Four Walls and a Roof

VOICES OF THE ARAB WORLD

Following the captivating performance Looking for a Missing Employee, presented in 2024, artist Rabih Mroué – one of the foremost figures of contemporary political and conceptual theatre – returns to Peiraios 260, this time in a co-directing undertaking with his long-standing collaborator Lina Majdalanie. The Lebanese artists have gained recognition through their lecture-performances, a hybrid format situated between theatre, lecture, and documentary. In 2026, they were awarded the Theaterpreis Berlin for their overall contribution to contemporary theatre. Their work interweaves the political with lived personal experience shaped by life in Lebanon, while also addressing, among other things, the reverberations of regional wars, such as the Syrian civil war. At the core of their practice lies a restless question: what responsibility does the artist bear within a specific cultural and political context?

Referencing their own experience of displacement – their relocation from Beirut to Berlin approximately a decade ago – and confronted with the global rise of the far right, the two artists articulate, in unflinching terms, what it means to live and work in exile. What do expectations of freedom of speech look like within a Western democracy when they collide with lived reality – censorship, propaganda, character assassination, and the many forms through which dominant state narratives reproduce themselves? How free and open is, after all, the liberal democracy we inhabit?

To address these questions, the artists turn to a historical episode that mirrors contemporary mechanisms of speech control. In a resourceful dramaturgical gesture, they interlace present-day experiences of censorship with a historical document: the 1947 interrogation of Bertolt Brecht by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the United States, during his own exile. Using as a springboard the catalogue of absurd questions posed to the German playwright, Majdalanie and Mroué weave a reflection on exile, political persecution, the so-called “cold execution,” and the illusion of a “humanitarian refuge” in a fragmented world.

The event is transformed into a theatrical incident, while this monumental “testimony” enters into dialogue with their own personal material. Featuring original music by Hanns Eisler set to texts by Brecht, the performance combines critical humour, inventive digressions, and urgent questions concerning the artist’s responsibility today. A work that invites us to confront our own position within the History being written in the present – and to reckon with it – through a theatre that dares to unsettle, to awaken, and, potentially, to transpose its audience.