“I have a personal mandate and it happens to be deeply politicised,” the award-winning theatre director and playwright Yaël Farber tells me when I meet her at London’s Southbank on the penultimate day of the London run of her play Nirbhaya, as part of WOW – Women of the World Festival. “I don’t think there’s a single thing we do in our lives that is apolitical – from the clothes we buy, to the coffee we drink, to the way we speak to the homeless person on the street, even what we choose to forget.
“I’m a white South African,” she continues. “I grew up in a society that was deeply engaged with rearranging facts so that we believed certain things and were able to dispense with empathy for fellow human beings.”
Farber is worried it sounds rather “grandiose”, clearly uncomfortable with being misinterpreted, but admits that her work is driven by a participation in “the repair of the world”. Take, for example, her testimonial theatre and you find a deep engagement with the trauma caused by the society she grew up in. Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise, based on the lives of its cast, told the stories of five South Africans who came of age during the most brutal years of the country’s apartheid regime; Woman in Waiting explored what life was like for women under apartheid, told through the memories of one woman, Thembi Mtshali-Jones; and He Left Quietly was based on the life of Duma Kumalo, a man who, through one of the many miscarriages of justice that occurred during apartheid, spent years on South Africa’s death row.
Nirbhaya is equally politicised, but it’s also a production that combines testimonial with protest theatre, something of a new direction in Farber’s work. It’s based on the horrific real events of December 2012 in India. A woman, thereafter dubbed Nirbhaya (Fearless) by the press, was gang raped by six men on a bus in Delhi, sexually assaulted so violently with an iron bar that 95 per cent of her intestines were destroyed. After 90 minutes of torture, she and the male friend she’d been travelling with (himself beaten up by the attackers) were thrown from the vehicle where they then lay in the street, ignored by passersby for a further two hours.
The police were finally called but didn’t want to soil their uniforms with her blood, so her gravely injured friend had to lift her into a car to eventually take her to hospital. Thirteen days later, Nirbhaya died from her injuries, but in the meantime all hell had broken loose: the story became international news; people took to the streets of India to protest against the country’s ignored but pervasive sexual violence; and Poorna Jagannathan, a Bollywood/Hollywood actress contacted Farber with her own confession and cry to arms: “I am a victim of sexual violence who has been silent all these years,” she wrote to Farber, recorded by the latter in a piece about the play’s genesis published in The Guardian. “By keeping quiet, I consider myself a part of what happened on that bus. Come here. Women in India are ready to break their silence and speak. There is no turning back.”
Jagannathan was indeed ready to speak out and the play is as much about her and the other female cast members’ stories of abuse as it is Nirbhaya’s. Farber used the horrific incident on the bus as a catalyst for the other players’ stories, and each woman involved breaks her years of silence on the stage.
Discussing the perpetual lack of funding for the arts (the money for Nirbhaya’s Indian tour was raised in a Kickstarter campaign), Farber confesses, however, that she’s actually extremely grateful for not having been handed “a whole lot of toys to play with on stage” when she was younger, as without deprivations “I would not be the director I am today where I have had to make things from nothing”. Nirbhaya is a beautiful case in point – raw, stripped down but immensely moving – that allows what Farber calls “the gestures of theatre to fill in the soul of the story”: symbolic images or props, considered movement and specific lighting or sounds.
As with all of Farber’s testimonial work, Nirbhaya was written in close collaboration with the actresses whose stories the play tells. “I ask many, many questions,” the playwright explains. “I provoke their memories by asking about songs, smells and sounds. I gather a lot of material on each person and then I distil it down.” The stories may not be hers, but she is the writer of the words spoken on stage. It’s a creative method she likens to the therapeutic process and indeed, the term “talking cure” springs to mind. “Memory is very random, very chaotic,” Farber says, “so I’m there to construct the narrative.” She then goes on to compare her writing process to that of an archaeologist “scraping away at the layers” of her subjects’ memories, “finding the bones and piecing them together” – the same analogy used by Freud to describe his psychoanalytic work with patients who had suffered trauma.
What makes Nirbhaya so potent – the entire audience rose in a standing ovation the night I was there, and messages left outside the theatre and on Twitter and Facebook all speak of people being powerfully affected by the experience – is its unique mixture of testimonial, transformation and protest.
“It’s civil war,” Farber says about India’s horrifying sexual abuse statistics, without any shadow of the dramatic. “It’s fellow citizens turning on each other and there is a blanket of silence around it.” Thus the play is about both bearing witness and laying claim to the events of the past – as was the case with Amajuba, Woman in Waiting and He Left Quietly – but doing so in order to mount a movement of change; in this sense the play is also a scream of protest. This might be a new facet of Farber’s work, but it’s clearly something that lies in her background as she recalls watching protest theatre as a teenager in South Africa in the 1980s, speaking of it in similar terms to the political and social context of Nirbhaya: “We were in the midst of this incredible and pervasive silence and people were trying to bust through that with their narratives. I watched people literally trying to wake us up on that stage.”
The immediacy and the closeness of the communication that happens in the theatre space is central to Farber’s manifesto. “Theatre,” she says, “is a very humble endeavour.” It’s not about recording a moment on film that’s then stored and watched by millions, it’s urgent in its directness and fleeting nature. “Night by night, 100 people at a time, you create a transmission that, if it’s done well, is beyond the capacity of any other art form I know.” She takes, for example, the meaning of acting extremely literally – actors are people who take action. “I don’t think the word ‘act’ is to pretend. “I think I’ve been profoundly rocked by theatre maybe two or three times in my life, but I make theatre in order to emulate those moments that shaped me.”
The other body of Farber’s work is adaptations – she used Sophocles’ ancient Greek Theban Plays as a lens through which to examine leadership, accountability and the nature of democracy in the foreign policy of a contemporary superpower in Kadmos; Molora was a radical adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy in the context of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Sezar transposed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to contemporary Africa; as did her last production, Mies Julie, a South African-set adaptation of Strindberg. She’s keen to return to Shakespeare again in the future in the form of a Middle East-set adaptation of King Lear that hinges on the idea of the ownership of land – one in which Lear is the head of a post-genocidal community and thus the legacy he’s so desperate to pass on to his daughters isn’t simply his kingdom but a homeland he believes is his by ancient right. But his daughter Cordelia can’t see it as anything but occupied territory and thus not hers to inherit.
These issues – basic human rights, the ownership of the body and the ownership of land – are those Farber returns to over and over again. Essentially, she says, her work is about “the messy struggle of what it is to be human and how we’re all just desperately trying to get a foothold in some certainty in this existence, and the damage we do to each other inside that”.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
thereview@thenational.ae
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Race card
6.30pm: Emirates Holidays Maiden (TB), Dh82,500 (Dirt), 1,900m
7.05pm: Arabian Adventures Maiden (TB), Dh82,500 (D), 1,200m
7.40pm: Emirates Skywards Handicap (TB), Dh82,500 (D), 1,200m
8.15pm: Emirates Airline Conditions (TB), Dh120,000 (D), 1,400m
8.50pm: Emirates Sky Cargo (TB), Dh92,500 (D)1,400m
9.15pm: Emirates.com (TB), Dh95,000 (D), 2,000m
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Results
2.15pm: Handicap Dh80,000 1,950m
Winner: Hello, Tadhg O’Shea (jockey), Ali Rashid Al Raihi (trainer).
2.45pm: Handicap Dh90,000 1,800m
Winner: Right Flank, Pat Dobbs, Doug Watson.
3.15pm: Handicap Dh115,000 1,000m
Winner: Leading Spirit, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar.
3.45pm: Jebel Ali Mile Group 3 Dh575,000 1,600m
Winner: Chiefdom, Royston Ffrench, Salem bin Ghadayer.
4.15pm: Handicap Dh105,000 1,400m
Winner: Ode To Autumn, Patrick Cosgrave, Satish Seemar.
4.45pm: Shadwell Farm Conditions Dh125,000 1,200m
Winner: Last Surprise, James Doyle, Simon Crisford.
5.15pm: Handicap Dh85,000 1,200m
Winner: Daltrey, Sandro Paiva, Ali Rashid Al Raihi.
The Bloomberg Billionaire Index in full
1 Jeff Bezos $140 billion
2 Bill Gates $98.3 billion
3 Bernard Arnault $83.1 billion
4 Warren Buffett $83 billion
5 Amancio Ortega $67.9 billion
6 Mark Zuckerberg $67.3 billion
7 Larry Page $56.8 billion
8 Larry Ellison $56.1 billion
9 Sergey Brin $55.2 billion
10 Carlos Slim $55.2 billion
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Lexus LX700h specs
Engine: 3.4-litre twin-turbo V6 plus supplementary electric motor
Power: 464hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 790Nm from 2,000-3,600rpm
Transmission: 10-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 11.7L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh590,000
More from Neighbourhood Watch
The specs
Engine: 4.0-litre flat-six
Torque: 450Nm at 6,100rpm
Transmission: 7-speed PDK auto or 6-speed manual
Fuel economy, combined: 13.8L/100km
On sale: Available to order now
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Gulf Under 19s final
Dubai College A 50-12 Dubai College B
MO
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Expo details
Expo 2020 Dubai will be the first World Expo to be held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia
The world fair will run for six months from October 20, 2020 to April 10, 2021.
It is expected to attract 25 million visits
Some 70 per cent visitors are projected to come from outside the UAE, the largest proportion of international visitors in the 167-year history of World Expos.
More than 30,000 volunteers are required for Expo 2020
The site covers a total of 4.38 sqkm, including a 2 sqkm gated area
It is located adjacent to Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai South
Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
- Priority access to new homes from participating developers
- Discounts on sales price of off-plan units
- Flexible payment plans from developers
- Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
- DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
The specs: Macan Turbo
Engine: Dual synchronous electric motors
Power: 639hp
Torque: 1,130Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Touring range: 591km
Price: From Dh412,500
On sale: Deliveries start in October
Company%20profile
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SPEC%20SHEET%3A%20APPLE%20M3%20MACBOOK%20AIR%20(13%22)
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If you go
Flights
Emirates flies from Dubai to Phnom Penh with a stop in Yangon from Dh3,075, and Etihad flies from Abu Dhabi to Phnom Penh with its partner Bangkok Airlines from Dh2,763. These trips take about nine hours each and both include taxes. From there, a road transfer takes at least four hours; airlines including KC Airlines (www.kcairlines.com) offer quick connecting flights from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville from about $100 (Dh367) return including taxes. Air Asia, Malindo Air and Malaysian Airlines fly direct from Kuala Lumpur to Sihanoukville from $54 each way. Next year, direct flights are due to launch between Bangkok and Sihanoukville, which will cut the journey time by a third.
The stay
Rooms at Alila Villas Koh Russey (www.alilahotels.com/ kohrussey) cost from $385 per night including taxes.
Dr Amal Khalid Alias revealed a recent case of a woman with daughters, who specifically wanted a boy.
A semen analysis of the father showed abnormal sperm so the couple required IVF.
Out of 21 eggs collected, six were unused leaving 15 suitable for IVF.
A specific procedure was used, called intracytoplasmic sperm injection where a single sperm cell is inserted into the egg.
On day three of the process, 14 embryos were biopsied for gender selection.
The next day, a pre-implantation genetic report revealed four normal male embryos, three female and seven abnormal samples.
Day five of the treatment saw two male embryos transferred to the patient.
The woman recorded a positive pregnancy test two weeks later.
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League semi-final, first leg
Bayern Munich v Real Madrid
When: April 25, 10.45pm kick-off (UAE)
Where: Allianz Arena, Munich
Live: BeIN Sports HD
Second leg: May 1, Santiago Bernabeu, Madrid
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Ten tax points to be aware of in 2026
1. Domestic VAT refund amendments: request your refund within five years
If a business does not apply for the refund on time, they lose their credit.
2. E-invoicing in the UAE
Businesses should continue preparing for the implementation of e-invoicing in the UAE, with 2026 a preparation and transition period ahead of phased mandatory adoption.
3. More tax audits
Tax authorities are increasingly using data already available across multiple filings to identify audit risks.
4. More beneficial VAT and excise tax penalty regime
Tax disputes are expected to become more frequent and more structured, with clearer administrative objection and appeal processes. The UAE has adopted a new penalty regime for VAT and excise disputes, which now mirrors the penalty regime for corporate tax.
5. Greater emphasis on statutory audit
There is a greater need for the accuracy of financial statements. The International Financial Reporting Standards standards need to be strictly adhered to and, as a result, the quality of the audits will need to increase.
6. Further transfer pricing enforcement
Transfer pricing enforcement, which refers to the practice of establishing prices for internal transactions between related entities, is expected to broaden in scope. The UAE will shortly open the possibility to negotiate advance pricing agreements, or essentially rulings for transfer pricing purposes.
7. Limited time periods for audits
Recent amendments also introduce a default five-year limitation period for tax audits and assessments, subject to specific statutory exceptions. While the standard audit and assessment period is five years, this may be extended to up to 15 years in cases involving fraud or tax evasion.
8. Pillar 2 implementation
Many multinational groups will begin to feel the practical effect of the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax (DMTT), the UAE's implementation of the OECD’s global minimum tax under Pillar 2. While the rules apply for financial years starting on or after January 1, 2025, it is 2026 that marks the transition to an operational phase.
9. Reduced compliance obligations for imported goods and services
Businesses that apply the reverse-charge mechanism for VAT purposes in the UAE may benefit from reduced compliance obligations.
10. Substance and CbC reporting focus
Tax authorities are expected to continue strengthening the enforcement of economic substance and Country-by-Country (CbC) reporting frameworks. In the UAE, these regimes are increasingly being used as risk-assessment tools, providing tax authorities with a comprehensive view of multinational groups’ global footprints and enabling them to assess whether profits are aligned with real economic activity.
Contributed by Thomas Vanhee and Hend Rashwan, Aurifer
GOLF’S RAHMBO
- 5 wins in 22 months as pro
- Three wins in past 10 starts
- 45 pro starts worldwide: 5 wins, 17 top 5s
- Ranked 551th in world on debut, now No 4 (was No 2 earlier this year)
- 5th player in last 30 years to win 3 European Tour and 2 PGA Tour titles before age 24 (Woods, Garcia, McIlroy, Spieth)
The specs: 2018 Maxus T60
Price, base / as tested: Dh48,000
Engine: 2.4-litre four-cylinder
Power: 136hp @ 1,600rpm
Torque: 360Nm @ 1,600 rpm
Transmission: Five-speed manual
Fuel consumption, combined: 9.1L / 100km
How to apply for a drone permit
- Individuals must register on UAE Drone app or website using their UAE Pass
- Add all their personal details, including name, nationality, passport number, Emiratis ID, email and phone number
- Upload the training certificate from a centre accredited by the GCAA
- Submit their request
What are the regulations?
- Fly it within visual line of sight
- Never over populated areas
- Ensure maximum flying height of 400 feet (122 metres) above ground level is not crossed
- Users must avoid flying over restricted areas listed on the UAE Drone app
- Only fly the drone during the day, and never at night
- Should have a live feed of the drone flight
- Drones must weigh 5 kg or less
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
PLAY-OFF%20DRAW
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The details
Colette
Director: Wash Westmoreland
Starring: Keira Knightley, Dominic West
Our take: 3/5
RESULT
Bournemouth 0 Southampton 3 (Djenepo (37', Redmond 45' 1, 59')
Man of the match Nathan Redmond (Southampton)
MATCH INFO
Manchester City 1 Chelsea 0
De Bruyne (70')
Man of the Match: Kevin de Bruyne (Manchester City)
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Ferrari 12Cilindri specs
Engine: naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12
Power: 819hp
Torque: 678Nm at 7,250rpm
Price: From Dh1,700,000
Available: Now
First Person
Richard Flanagan
Chatto & Windus
