Two weeks ago you could see and read here how Mokhallad Rasem was assembling the pieces of his Romeo & Julia (Romeo and Juliet). Excerpts from Shakespeare’s play and medieval and contemporary poets and lyrics were placed side by side, and the notice board began to fill up with drawings, jottings and the titles of the various scenes in the play. The sheets of paper pinned to the notice board during the first week of rehearsals – full of deletions, drawings and notes in Arabic, English and Dutch – have since been replaced by new ones - in neater handwriting and in the correct order. Now the various fragments of text are in place, set, lighting and music are gradually beginning to slot into the whole like pieces of a puzzle. 

With three weeks to go before the première, in the scenic workshop there is still a lot of building, welding and painting work to be done on Jean Bernard Koeman’s set. Occasionally photographs, films and drawings travel from the scenic workshop to the rehearsal attic, and we try to imagine what the final set will look like. However beautiful the wooden car that is now being used for rehearsals, everyone is eager to see what will arrive in the attic in two weeks’ time.

Jean Bernard, who works mostly as a visual artist, was inspired by a photograph Mokhallad took last year on a visit to Baghdad. In the background is his parental home, in the foreground a rusty, burnt-out car, belonging to a neighbouring couple who had spent a lifetime together. That couple were killed out of the blue one day by a bomb under their vehicle. Mokhallad soon realized that the car would play a key role in the production, not so much as a car but more as an installation which can transform from metal vehicle to tranquil bedroom, from obscure adventure to safe refuge. It is the place where the different Romeos and Juliets come from and always return to, the place that keeps them together as couples. “For me Romeo & Julia is about immortality”, says Mokhallad. “It is about the love that comes back as genetic material whenever someone is born. It also comes back in the set. The car I photographed in Baghdad works its way into the set like genetic material. That metal vehicle is also a body with limbs, each of which serves a specific purpose, a womb which new people emerge from, with brains and memories and their own story. It ages, it rusts, it transforms.”

By altering the position and colour of the lighting, it is possible to stratify the scenes as they have been rehearsed to date. You can create an intimate or perhaps hostile atmosphere, for instance, and that changes the play quite radically. Lighting technician Lucas van Haesbroeck has drawn the now more or less completed lighting scheme in his notebook and soon it will be hung downstairs in the Bourla. In its own way the music also adds a new layer to the scenes. A few weeks ago, for example, the search was still on for a text about the fear of losing the person you love. After a weekend of brain-racking and searching, Mokhallad came up with a song that seemed to be made for this play. “Sometimes we cannot put feelings of love into words”, Mokhallad explained. “Turmoil, sorrow, longing; dancers can express that with their body. I want the verbal poetry and the physical poetry to merge on the stage.”