ابن رابعة Ibn Rab‛a
Salman Natour
For twenty-five years Ahmed Ibn Rab‛a works for the Association for the Fighting Poverty but does not succeed in rescuing even a single person from the fate of poverty, deprivation, and discrimination—not even himself. In the play, based on characters and texts created by the novelist and intellectual Salman Natour, we witness not only milestones in the life of Ahmed Ibn Rab‛a but also pictures from an album of Palestinian life. With black humor, naiveté, and great compassion, the play tells a story of oppression and survival, of catastrophe and a continuing dream.
The play was first staged by the actor Yussuf Abu-Warda in Haifa’s Al-Midan Theater in spring 2017. It was staged again at the Jaffa Festival in the Jaffa Arab-Hebrew Theatre in summer 2019.
Translation team: Kifah Abdul Halim, Yonatan Mendel, Hanan Saadi,
Eyad Barghouti, Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani