Anger management

• Last Updated: February 27. 2009 1:00PM UAE / February 27. 2009 9:00AM GMT

“It’s a microcosm of Lebanon. People don’t want to see it,” Zeina Daccache says of Roumieh Prison, where she has directed Twelve Angry Lebanese. Dalia Khamissy/ADDL/Catharsis

The latest – and most unlikely – revival of a venerable courtroom drama is being staged by inmates at Lebanon’s most notorious prison. Eyad Houssami reports from Roumieh.

For a Cold War after-dinner television drama, Twelve Angry Men has travelled unusually far. Screenwriter Reginald Rose first penned the script as a teleplay for the CBS programme Studio One in 1954.

Set in a hot, stuffy New York courthouse, the play focuses claustrophobically on a jury deliberating the fate of an 18-year-old accused of patricide. At first, all the jurors save one stalwart dissenter are certain of the defendant’s guilt; heavy debate ensues, perceptions shift, and finally the jury pulls an about-face and agrees to acquit the boy of murder, laying bare the fragile contingencies of justice.

Not long after its debut on the small screen, the script was made into the now-classic film starring Henry Fonda. At the time, both productions were regarded as parables for America’s McCarthy years. But a steady stream of stage and film adaptations soon carried the script far beyond connotations of the Red Scare. In 1986, the script found its way to Bollywood; in 2007 Nikita Mikhalkov set Rose’s drama in a Russian courtroom for his film 12.

Now, from the bowels of Lebanon’s largest prison, Rose’s play has emerged in what is perhaps its grittiest and most striking adaptation. Directed by Zeina Daccache and performed by 45 Roumieh Prison inmates, the work has been renamed Twelve Angry Lebanese. The result of a year-long drama therapy initiative led by Daccache, the production is reinvigorating Beirut’s stale, self-obsessed performance scene.

Valentine’s Day was a day of pilgrimages in Lebanon. While thousands descended on Martyr’s Square to mark the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Rafik Hariri, 140 audience members trekked to a jail to attend a play. Roumieh Prison houses more than 4,000 criminals (four times its intended capacity), among them four generals accused of involvement in the Hariri assassination as well as members of the Fatah al Islam, a militant Islamist group.

Perched on the western shoulder of the forested Metn hills, the penitentiary overlooks a string of eyesore Beirut suburbs and commands a five-star view of the Mediterranean – in fact, the concrete fortress bears an odd resemblance to the upscale Sheraton Hotel in Damascus. But the likeness only goes so far. Designed by Pierre El Khoury in the early 1960s, the severe, hexagonal prison mainly elicits a crushing sense of fatalism.

“It’s a microcosm of Lebanon. People don’t want to see it,” says Daccache, who first visited the prison 10 years ago as an assistant stage manager with Clowns Without Borders. “But it’s fertile. Theatre is nourished by people’s hunger: the bigger the hunger, the bigger the theatre.”

A Gucci-clad woman holding the reservation list and a dozen bemused soldiers greet the audience at the entrance to the prison. After traversing two more checkpoints, we land in a courtyard, a Suprematist bricolage of cell windows accented by hanging laundry. The performance hall, sentinelled by a dozen soldiers, smells like an old motel room. The whitewashed concrete walls, the beat-up red carpet, and the dusty audience risers charge the space with a bizarre circus cheer.

Twelve Angry Lebanese is a rugged theatrical collage. Daccache uses Rose’s text as a narrative scaffold, adding personal monologue, sketch comedy in drag, live original music and even a hip-hop dance break – a veritable cellblock tango.

The inmates composed and scripted these scenes; one cast member, formerly illiterate, learned to read and to write through the creative process. After a musical quartet opens the show with a vaguely nationalist anthem, My Beloved Country, Youssef Chankar, who narrates the production, sets the play metronomically into motion. Convicted of manslaughter, Chankar has served 18 years of his life sentence. He calculates, “6,570 days... 157,680 hours... 9,460,800 minutes.”

Stagehands assemble a table in centre stage surrounded by 12 plastic chairs, and the performance transitions to Rose’s jury room drama. The cast features a hodgepodge of nationalities and races, and includes men serving time for sexual assault, theft and drug-dealing. They each share their own stories in vignettes interspersed through Rose’s script; a scene of jury debate climaxes, the lights dim, the table is disassembled, and an actor takes the stage, offering the audience a glimpse of his life as an inmate. The vignette ends, the stage hands set up the table, and we’re back with the jury.

So Twelve Angry Lebanese oscillates between a linear American courtroom drama and episodes about life in Roumieh. This theatrical remixing is a brilliant choice by Daccache. As the piece traces the jury’s reversal and counts down to the delivery of the final verdict, the episodes about Roumieh Prison accumulate, and the experience of these inmates – these characters – deepens with pathos and comedy.

The fragility of justice unfolds in tandem with the dimensions of life in Roumieh, suggesting that these prisoners are obsessively focused on the distant past and the distant future; they are always studying how they came to be behind bars and always counting the hours, minutes, seconds until they are free. By having the inmates play both themselves and the jurors who deliberate their fate, Daccache blurs the presumed distinction between the two groups of men – and questions the ethics of both.

Hussein al Mawla, an inmate from Bangladesh, and Rateb al Jibawi, a Lebanese prisoner convicted of sexual assault, deliver the most riveting moments. Speaking in thickly accented Arabic, Mawla lashes out against the racial prejudices that plague Lebanon and Arab society more broadly. “This prison is like a castle,” he shouts. “Outside these walls, I’m a servant. Inside these walls, I’m a servant.”

Husky and grainy-voiced, al Jibawi reveals the misery of his homeless childhood and confesses his dread of leaving Roumieh: “Another prison waits for me outside... one without walls.” The scenes are disarmingly free of self-pity or overwrought anger. Daccache has prioritised candid acting, messy but sincere – the characters are human first, inmates second, criminals third. Despite the fact that they have never before taken the stage, these angry men unleash emotional as well as ethical truths, a double-edged enlightenment.

Daccache, 31, first came across Rose’s play about six years ago while she was bedridden, recuperating from leg surgery. At the time, she was preparing for a drama therapy project with a group of recovering drug addicts. She called up her theatrical mentors in search of the best scripts with large, all-male casts. She adapted the play to probe questions of drug addiction, and they staged two private performances. “But I knew this play could make a bigger impact,” she recalls.

The Twelve Angry Lebanese director is a sprite with a raspy voice and a disarming sense of humour. Since 2003, she has starred in Bassmat Watan, a popular weekly TV political satire, and most people know her by her television name, Iso. Iso, whom Daccache describes as “comfortable in her own skin”, plays a variety of characters on the show, and is famous for asking hilariously stupid questions.

In 2000, she studied clowning with Philippe Gaulier, a French physical theatre guru, and shortly thereafter assisted on a drama therapy project in an Italian prison. Upon her return to Beirut in 2003, she began a fruitful career as a drama therapist and recently established a centre for drama therapy called Catharsis.

The current adaptation of Twelve Angry Men, translated to Arabic by the director, has been in the works since 2006. The project officially got off the ground in February 2008, with the support of a consortium of NGOs, ministries and a €66,000 (Dh309,000) grant from the European Union. Daccache received more than 200 applications to participate in the performance from the inmates; priority was given to those with at least five years left to serve. Working with prison authorities, she cut the group down to just under 50. She led two months of training with this group to assess each individual’s capacity to perform and to collaborate with others. The actors then auditioned with monologues and scenes from the play. The actual casting was a collective process: the inmates auditioned for each other, and roles were assigned by the group.

As the inmates delved into rehearsing the script, some also began writing monologues and composing the score. The director, whom the actors christened Abu Ali, says that the greatest challenge in the creative process was managing the group. “Imagine normal arguing multiplied by 1,000,” she says. “They have never worked with anyone... Even in their crimes, they were one or two.”

Politicians, dignitaries, generals, and ambassadors attended the exclusive premiere of Twelve Angry Lebanese earlier this month. The audience included the likes of the chief public prosecutor, Saïd Mirza, the minister of education, Bahia al Hariri, and the chief of police, General Antoine Chakour. The stakes were high: “Both the audience and the actors were holding their breath,” smiles Daccache.

After the last juror changes his mind and the 12 men settle on a verdict of not guilty, the performance closes with a final monologue by Chankar and a coda of My Beloved Country. Indeed, a current of Lebanese nationalism underscores the entire performance. In the opening speech, Chankar expounds Lebanon’s history as the source of enlightenment and civilisation, and the scenes in the courtroom convey this sentiment as well. Willem Makson Brando, a Nigerian who plays a juror, often idolises the nation as a pillar of democracy: “I came to Lebanon because here I can express myself,” he affirms.

This nationalist undercurrent is unfortunate. The performance is not about 12 Lebanese but rather about 12 convicts – Iraqi, Palestinian, Bangladeshi, Lebanese, Syrian and Nigerian – in a Lebanese prison. By framing the production as a nationalistic project, Daccache distorts and constrains the scope of this cultural intervention which, while rooted in Lebanon, transcends the limits of a single nation. To her credit, the director acknowledges this severe flaw. “I was ignorant,” she concedes. “I thought I would only be working with Lebanese” when she titled the project two years ago.

Still, Twelve Angry Lebanese stands as a remarkable achievement. In addition to confronting and addressing the failures of the prison system in Lebanon, Daccache has demonstrated that performances with social and political objectives need not sacrifice their integrity as great theatre – indeed, they can push the boundaries of the art. All too often, development theatre initiatives supported by international organisations across the region become completely subsumed by political agendas, only to have audiences wilt, turned off by the didacticism that seeks to instrumentalise them. Daccache’s project, however, confirms that the higher the artistic quality, the stronger the impact.

“I cannot do miracles – I’m not a superwoman,” says Daccache, stressing the urgency of extending the Roumieh Prison project and instituting an annual drama therapy programme there. Throughout the spring and summer, she will conduct drama therapy initiatives in Palestinian refugee camps and in drug rehabilitation centres. But the theatre in Roumieh is set to close this April when the funding dries up, much to Daccache’s dismay.

As it happens, Reginald Rose, who died in 2002, drafted his script for Twelve Angry Men after serving on a real jury in New York. “It was such an impressive, solid setting in a great big wood-paneled courtroom, with a silver-haired judge. I was overwhelmed. I was on a jury for a manslaughter case, and we got into this terrific, furious, eight-hour argument in the jury room. I was writing one-hour dramas for Studio One then and I thought, wow, what a setting for a drama.” Today’s adaptation of his drama, set within the walls of a Lebanese prison, serves as a testament to just that: the importance of setting. Firmly rooted in the nuances of place and time while also transcending them, Twelve Angry Lebanese confirms that theatre grounded in circumstance has limitless potential.

Eyad Houssami works in theatre as a director, writer and researcher based in Beirut.