“In my opinion, the greatest catastrophe is that our everyday life has become so absurd. The people live this war with a certain fatalism — as if it were an inevitable normality,” says the Lebanese theatre director Issam Bou Khaled of life in Beirut. “There is nothing more absurd than everyday life during war. Naturally, this civil war through which I have lived, with an occasional intermission, for approximately forty years has made me what I am today. During a war, one lives every moment as if it were one’s last. It leaves its trace. On the stage, I try to treat every moment as if it were the last of the performance,” states Issam Bou Khaled on what defines him.

“It is difficult to say where my love for theatre stems from. Yet, when one is born and lives in a country that has been torn apart by civil war and Israeli invasion, when one belongs to a family whose members were forced to flee multiple times, and has even oneself become a part of the war machine at some point, then one is confronted with an absurdity so unthinkable that it surpasses anything one can imagine on stage....