Rosemary Behan checks out Rest Upon The Wind, a play based on the life of poet Khalil Gibran, at Emirates Palace. It was a mixed affair, she writes.
Expectations were high for Rest Upon the Wind, a Nadim Sawalha-scripted dramatic interpretation of the life of Khalil Gibran performed last night at Emirates Palace. Alas, the theatre seemed too grand for the production and barely half of the seats – priced between Dh195 and Dh500 – were filled.
The performance itself was somewhat one-dimensional in scope, promising to reveal the life of the man behind such canonical works as The Prophet, but coming across as a rather flat collection of scenes with little interspersion of the author's great works.
To an extent this served to underline the lonely early life of the poet and painter, with Fanos Xenofos’s Gibran exhibiting completely believable if not likeable traits of anger, frustration and borderline depression as Gibran immigrated to Boston and began his writing career.
Of the eight cast members three are members of Sawalha’s own family (Nabil, Zak and Lara); Zak, who plays an Armenian waiter in Boston, speaks with an unlikely cut-glass English accent, as does an Irish photographer and Ottoman soldier.
“Hollow” is how a fellow audience member described the performance of Stephanie Ellyne, who played Mary Haskell, the American headteacher who became Gibran’s benefactor, editor and lover – although her hugely influential role in his life was at least effectively if not powerfully conveyed. I would like to have seen more of her reflections on the “instinctive intelligence” she chose to devote so much of her life to.
Perhaps the most revealing character was that of Gibran’s sister Myrianna, played by Dina Mousawi. Though slightly charmless herself, it’s through Myrianna that we’re shown the real Gibran – a rather mean and frustrated figure at first who is full of unproductive negativity and anger at the world. Her sarcastic repetition of his overblown musings: ‘“I have a voice within me, something is moving deep inside’....Are you pregnant?”’ serves to demonstrate that – as so often with writers – the man and his aspirations are poles apart. Mousawi is also good on Gibran’s hypocrisy – “you are a miserable self”; “You want to liberate the women of the world while I sit here your prisoner?” “You commit yourself to words not people.” There’s precious little humour in the first half, an exception being one of my favourite Gibran lines: “Your children are not your children.”
Thankfully, pushed by Haskell, Gibran experiences his epiphany at the end of the first half, and as the light falls on Zenofos we know he something big is about to happen. The second half is better, with an improved musical score representing the move from stagnation to the momentum of success and the audience getting to experience some of the genuine “spiritual emancipation” that Gibran’s works represent.
There's a lovely, sad and human delivery of an extract from the Life of Love: "Feed the lamp with oil and let it not dim, and / Place it by you, so I can read with tears what / Your life with me has written upon your face." "We were waiting for him to become humble," said one audience member as we left.
