Deconstructing drama, stripping it bare to better understand it, to be able to represent it and present it to us — this is at the heart of Laila’s work, and it invites us to share what we have in common, even if it appears distant and can sometimes seem violent.

Hers is a theatre that uses documents as raw material to create with, and that rejects dramatisation, unlike what we know of the ‘Document as a Performance’ practised in the Middle East and particularly in the Lebanon.

Laila is part of a generation of new Arab playwrights from Cairo, Tunis or from Rabat. She fully aligns herself with new forms of theatre and with a new temporality, a temporality of urgency. And at the same time, these works are an amalgam of knowledge and works from the previous generation, a generation full of ideas about liberty and equality, the motor of modernity in the 20th century. A previous generation often put behind bars by authoritarian and despotic powers. But an influential generation that passed this heritage onto today’s artists, a generation that includes Cheikh Iman in music, Naguib Mahfouz and Sonallah Ibrahim in literature, and the writer and painter Hassan...