The 37th Doha Theater Festival hosted the performance of the play "The Captain.” This profound and complex theatrical experience departs from the traditional style of performance and opens a vast intellectual space.
It touches upon questions of existence, leadership, and identity, and unfolds the files of contemporary human conflict in a dramatic and philosophical framework based on symbolism and metaphor, addressing both the conscience and the mind.
The play, whose script was written by Dr Khaled al-Jaber and directed by Ali Mirza Mahmoud, is a dramatic adventure that invites involvement and raises human problems and their complexities, engaging the audience in an internal confrontation with their own anxieties, questions, and fragility.
It's not a story to be told, but a crisis lived out on stage, its features defined by sea storms, conflicting positions, and characters searching for a captain—meaning, authority, leadership, sovereignty, control, and a safe haven to lean on in a turbulent sea.
The events take place on a ship adrift, amidst an endless ocean, in an emergency situation that seems to have begun long ago and remains unclear when or how it will end. Leadership is absent, and the passengers suddenly find themselves without a captain or anyone to steer the ship.
Here, the crisis erupts not from outside, but from within. With the absence of a leader, divisions begin to emerge, and anxiety turns into a fierce intellectual struggle among the passengers over who has the right to command and who can save the ship from the mysterious fate that awaits it.
Each character represents an intellectual or visionary trend, and a broad debate takes place between them that transcends the ship's boundaries, reflecting contemporary Arab and human reality.
Through this conflict, the gradual collapse of trust, the rise of suspicion, and the disintegration of understanding are explored, making the ship a grand metaphor for modern society, at a pivotal moment that confronts everyone with their shared destiny.
Director Ali Mirza Mahmoud chose to take the script to its maximum visual and aural impact, providing the viewer with a complete sensory theatrical experience.
The stage is not merely a space for the audience to be entertained; it becomes the ship itself. The viewer not only watches, but also engages in the experience, feeling the ground sway beneath them, hearing the waves, seeing the darkness, and breathing the tension.
Ali Mirza said: “Every sound of a wave, every tear in the sails, every spot of light, we designed it to be an unspoken sentence. The play is inundated with silent emotion and an inner turmoil that doesn't need to be spoken to be understood.”
A scene from The Captain
