Mohammad Al Attar

Mohammad Al Attar (محمد العطار; born 1980 in Damascus, Syria) is a Syrian playwright and dramaturg who lives in Berlin. His plays have been performed in the original Arabic versions or in translation in several countries, including the Middle East, the USA, United Kingdom, France and Germany. His plays are part of Syrian literature in the context of war and imprisonment.

Life and career
Al Attar studied English literature at the University of Damascus and theater studies at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in the Syrian capital. He then earned a master's degree in applied drama at Goldsmiths University, London.

His plays have been staged in translation at theaters in various countries, including the Avignon Festival and the Festival d'Automne in Paris, the Volksbühne Berlin, the Lincoln Center New York, the Royal Court Theatre in London, and the Kunsten Festival in Brussels, as well as at the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw, the Onassis Stegi Cultural Center in Athens and the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

In addition to plays, Al Attar has also written articles for magazines, with a particular interest in the revolution in Syria since 2011. Because of his focus on the fate of refugees and the war in his country, he has been described as “an important chronicler of war-torn Syria.”

Al Attar has lived in Berlin since 2015 and also is a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. For several years, Al Attar has been working with the Syrian director Omar Abusaada. Her theater is characterized by both fictional and documentary elements.

Al Attar's earliest play, Withdrawal, was performed in a cramped apartment in his hometown; his second, Could You Please Look into the Camera, followed a massive wave of arrests in his country. This text consists of testimonies from prisoners who were tortured in military prisons.

Between 2013 and 2017, Al Attar and Abusaada performed a trilogy about the fates of refugee Syrian women, which is based on classical Greek tragedies. His adaptation of Iphigenia after Euripides was shown in 2017 at the Volksbühne in Berlin, preceded by The Trojan Women after Euripides in Jordan and Antigone of Shatila after Sophocles in Lebanon.

In the 2023/24 theatre season, the German premiere of Al Attar's work Damascus 2045 took place in the Theater Freiburg. The piece, set in a utopian future, addresses “the mechanisms of forgetting, the writing of war history and the narratives of the victors and the vanquished.” In March 2024, his play A Chance Encounter premiered in the same German theatre. In the plot, which is based on a real event, Anas, one of the main characters, meets the other protagonist, Walid Salem, by chance in Berlin. In the ensuing court case, both men try to remember their encounter ten years ago during an interrogation by the Syrian secret service. The piece thus addresses “the different meanings of justice and the stories of the past [...] that cannot be buried without facing them.”

Works

 * Withdrawal (2007)
 * Samah (2008)
 * Online (2011)
 * Could You Please Look Into The Camera? (2011)
 * A Chance Encounter (2012)
 * Antigone Of Shatila (2014)
 * While I Was Waiting (2016)
 * Iphigenia (2017)
 * Aleppo. A Portrait Of Absence (2017)
 * The Factory (2019)
 * Damascus 2045 (2019)

Reception
Reviews of the production of his play Iphigenia with Syrian amateur actresses at the Volksbühne Berlin in Tempelhof in September 2017 were largely negative. Critic Christian Rakow reported how Al Attar intended to “subvert common expectations of a documentary evening with refugees. There are no spotlights onto the political situation in Syria, and no close-up views of war atrocities or experiences of escape routes.” - With regard to the expectations of Western audiences, some Syrian authors have complained, however, that their works are often not met with an interest primarily for literary reasons. Rather, their works are expected to meet Orientalist clichés, for example regarding the dangers of the flight into exile or the trope of the oppressed Arab woman.

The German weekly Die Zeit judged that the piece “disarms all criticism by presenting itself hardly as an aesthetic project, but rather as an act of organized sympathy.” Further reviews in other German news media highlighted the acting performance, which was characterized by authentic and personal stories, but they criticized the classical Greek references as “not suitable.”

The more positive review of the production of A Chance Encounter highlighted how the author “continues to turn the screw of complexity, away from deadly struggles and towards the realities of life. In doing so, he gets really close to the audience, makes the distance to distant torture chambers disappear and anchors them as part of our history.“

A detailed description of Al Attar's theatre was published by the writer Caspar Shaller in Die Zeit in 2017. He pointed out that the text for Iphigenia had been written in collaboration with eleven Syrian women, "not only to merge their stories with Euripides' text, to give them a voice, but also to achieve a cathartic effect for the women themselves." In this context, Shaller also referred to the Theatre of the Oppressed as known by the Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal, as a method setting people free.