JOGGING: THEATRE IN PROGRESS by Hanane Hajj Ali

“One Woman’s Beirut”

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 16 January 2019

The premise of Jogging is simple: a woman wills her middle-age limbs to move, sending her past the cracked walls and unwatered potted plants of present-day Beirut.

But Hanane Hajj Ali, writer and performer of this touring piece, has something more nuanced in her sights. She is jogging after all, not running. This means every move she makes, every character she describes on the bare stage is in casual rhythm; when she talks to the audience she turns up the house lights, as though chatting with friends in her living room.

The effect is quite surprising. Hanane becomes a node of potentiality: it feels like she can meet and become anyone at any point in the city. The people most special to her are ‘Medeas’ – great women of resistance. One such woman insists she is not the suffering character in Dario Fo’s A Woman Alone. Another murders her family by adding poison to the fruit salad.

Hanane observes that her ‘Medeas’ reflect the city’s capacity for building and destruction, but their singular acts of resistance are meaningless next to it.

I admit this is where Hanane loses me slightly. Is she telling me these stories because this is how she feels? Does she know why she feels this way?

Earlier on Hanane also mentions she is an activist. But what of?

The script does not signpost the answers I am looking for. Why does Hanane choose these specific women, some of whom seem less ‘Medea’ than others? She performs, for instance, a character who watches as Israeli soldiers plunder her city. It is not clear how the woman resists.

It is also glaring that the men and children and grandparents of the civil war are left unmentioned.

But while this leaves me unconvinced of the connection between feminism and the tragedy of the city, there is an odd comfort seeing that Hanane has sensed something so different from what I sense in her observations.

Hanane’s Beirut is a delicate contradiction. She is funny, breezing through each stand-up routine. Yet she is foul-mouthed and completely militant as she performs the random acts of blasphemy that people commit.

This contradiction is reinforced by an inspired use of light by designers Sarmad Louis and Rayan Nihawi, as they cast Hanane’s shadows on the black box walls and imbue her stories with shifting gestures. Particularly enjoyable are the instances when the shadows are obscured to an ambiguous shape, when it is impossible to tell if the characters are laughing or crying.

And through it all, Beirut somehow manages to holds itself together. Like its inhabitants – the characters in Hanane’s narrative – the city struggles to restrain its violent past, but it also yearns forward and laughs.