El Harraz: Melhoun Climbs Back Onto the Stage of the Mohammed V Theatre

ealous jailer, sequestered beauty, suitor piling on disguises to slip past him: the argument of “El Harraz” fits into a single sentence, and Moroccan theater has built a monument on it. The Theatre Mohammed V in Rabat has programmed the play for Friday, September 25 at half past eight in the evening, in a new adaptation after the work of Tayeb Saddiki and Abdeslam Chraibi, directed by Amine Nasseur. The production is carried by the thirty-fifth graduating class of the Institut Superieur d’Art Dramatique et d’Animation Culturelle, the ISADAC, and stands as its final project. Written in the 1960s, the play draws on Moroccan oral heritage and on the world of melhoun, and takes its cue from the poem of the same name attributed to Cheikh El Mekki Ben El-Qorchi.

Reviving Saddiki is no classroom exercise. The company says it chose to question the play’s inheritance and its stage conventions rather than reproduce them to the letter, and to set the memory of Moroccan theater talking with the eye of a generation of actors who never knew its author. That is the whole stake of a repertoire that was never fixed: born of melhoun, an art sung before it was ever acted, “El Harraz” exists only in revival, and every revival rewrites it a little. For these young graduates the evening will be examination as much as performance. Above all it will say whether the national stage can pass on what is hardest to bequeath: not a text, but a way of speaking it.

Photo: Hamdi Maroc, CC BY-SA 4.0.