Theatre Review: Oh My Sweet Land

Director: Amir Nizar ZuabiCast: Corinne JaberRating: ****When Syria has become just another news to us, pictures of dead Alan Kurdi or stunned, bloodied Omran Daqneesh have ceased to disturb our mind, casualties have been reduced to mere numbers and we are seldom bothered about who is killing whom, Corinne Jaber appears on stage with her production, Oh My Sweet Land.At an elementary level, the play is all about making kibbeh — a torpedo-shaped Syrian fried croquette, stuffed with cooked minced meat, onions and pine nuts. Thus, on the stage of Max Mueller Bhavan, we find an elaborate set of a western kitchen with a cooking range at one side, a big double-door refrigerator at the other and a kitchen top at the centre. Corinne — a Syrian-German woman — tells her story while chopping onions, mincing meat, sprinkling spices and breaking pine nuts. As the aroma of exotic spices engulfs the auditorium, we hear the tale of her journey, to find her beau — Ashraf.She meets Ashraf, a Syrian refugee in Paris. She falls in love and he finds comfort under her cocoon. They make love and poof, Ashraf disappears. She embarks upon a journey to find Ashraf — a married man deeply in love with his country. Panning Syrian town one after another, our obsessive-compulsive cook narrates her experience — from horrid account of shelled farmlands to stories of mothers’ desperations to save their children from airstrikes. And all the stories find themselves neatly knitted into the kitchen’s narrative.The play pitts the grotesque picture of the never-ending civil war against the solace of food. The human story behind the crisis is depicted with poignance. It is not a story of a single Ashraf. It is about many, many Ashrafs who are less fortunate and dying in the kill field of civil war. It is about the state, the rebels, the West and the fundamentalists who have been sucked into a mindless vortex of killing, bombing, annihilating human civilisation bit by bit with every passing day, while the rest of the world, after paying a mere lip service, turns away. At the end of the play, Jaber says, “There’s nothing more to say.” Indeed, we nod. Corinne Jaber and the Palestinian playwright and director Amir Nizar Zuabi have once again shown that the theatre in the West is choosing a new intimate idiom to remain socially alive. The play ends with the most gruesome act — our obsessive-compulsive cook heats oil in a fryer, gently dips the croquettes into the oil, opens the door of her refrigerator and collapses in the darkness. As her vanishing silhouette unblocks our gaze, we see piles of raw meat peeping out of the fridge as the sizzle of the frying meat overwhelms the auditorium. The smell of kibbeh lingers as does the consciousness of a raging war.