The Factory

If the war is a factory, what does it produce? Blood? Disaster? Or riches and power?

The playwright Mohammad Al Attar and the director Omar Abusaada continue to deconstruct the complex struggle over their burning homeland, Syria.

In the “Factory” they shed a light on the alliances between money and power in Syria before and after the revolution, and expose the war trade and its traders, investigating a true story: In 2010, right before the Arab Spring, in the northern Syrian border, a cement factory is inaugurated by the French interests company Lafarge; it is one of the biggest foreign investments in the country. The popular anti-Assad revolution and its culmination into a bloody strife will define the future of Syria, but the factory will continue its operation at any cost.

The two Syrian artists, who continue to report the total disintegration that is Syria in with poetic terms, return to Onassis Stegi with a tale from the core of the clashes.

Syrian actors from come up on stage to chronicle a dark business game, against the background of a broken country.

The Syrians Omar Abusaada and Mohammad Al Attar join the Onassis Stegi for the third time. In 2012 they took part in Meeting Point 6, the Arab Spring focused festival of contemporary art, with two performance-lectures. They were back in 2016 with the fiction drama "While I Was Waiting", a performance-protest about a country in intensive care. The trigger was the true story of a young man who, after a brutal beating by soldiers, falls into a coma.

The Syrian revolution and the long and bloody war that followed have been the main focus of the author Mohammad Al Attar for the last seven years.
Al Attar and Abusaada have recently completed their trilogy working with displaced Syrian women based on major Greek tragedies with Sophocles’ "Iphigenia" (2017) at Volksbühne, Berlin. It followed Euripides’ "Trojan Women" in Jordan (2013) and Sophocles’ "Antigone" in Lebanon (2014).