My childhood was the first source in the development of my feelings, sentimentality, faith and talent, i.e. that emotional reservoir that falls between consciousness and subconscious. I am the son of the city of Zahle, a neighbor of the valley which is my earthly paradise, and the son of Al-Maalufiya, where I grew up, in my opinion “Al-Maalifah are the people of poetry.” who preserved the ad-Dhad language before the Marib dam was destroyed, and they still remain. ” Since childhood, I have loved theater, after I accompanied my mother with a boy for the play “Salah ad-Din” by Fara Antun. After that, I put powder on my face and stood in front of the mirror to play the role of an imaginary hero in front of me. At the age of sixteen I wrote my first play, Daoud, a tragedy in two works, a poem about the clear sea, in which I staged and played the part of King David here. I am very attached to Greek theater in literature, thought and theater, and the secret of this attachment goes back to genealogical psychology, because a person carries in his subconscious his grandparents, war, wounds and talents. Anyone who wants to enter himself in search of his identity must climb the tree of ancestors, and perhaps I found the answer when I read that Bahri’s family, the uncle of Asaad Maalouf, my grandfather’s father, came from in Greek and the most famous of them in the nineteenth century-the writers Al-Maalem Aboud and Hannah Bey. As for my grandfather Anton, he was very good at telling stories about a winter month, next to the stove.
What did the theater give you? And what did he take from you?
It gave me a truly oriental experience, especially with the tragedies and tragedies I had prepared for, I found it in the depths of my personality and my personal life as a translation of its unique concept into Arabic literature. It is a two-way interactive relationship. An example of this is my book Introduction to Tragedy and Tragic Philosophy, in which Father Dr. Noah, Professor of Philosophy and Mysticism at the University of the Sorbonne, that it is the most complete and deeply written in Arabic on this subject. tragedy and tragedy. It is also considered the first Arabic book devoted to tragedy. He paved the way for critical thinking about theater, Aristotle and tragedy. Since the time of Aristotle, not a single book knows of Arabization or criticism of the Arab world devoted to tragedy.
You have been a pioneer of Lebanese theatrical composition since your famous play The Chisel. What is the meaning of text and pluralism (writing, acting, directing) in theatrical work?
– “The Chisel” marked the beginning of modern Lebanese theater and became the solution to a major problem – the loss of the theatrical text written in Arabic, addressed by the Baalbek International Festival Committee, founded in 1956. and performed an active role in the resurgence of Arab artistic culture. I do not support the statement that a theatrical text is not necessary as long as the director is capable of making any text theatrical work. True, the theatrical text does not extend in its entirety without being presented on the stage of the theater, but it is the basis, the beginning, it is necessary. So I prepared for a script in the theater that I was banned from writing. For your information, some statistics show that readers of Shakespeare’s plays crowd out the number of readers of religious books. In this context, I believe in theater democracy based on pluralism, and its basis is the text, its author, the director, then the actor. This is the secret of theater and its magic. The actor is given an important role in highlighting the theatrical character without compromising his originality and originality. In addition, what is surprising in theater is the important interaction that the text evokes, through the director and actor, in the mind of the viewer.
What is the concept of Antoine Maalouf’s theatrical vision?
The theater is the sacred place of its creator and its sacred time, which begins after three steps and the curtain rises when the celebration begins. The Creator came from the world and from man, and rose up, and at his height they are seen in depth, in truth, in destiny. And the spectator, entering the theater hall, is left with the horrible emptiness of home, office, shop and street life. He desires to meet the Truth and the Absolute where things have reached their fullness. Nothing interferes with the written play of his “games”, except a lack of vision. Perspective is poetry, theater is poetry.
What is the significance of your relationship as an Arab playwright in the tragic Greek theater?
Roy has two concerns: the first is the infiltration of Arabic literature into tragic ancient Greek literature so that it does not remain a mix between tradition (tradition of the ancient Arabs) and renewal in the way of Western modernists. but without returning, as they do, to the roots, which are often tragic Greek. The experience experienced by the Arabs during the Abbasid period by the transfer of Greco-Syrian philosophy to Arabic, so that the dawn of a golden age shone upon the Arabs and their subjects. The second obsession is to try to write a tragedy in Arabic, and I have done this in more than one text, so that the two concerns have become a reality that encompasses thought and mental things from a tragic vision based on dealing with fate, removing masks. , loyalty to self and others, and a paradoxical spirit based on a controversial and controversial religion History is a straight line, not a cycle that repeats itself.
What are the possibilities of theatrical language for Antoine Maalouf?
Theater is the arena of practical speaking. It was the language of drama, meaning work, and later theater. In the language of theater, there is no freedom of speech that does not participate in a dramatic work, and every step away from a work in a performance, whether lyrical, epic or philosophical, can only replace the work and be brief without specification and suggest that there is no details. This is my view of theatrical language, which became a reality for me when I automatically used it in my theatrical texts. In a very dialogical way, I was able to combine two different assumptions of language: the first is that it is close to immediate spontaneous language, as it is an expression of the fusion of the hero with reality and the world. Second, being poetry, because it is the language of celebration. From here, short dialogue flooded into my theater, and this caused the text to become fluid, tactful, touching to the mind of the reader-or to the ear of the viewer-easily and clearly. These numerous short passages give the dramatic text a dynamism that is easily understood by the listener or reader, and they express positions or actions concisely and clearly. I wrote my texts in classical language and poetry so that the reader himself could understand them, because only poetry deserves tragedy. In poetry, the writer better expresses the different emotional and psychological states that distinguish each character in the play from the others on stage. Theatrical language is an art that transcends, but does not drown in ambiguity, refinement and pure poetry. It combines the spoken language with the written language of the Qur’an, without falling into overwhelming truth or leaning towards the ethereal ideal.
In my opinion, the playwright, no matter how good he is at drawing characters and presenting a dramatic action, remains second if he is not the owner of a warm vision about the fate of the universe and human destiny.
Source: Al-Akhbar
