Mama

When men are only passing through, women remain. And in this bourgeois living room in Cairo, they take up all the space. As a place that serves at once to protect family intimacy and to welcome visitors from the outside, this ordinary location provides Ahmed El Attar with countless combinations to express the symbolic and physical imprisonment of the Arab woman and of her children. With Mama, he paints an unforgiving portrait of the mother, made monstrous by her limitless love, and uses his thirteen characters and this living room to expose the audience to a miniature society made up of alternating relationships of power. Each is at the service of the others, and lets him- or herself be buried under things left unsaid. With this play—the last in a trilogy about family—the director dares to shift our point of view on the mother, too often seen as an untouchable object to honour and cherish, in order to make her the mistress of her own destiny, and more largely to explore her responsibility in our time of crisis. Because loving too much or badly has never led to more freedom...

With Belal Mostafa, Teymour El Attar, Menha El Batrawy, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mohamed Hatem, Noha El Kholy, Ramsi Lehner, Seif Safwat , Nanda Mohammad, Hadeer Moustafa, Dalia Ramzi, Heba Rifaat, Mona Soliman, Menna El Touny

Text and direction Ahmed El Attar
Music Hassan Khan
Stage design and costumes Hussein Baydoun
Lights Charlie Alstrom

Production Orient productions, Temple Independent Theater Company
Coproduction Tamasi Performing Arts Network, MC93 Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis Bobigny / Festival d'Automne à Paris, Festival d'Avignon, Le Liberté Scène nationale de Toulon, Maison de la Culture de Bourges Scène nationale
With the support of  Agence suédoise de coopération internationale
au développement, Studio Emad Eddin Foundation
In partnership with France Médias Monde