‘The most beautiful laugh is from a place of pain’

Ghanem al-Sulaiti in  a scene from the TV series Tasaneef. Facing page: A scene from the 2009 series How Long.By Hamza JilaniOn the sidelines of the Doha Film Institute’s creative writing workshop, dubbed Qoul Qousa, Gulf Times seized the opportunity to sit down with the programme’s presenter, renowned actor, playwright, director and producer Ghanem al-Sulaiti. You might have heard his name from hit Arab plays and series like Zelzal, Hello Gulf, and Fayez Al Toush. If not, you might need to get out more!But what’s the story behind this legend? Where did he come from? It turns out, like just about every big hit out there, al-Sulaiti just seems like he was born for theatre:“When I was 7 years old my family would beat me because people wouldn’t visit us. I would act like the guests in an animated and exaggerated way,” he recalled his earlier days. “‘I’m not going to visit you because of that monkey of yours,’ my grandmother and so many others would say to my family,” the lively veteran actor said. “Then I started school. It didn’t stop there. I would act like anyone.”However, he didn’t know he had a knack for the theatre arts when he was young. “When I was a kid I didn’t know what theatre was. I knew the street.” he says, adding that since his father died when he was merely a year old, he didn’t have the right kind of family pressure to control his ambitions to become an actor in the Arab world.“I didn’t have the pressures of a father to not study film and theatre. Although I did have a lot of resistance from my family members it wasn’t enough to stop, only a father can do that,” he says. “I was good in school. In fact, I was very good in school, and I could’ve studied anything I wanted and gotten into any college. But I wanted to be selfish. And I was very selfish.”He went on to study and graduate from the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Cairo and thereafter wrote more than 15 successful plays on social and political issues with around 350 hours of material, he says. But with all of his talent in the different genres and his garnered success, he says his favourite theme to work with is black comedy.“I consider laughter as a dangerous weapon that can change, destroy, illuminate. If you tie laughter with pain you have the most impact. The most beautiful laugh is from a place of pain,” he says, adding that “when an audience laughs from a place of pain stemming from personal experience, but when a socially or politically geared story is portrayed, people get enticed and fired up. They break their shackles. You see it all over the world. Theatre’s [main aim] is to educate.”But while true powers of influence exist through such entertainment, the life of theatre arts is struggling and suffocated in the Arab world. Al-Sulaiti admits that he has had several of his productions’ showings which take place in Ramadan stopped by television stations. “I’ve had plays and series cut off from their showings in the middle of the programme because of their content. Some were too revolutionary or touched on sensitive cultural issues,” he chuckles. According to al-Sulaiti, whether he’s acting, producing, directing or scriptwriting, he’s doing only part of the job. Every job, he says, has to be done perfectly.“The hardest aspect of an actor is to not act: Once you know you are acting, everyone else knows. You have to leave your life outside. It’s all about absolute self- and mind control,” he maintains. “You need to love theatre, understand it, be truthful, have conviction and training. My mom died in 1998 when I was in the middle of acting for Zelzal (Arabic for Earthquake). I took two days to mourn and that was it. I have to leave it all outside. Otherwise you lose everything.”The proud father of five children says that while his kids are all interested in creative arts, he surprisingly wouldn’t let them pursue a career in the film industry, simply because of his experiences.“There’s a lot of pain and sacrifice in this industry. I love my kids and I don’t want them going through that. Opportunities are better in the West, but until we achieve true freedoms to rights of expression, it’s a struggling and suffocated road,” he says, without going into further detail.Nevertheless, al-Sulaiti says that his work also taught him to be a fighter, that his only hobby is acting and related theatre arts. But it’s hard work. Typically, a series will take him eight to nine months to write, sometimes as little as five months, whereas a play would take him around a year.“A play is more focused. In a play, you need better timing and you have be able to get the point across faster. A series gives you more time,” he explains.