BAGHDAD — It looked and sounded like a production by any hip young theater company: an edgy avant-garde script, a wiry and intense cast and a stage set that looked like something out of a war zone.
The half-wrecked backdrop, though, wasn't just for dramatic effect. An Iraqi theater group staged the country's first independent postwar production Sunday in Baghdad's looted, soot-stained Al Rashid theater -- formerly a state-run institution in which only works sanctioned by the government of Saddam Hussein could be performed.
"We are happy, so happy," said director Basim Hajar, coauthor of the play, "They Passed By Here" -- a scathing critique of the Hussein regime that also carried a passionate antiwar message. "For us, this is the real meaning of freedom."
It remains to be seen, though, whether Iraqis will be able to revive what was once a flourishing cultural and artistic life.
Actors and painters, musicians and writers will have to overcome the spirit-deadening effect of decades of repression, along with the corrosive moral consequences of many artists having cooperated with the regime.
Sunday's show played to a packed house of several hundred people, even though theatergoers had to pick their way through a lobby strewn with broken glass and other debris. Walls were scorched black, and wires dangled snakelike from the ceiling.
Most of the theater's plush red seats were still intact, but the stage had been ravaged, with klieg lights stolen, heavy curtains pulled down and the wings left undraped. The bare-bones stage set played to the theme of destruction, with spindly scaffolding, a scattering of broken urns and a dim bank of battery-powered lights.
The capital is still under round-the-clock assault by looters; during the performance, U.S. Army troops patrolling near the theater fired warning shots at yet another gang of would-be thieves. Because the darkened streets remain dangerous at night, the players opted to put on a matinee.
Thrown together in just 10 days, the production draws heavily on "Caligula," Albert Camus' dramatic portrait of the cruel, perverse and megalomaniacal Roman emperor. In one scene of this loose Arabic-language adaptation, a menacing leader exhorts an exhausted, bedraggled soldier to go and fight.
The play reflected Baghdadis' still-raw trauma of seeing their city turned into a battleground. At one point, the characters, hollow-eyed, chanted in horrified unison: "War! War! War!" In another scene, a woman cradled the head of a crouching and weakened man, gently ladling water over him.
