Papers from the Citadel

Review by Sydney Arts Guide

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Adeeb was a refugee from war torn Syria to Lebanon, where he waited in limbo until gaining entry to Australia on humanitarian grounds. He brings a solid background in performance from his upbringing in Syria, and echoes of that distinct cultural style were most evident in his first Australian work, Papers from the Citadel.

The show is a mature, serious work, delivered with impeccable style, accompanied by keynote varied and highly effective low level lights (Theo Carroll), nuanced video (Ali Rezvani) and a diverse live audio (Andrea Lim). Adeeb invites us into his space, so called The Citadel, adorned by pages from diary writings on the wall and floor. Adeeb kept a diary during his long stay in Lebanon, and its words now become the script for an hour-long meditation on the lost survivors of the Middle East, indeed global forgotten, suffering peoples.

One might at first think the room is abstract, a Beckett type confinement from which there will be no exit. Adeeb’s obsession with a small projected lit oblong in the rear right side of the stage must surely be a visual and verbal ruse. His waiting seems so encompassing, so emotional. Language repeats, breaks, fragments. He seeks out words on paper – in a word he will find a code to break free, a hammer to make change. The stage is an intriguing melange of strewn and affixed paper sheets, constantly defined by a continuum of carefully directed, often faint, spots. It is continual night, and he is in solitude with only writing to try to make sense. Somewhere on those pages there are clues to an explanation of the past and a way forward.

If there is a tinge of absurdism, the memory of broken bodies and rubble outside the room is there to qualify disembodied existential dread. Adeeb’s persona becomes the representative of his people, whose suffering finally finds hope as a door is opened. The personal is very public, the private geopolitical. If there is any comparison to absurdism, it is Beckett with reality and hope. Papers from the Citadel is a flickering prayer of hope for the globe’s suffering peoples of the south, trapped in death, war, betrayal, loss of country and transition. There is a navigational sign in the sky, repeated twice – there is a journey ahead, which barely begins in this prelude to a just world order. Welcome to this performer, his team and his vision, to this great southern land.