On Saturday a day-long seminar on UK and Arab theatre was held as part of the British Council's 10th anniversary showcase in Edinburgh. One of the speakers due to attend was the writer and director Jawad al-Assadi, who was born in Baghdad but who for many years has lived in exile in Lebanon. He was unable to travel to Scotland because of the deaths of his brother and nephew, who have been murdered in Iraq in circumstances that grimly reflect Al-Assadi's most recent play, Baghdadi Bath. The playwright sent instead a written statement explaining his absence. We reprint it in full below.
Lyn Gardner
I felt an unprecedented bitterness during the rehearsals for my most recent play, Baghdadi Bath. The play depicts the lives of two brothers who every day drive a passenger bus between Damascus and Baghdad. The text of Baghdadi Bath is, in fact, a biography of these two brothers, with a touch of fantasy that dominates the theatrical action.
Both in the written text and in the performance, the characters face sudden violations (or intrusions) during their daily trips, especially after passing the Iraqi border on the way to Baghdad, where hundreds of passengers and drivers are subject to attack, kidnap, robbery and bloody murder.
What I described in Baghdadi Bath has unfortunately become real in life. My brother and his son were kidnapped as they were driving a bus. They were stopped by 10 armed men in the area of Radwanieh, not far from the infamous al-Rasheed camp, then driven to a remote area in dense palm tree forests, where armed militia have sprung up in great numbers.
The strange thing is that after the escalation of killing, Iraqi drivers, both Sunni and Shia (my brother and his son among them), have got used to carrying two passports: one with a Sunni name to be handed to Sunni militia, and the other with a Shia name to be handed to Shia militia. But my brother and nephew fell into a trap: their kidnappers appeared in the costumes of Shia militia, so my brother and nephew handed them their Shiite passports, thinking that their rescue was guaranteed, only to discover a few moments later that the kidnappers were actually Sunni.
This is the perfect Iraqi theatre of blood. It's the theatre of masks, which leads to brutal murder. My brother and nephew were kidnapped, interrogated and tortured for days, then endured a surreal trial with a mock judge, who asked the kidnapped to pray because their death at dawn was inevitable.
Irtiqa al-Assadi, who had hardly reached his teens, was slaughtered in front of his father, Hussein al-Assadi, who was then also murdered. Both were thrown into a large hole with many other dead bodies. The palm trees were the only witnesses.
What has Iraq become?
