Golden Tanit Award (Best Production)
—Carthage Theatre Festival, 2023

Best Actress Award (Hala Omran)
Best Text Award (Sulayman Al Bassam)
—Carthage Theatre Festival, 2023 and Cairo International Experimental Theatre Festival 2024

The latest performance by director and playwright Sulayman Al Bassam, Mute, is inextricably tied to the contemporary realities of the Arab world. Al Bassam conceived this performance, which premiered in Tunisia in December 2023, taking the Beirut port explosion of 2020 as a point of departure.

With its experimental style and open transgression of the rules of Arab classical theatre, the performance proposes an alternative dramatic structure for contemporary productions, beyond the realm of metaphor and symbolism.

Produced in collaboration with Hala Omran and the music band Two or the Dragon, the performance uses music, singing, prose and audiovisual experimentation to express the kind of thoughts that take hold of our minds at the moment of silence that follows an explosion. Mute unfolds like a poem about pain, art, and theatre while foregrounding silence as an act of resistance against despair or denial.