Four new texts by play writer Abdel-Fattah Qalaa’ji issued by the Arab Theater Authority

Syrian theater writer Abdel-Fattah Qalaa’ji is considered one of the most outstanding contemporary theater writers in Syria and the Arab world. In more than half a century, he has written more than 76 theatrical texts, issued nearly forty books, and more than 25 theatrical performances by him , were  displayed inside and outside the country.

In honor of his active and busy career, the Sharjah-based Arab Theater Authority issued four texts written by Qalaa’ji during the years of the terrorist war that affected Aleppo as well as the rest of the Syrian cities depicting the criminality and aggression that the city  was exposed to.

On this new edition, Qalaa’ji explains to SANA that the book was published under the title “Four Theatrical Texts”, which combines suffering, human pain, and the oppression and the abolition of the enlightened thought and the darkness and oppression of wars .

These texts, according to him, include the “Fantasy of Madness”a  play that deals with terrorism and its subversive thought by talking about a group of people escaping from a mental hospital, taking refuge in an abandoned theater and performing a theater show where a theater artist, “The Clown”, is trying historical figures such as;  the captain who represents the great power today and the Roman leader Anthony and the poet Omar bin Abi Rabia.

As for the second play,  “The Master of Time, Al-Shihab Al-Sahroudi,” which is, as its author mentions, an epic about the life of the founder of the Al-Sahroudi illumination thought who was sentenced to death in Aleppo Citadel, which is a condemnation of the persecution and annihilation of the enlightenment thought in history.

Regarding the third text,  a play “Kafr Salam” or a dozen of kings pouring coffee for the invading people, where Qalaa’ji showed that its hero, the player of the stories’ box, is returning from his tour to his village, and finds that it is completely destroyed and the corpses of its children are scattered as a result of brutal bombing, so he presents a new chapter in which he displays a flood of memories and personalities about the village and its people.

As for the last play, which is entitled “A Tale of a City named Aleppo .. The Years of Embers and Fire”, he describes as the great theatrical epic of Aleppo, which he did not and will never write a play like it again , explaining that he wrote it in the years of terrorism and the siege that Aleppo witnessed and his personal suffering as his home was destroyed, he was injured and underwent treatment for a long time. The text begins with the story of an author who is under bomb fire searching for a topic for writing, and suddenly a girl who identifies herself as the soul of Aleppo is embodied in front of him and proposes to him to write her biography. The successive events between the present and history continue until the last scene in which the elements of the show meet to form the population mosaic of Aleppo and sing the song of love for the oldest city in the world.

 Qalaa’ji finds that the best and most accurate of what has been written in these texts is what was written on the cover, including: “In this book there  are four texts from the spaces of Abdel Fattah Rawas Qalaa’ji embodying his interest in content, language, dramatic intensity and the technique of scene writing, four of his wonderful worlds .. where he does not stop diverting the course the past to be present and prophecy of the future and does not hesitate to reproduce the characters who settled in the conscience of written and oral texts to introduce them into his worlds. ”

It is noteworthy that Abdel  al-Fattah Qalaa’ji is a writer, theater critic and poet, born in Aleppo in 1938. He graduated from the University of Damascus , Faculty of Letter. He has dozens of books on literature, thought, heritage, translations, poetry, children’s stories, novel and theater.

He served as the head of the Popular Theater Department and head of the Heritage Committee at the Syrian Song Festival. He was awarded the Al-Basel Prize for Intellectual Creativity and the State Appreciation Award, in addition to his many contributions to Syrian and Arab festivals, as a critic, researcher, or arbitrator.

Amal Farhat