An Article by C. N. (1385 words, 7 min. read)
We grew up with the sound of shells louder than bedtime stories. Our childhood was split — not in years, but in barricades, gunshots, and the kind of silence that only comes after an explosion. We Lebanese, never needed a history book to understand what war is. We lived it. We carry it.
That is why Khiyal Sahra hit us in a way we did not expect. It is more than a play. It is memory brought to life; memory we buried, blurred, joked about, denied. Written and directed by Georges Khabbaz, and produced by Tareck Karam, the play brings together Khabbaz and Adel Karam on stage for the first time — two artists who have long been part of our collective voice, now confronting a collective wound.
Khiyal Sahra is a reckoning. A stripped-down, emotionally charged reflection on the Lebanese Civil War, memory, masculinity, and the illusions we inherit. Premiering at Casino du Liban and later performed at Dubai Opera, the play blends political commentary with absurdist humor, personal confession, and musical storytelling. It is theater as confrontation, as catharsis, and as a quiet act of resistance, crafted with sharp writing, fearless performances, and a message that lands hard: wars end, but the damage lingers in those left behind.
Text
This script does not try to impress, it tries to understand. And in doing so, it reaches a place that most political speeches and history books never could. Khabbaz wrote these words like someone still trying to make sense of what happened, and it shows. The writing is quiet where it needs to be, explosive where it hurts, and always rooted in lived experience. Nothing is forced. It flows like a memory that keeps coming back when one least expects it. We sit in the audience and feel like someone finally said what we have all been thinking, not just about the war, but about what it left behind inside us.
But what makes the text truly remarkable is the way Khabbaz writes it with a subtle hand and a poet’s ear. The rhymes, the echoes, the perfectly timed replicas. The lyrics, the poetry, even the bad words. There is never vulgarity for its own sake, yet the dialogue stays raw and honest, never sanitized. It is beautiful without being polished, emotional without being sentimental. Khabbaz finds the exact language of pain and memory, and delivers it with clarity and heart. Itis a script that sings and stings in the same breath.
Topic
This is not another piece “about the war.” It’s about our war, and more importantly, what it did to us as people. What happens when two young men pick sides in a fight that was never really theirs? When they think they are heroes, only to find out they were just pawns? In Khiyal Sahra, one is Muslim, the other Christian. One from the leftist, pro-Palestinian side, the other a right-wing militiaman. Opposing ideologies, opposite identities, and yet, they speak the same language of loss, fear, and fractured dreams. What begins as rivalry becomes something closer to partnership. Even friendship. Because underneath the slogans, like any Lebanese, they share the same sense of belonging, the same warmth for this broken country they both think they are saving.
Khabbaz and Karam take us into that heartbreak, that confusion, that twisted pride that many of us knew too well. The nostalgia in the play is not sweet, it is heavy. It is the smell of sandbags and burned tires. The ache of a time we survived but never fully left. The play remembers. And that is what makes it powerful.
Humor
What do we do when the pain’s too big? We laugh. And that is exactly what this play does. It lets us laugh at the ridiculousness of our own tragedy. The fake swagger of boys in uniform. The way we all talked big while hiding behind ideology and slogans. Khabbaz and Karam use humor like only Lebanese can: it is sharp, ironic, full of that dark absurdity we grew up mastering. The jokes land deep. They remind us how we survived: not just through luck, but through sarcasm. Because sometimes, that was all we had.
Acting
Watching Khabbaz and Karam on stage together felt like watching two sides of the same coin. They are different but mirror each other. Khabbaz, with his surgical timing and deep emotional core. Karam, raw and fiery, his rage barely covering his heartbreak. Their chemistry is performance, a dialogue between two souls who lived through the same fire. Every line, every silence, feels earned. When they argue, it is real. When they grieve, it is ours. This is not justacting. It is remembering.
Scenography
When the play started at Casino du Liban, we felt like we were back in 1985. The set was divided down the middle — like Beirut once was — and the two black leather car seats, stolen straight from another era, felt like ghosts from the street. Cement blocks. Jute sacks. The kind of scenery that once was our everyday reality. The projections behind them — newsflashes, ruins, propaganda — reminded us that this isnot fiction. It is reconstruction. Not just of a place, but of a trauma. The stage was not just a space. It was a scar… still open.
Staging as Memory
The staging of Khiyal Sahra reveals the deep vision of Georges Khabbaz, not just as a writer and actor, but as a director who knows how to shape silence, space, and memory. His control over every element of the scene is clear: the rhythm of the transitions, the movement between past and present, the symbolic layout of the stage,all build toward an experience that feels both intimate and epic. Khabbaz does not decorate the space; he uses it like a wound exposing layers, pausing for breath, and letting contrast do the emotional heavy lifting.
There are moments where the play echoes the texture of Broadway or London’s West End, not in imitation but in ambition. You feel it in the structure: the balance between dialogue, music, and visual rhythm. You see it in the irony of the grand theatrical format used to tell such a brutally local, stripped-down story. There is something of Hamlet in this, especially as the characters spiral between madness, reflection, and moral collapse. But it is Hamlet through the lens of Beirut. Khabbaz borrows the scale of global theater and fills it with the soul of Lebanon — contradictory, wounded, and human.
The final scene is where his direction reaches its quiet peak. After all the passion, violence, and ideological fire, the stage transforms into something stripped and gray. We see the two former fighters — once loud, proud, and delusional — now standing as tired security guards in front of dead ATMs, during the 2020 collapse. No longer fighting for ideology. Just surviving. Just watching. They are not protecting people anymore. They are protecting machines that do not even work. This shift is handled with devastating subtlety — no overstatement, no sentimentality. Just stillness.
And then, in the final moments, something shifts. The stage quiets. The energy drains from the air. We do not get a dramatic climax or a clean resolution, we get something heavier. Something real. What happens is not shouted, but it stays with us. Khabbaz does notannounce it. He lets the silence do the talking. And in that silence, weare left with the unsettling weight of everything that came before; the lost years, the false pride, the pain we thought was behind us. It is a final note that does not end the story, but deepens it. Long after the lights go out, it lingers.
After the Applause
This is more than theater. It is therapy. For anyone who lived those years — or who inherited their silence — Khiyal Sahra feels like someone finally sat us down and said: I remember too. It is a play about war, yes, but more than that, it is about what war does to the human spirit. To men who once thought they were fighting for something. To the mothers who waited. To the country we kept trying to fix by breaking it more.
It never offer answers. Just a mirror. And maybe that is what weneeded all along. Not someone to explain the past to us, but someone to feel it with us.
