Nadia Qabilat.. Arab director explains “Capital” to Marx on the Russian stage

At the “Serida 21” theater, the young Jordanian director, Nadia Qabilat, presented her play “The Capital” by the author “Karl Marx”, and the play will be shown again in the theater’s repertoire.

According to the schedule of the theater located in the center of the Russian capital, the play will be shown again this evening, February 18, and then three times in March (5, 17, 18).

Capital is a monodrama based on the most famous major work of the German philosopher, Karl Marx, of the same title. However, the true essence of the play is exposed to the life of the independent theater, the independent artist, our daily life while we are exposed in every moment of existence to a fierce attack from the means of advertising via smartphone and computer, at home, in the workplace, and even while we move in various means of transportation.

The young Jordanian-Russian director created a theatrical performance using material that at first glance is not amenable to “theatre,” but she manages, through a wonderful and balanced theatrical script, and through a disciplined theatrical movement, dazzling decorations in her imagination and simple expressive lighting, to convey Marx’s questions about chaotic nature. To capitalism, about the Great Depression and the economic crisis we live today in anticipation of its occurrence, about imaginative appetite, monopoly, and the reserve army of industrial labour.

With the help of her advisor and assistant scriptwriter, Nikolai Tsvetkov, Nadia Kabelat was able to get to the core of Marx’s ideas about the process of production of capital, the production of surplus value, the division of labor, and wages, but the one-man show, Alexander Nikolaev, keeps repeating the words of Nadia and Nikolaev. If we understood that idea, we would “barely” understand the essence of “Capital”, then he would repeat to our ears the sentence: “Barely and not the whole substance.”

Despite the nature that seems, at first glance, to be indoctrination for an actor who draws for us on a “board” a simplified explanation of “Capital”, as if he answers the questions of “students / the audience”, we come out of that play with more questions than answers, questions We ask ourselves before anyone else about consumer culture, about globalization, about the absence of borders between countries and cultures on the Internet and social networking sites. About the new world and perhaps the “new world order” and the new “ideology” that we must look for to save the world.

The young Jordanian director, Nadia Qabilat, belongs to an artistic family, where the novel “White Cold Sun” by her esteemed Jordanian novelist mother, Kafa Al-Zoubi, was shortlisted for the 2019 Arab Booker Prize, and her father directs theater director Salam Qabilat, Al Shams Theater, One of the most important theatrical initiatives in the Jordanian theater scene, while Nadia graduated in 2018 from the class of Professor Sergey Genovich in the Directing Department of the prestigious Russian Gates Institute (established in 1878).