It is to be expected that a piece of musical theatre about buried wartime trauma, estrangement from family, and impending death, complete with an Oum Kalthoum-inspired score, might trigger a deep emotional response.
Still, British-Lebanese composer Bushra El-Turk was struck by just how moved the audience was by Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother when it premiered in Amsterdam earlier this year.
“There are so many layers to the work, and it cuts so close to the bone. People were coming out sobbing, trying to give me a hug but sobbing,” Bushra told The New Arab ahead of the show’s UK premiere at London’s Barbican on 2 October.
Oum follows 19-year-old Wahab, who left Lebanon as a child during the civil war, on his rushed journey to reunite and reconcile with his mother, who is on her deathbed in the hospital. Woven through the performance as a vector for feelings unearthed and erupting is the Oum Kalthoum song Al-Atlal (The Ruins).
“Following Wahab, who is expressing his diasporic experience – I think some people can relate to that. You hope that what is on stage is able to explain better what you, as the audience, have been trying to find words for all along for those feelings,” Bushra continued.
She said that the show’s Dutch-Algerian director, Kenza Koutchoukalli, and the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra wanted to produce a work particularly meaningful to the Arab diaspora, and with the Dutch National Opera.
“They wanted to do something on Oum Kalthoum because she means so much to so many – not just to the older generations. They wanted the work to mean something for the children of the diaspora, too,” Bushra said.
Representatives of the Dutch National Opera had seen Woman at Point Zero, an opera based on the book by Nawal El Saadawi that Bushra had composed and won an Ivor Novello award for, at its world premiere in the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.
“With all my experience working with musicians from the region, they thought I would be a good fit for it, because you can’t approach this work in the way a Western composer would,” she said.
“This orchestra is different to a usual Western orchestra, for example. Some of them don’t read music, and have to memorise the global structure of the work before we go into the detail – you have to allow for that to happen.”
Rather than add to the ever-widening spread of biopic pieces about Oum Kalthoum, Koutchoukalli and the orchestra instead wanted to produce a piece of work that spoke to the Arab diaspora, Bushra said.
“Instead of another biopic, Kenza wanted to put her own stamp on it, with a story related to the roots and identity.”
Kenza was only partway through reading Lebanese-Canadian novelist and playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Visage retrouvé when she pitched a collaboration based on that novel to Bushra, which became the basis of Oum.
Bushra and Kenza had not met before, but all signs pointed to a fruitful future collaboration between the two children of the diaspora.
“I didn’t know her at the time, but people said we should work together. They felt as though we would have chemistry. We connected instantly, and that chemistry was there,” Bushra said.
Like for so many in the Arabophone diaspora, Oum Kalthoum was part of the soundtrack to Bushra’s upbringing in London, her parents having moved to the English capital after fleeing the civil war in Lebanon, just as Oum’s protagonist, Wahab, did.
Al-Atlal, first recorded by Oum Kulthum in 1966, was a love song that quickly took on political significance and grew in popularity during and after the “Arab-Israeli” war that followed a year later, with lyrics like “Give me freedom, break my chains” primed to attach political meaning to them.
In Oum, “pillars of Al-Atlal come in – fragments and in larger sections, then at the end you can hear it is almost in its entirety. It's all a big cathartic moment,” Bushra said.
“The pieces are interwoven and taken into abstraction. My original compositions, inspired by Al-Atlal in their own way, are also interwoven throughout. Sometimes you’ll hear Oum Kalthoum in its purity, but sometimes it’s played with and extracted in a way that is almost unrecognisable but still there in some faint way.”
After its world premiere at the Dutch National Opera and Ballet in Amsterdam in March, diaspora Arabs told her how Oum helped serve as a bridge between their own past and present.
“Those who have come to see it who are Lebanese, Syrian, et cetera, and live abroad – they said that seeing Oum is the best representation of their bicultural identity, that conflict of their heritage and the Western life that they’ve lived. There is that marriage of these two worlds that some might resonate with,” Bushra said.
“Some people came to see it every time it was on, and we recognised them when they came back. I guess every time you see a work, you see it differently.”
Oum is also helping to bring whole new spectators into European theatres and opera houses.
“There are Arab audiences who have seen the show who had never stepped into an opera house before,” Bushra said.
“They might initially have come just because it features Oum Kalthoum, but at the same time, the opera house is gaining a new audience. We felt like we made history for them, in a sense. What better way to keep an art form that usually has one type of audience alive?”
Shahla Omar is a freelance journalist based in London. She was previously a staff journalist and news editor at The New Arab
Follow her on Instagram: @shahlatan