", was performed in a cramped apartment in his hometown, his second,"Could You Please Look into the Camera?", followed a massive wave of arrests in his country under Assad; it is a text made up of testimonies by tortured prisoners. The whole of his work draws from the Syrian writing tradition and has been widely performed in festivals, culminating in "While I Was Waiting", which was performed in the 70th Avignon Festival and in the OCC. In recent years he has been working with his compatriot, director Omar Abusaada; their theater balances between fiction and documentary. Presently residing in Berlin, he is recognized as one of the most important chroniclers of the Syrian war.