Face of Truth: The Sudanese Theatre Between Ideology and the Question of War..?

Ibrahim Shaglawi

The theatrical performance “Journey of Healing and Summer” brings back to the forefront an important question, according to the critical approach:

Is theatre still capable of producing an awareness that resists war, or at least of providing an understanding of its causes apart from the narratives of the two coups?

And can it contribute to repairing the national fabric torn apart by elites and their ideological conflicts?

The performance, hosted by the Ugandan capital Kampala in mid-September 2025, was written and directed by Mukhtar Al-Nour Sharara, one of the rising names in the Sudanese theatre scene, who chose to engage directly with the question: Who fired the first shot? — through political drama.

Starring Sajda Hassan, in an emotionally charged performance full of striking inner dynamism, and Mohamed Al-Taher Mamdou, who portrayed the hero–victim, or “the living corpse,” in a language that combines absurdity and wisdom, death and protest.

The technical execution involved Mohamed Al-Doun in designing the sound and lighting effects, giving the play an integrated audio-visual dimension, and Ahmed Haroun as assistant director. The work began complete in terms of theatrical structure and direction.

The performance opens with a shocking scene: a corpse carried onto the stage as if to bid farewell in a morgue. But it is not an ordinary corpse — it is the character “Muntasir,” who begins to speak and mock the idea of his own death. The corpse turns into a conscious being that dialogues, provokes, questions, and loudly opens the record of war.

It is a post-silence discourse — the voice of those who were never allowed to speak, of those who found no one to listen while they were alive.

This emotionally charged dramatic structure conceals beneath it a dangerous political question: Who writes the official narrative of war? Who defines the martyrs? And who decides who is patriotic and who is a traitor?

The play deconstructs these dualities not to take a side between them, but to undermine their logic entirely. It stands against war because it embodies the bankruptcy of the national project, revealing a state that has disintegrated into warring fronts and a people turned into fuel for conflict.

At the same time, the play did not address the idea of war as an existential struggle directed against the citizen himself, as reflected in the vast and brutal violations suffered by Sudanese people, nor did it point to the war being fought to restore the state’s prestige.

In this context, theatre itself becomes a party to the battle — a living laboratory for raising the questions that Sudanese political and intellectual elites avoid; those who have surrendered to discourses of revolutionary purity, the demonization of the other, or a deceptive refuge in external solutions that only deepen disillusionment and fragment national spirit.

Yet, despite its artistic boldness, the play blended with ideology without aligning with the homeland or the citizen, and did not offer explicit answers regarding the question of violations against civilians. Therefore, such theatre will continue to cry out in the backstage void, while politicians recycle the same failures in different language.

Journey of Healing and Summer revealed a frightening narrative vacuum in the national discourse.

In the scene of the mother weeping for her son and turning him into a “symbol of the homeland,” the narrative shifts from the land and the people to the anguished and displaced — those who have no voice in the media or political platforms.

Today, the country seems trapped between a deadly trinity: politics that has lost its project, an elite that has lost its credibility, and a war with no clear end. Here, the role of theatre emerges as an alternative space for political discourse that expresses society.

The performance offers no ready-made solutions, but poses courageous questions:

Why do the young people who faced bullets in a peaceful revolution turn into killers or killed in a war they do not understand?

Or perhaps they do understand — especially those who sided with the militias and fought alongside them, as documented by many video clips circulating in Sudan.

But the question remains: why does the state abandon its youth? And how does the revolution turn into a broken memory in the morgue of the nation?

The political analysis of this experience is not limited to Sudan alone; it intersects with the Syrian experience, where political conflict turned into a war of existence, and the state disappeared as an idea and an institution.

There, theatre became a mirror of a torn society — not offering a single narrative, but celebrating the multiplicity of pain: the victim, the fighter, the broken one… all sharing a space in search of meaning, life, and survival.

At the end of the performance, the most dangerous question is posed:

Can solutions coming from abroad produce real peace? Or are they merely a temporary postponement of an unresolved conflict within the national consciousness?

The play does not answer — but it opens the wound. It redefines peace as the recovery of critical reason, the living conscience, and the social fabric that has decayed amid identity and elite conflicts.

According to #Face_of_Truth, Sudan today needs a cultural and social renaissance project that restores the values of diversity, tolerance, and citizenship — values that silently defeat the elites’ refusal to face themselves.

For theatre, with its courage in expression and ability to generate questions, is truer than many hostage negotiation tables and their prepackaged solutions.

Because simply, it does not sell illusion nor beautify disappointment — it presents tragedy as it is.

Stay well and in peace.

Thursday, October 23, 2025

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