If you think contemporary theatre has lost its nerve, you haven’t seen Ahmed El Attar's latest work.
Right now, the 80th Avignon Festival in France is trying to navigate a world fractured by intense geopolitical crises. While many artists retreat into safe, abstract metaphors, the Egyptian director has brought something raw and unapologetic to the stage. His latest play, Salma, Mon Amour, is a brutal, funny, and deeply uncomfortable mirror held up to the face of modern privilege.
You don't need to be an expert in Middle Eastern politics to understand the friction at the heart of this play. Anyone who has ever scrolled past horrific news on their phone while sitting in a beautiful room will feel the sting of what El Attar is doing here. It's brilliant. It's frustrating. It's exactly what theatre should be doing right now.
The Bubble of Cairo Wealth vs the Reality of War
At its core, Salma, Mon Amour is about what happens when history refuses to leave the wealthy alone. The premise is simple but devastatingly effective. We find ourselves inside the plush living room of a hyper-wealthy Cairo family. They are dynastic, obsessed with status, and entirely insulated from the struggles of the working class.
The main event on their calendar is the upcoming wedding of the eldest son, Karim, to his wealthy American fiancée. This isn't just a romance; it's a massive commercial merger between two corporate empires. But then October 7, 2023, happens. The entire region plunges into instability. Planes are grounded, borders shift, and the wedding is postponed.
Instead of showing us the violence in Gaza directly, El Attar shows us the ripples. He focuses on the family’s irritation. For them, the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe next door isn't a tragedy of human lives; it is an annoying logistical setback that ruined their party. By centering the narrative on those who think they are immune to history, the play exposes the terrifying moral vacuum of the global elite.
Why Salma Mon Amour Works as a Greek Tragedy for the TikTok Era
What makes the production so sharp is the character of Salma herself. Played with a mix of modern irony and raw despair, Salma starts as a caricature. She is a young woman completely absorbed by her TikTok feed, chasing likes and obsessing over digital validation. She seems like the least likely person to care about geopolitics.
But something changes. As she scrolls through her phone, the algorithm starts feeding her real, unedited footage of the horror in Gaza. Through her screen, she witnesses things she cannot unsee. Her conscience begins to wake up, and it tears her apart.
The Clash of Ancient Grief and Modern Pop
El Attar does something daring with the script here. Instead of relying solely on contemporary dialogue, Salma's internal monologues are actually built from classic Greek tragedies. The playwright has woven in heavily adapted excerpts from Euripides (including Hecuba, Heracles, and Electra) and Sophocles' Antigone.
This creates a wild, disorienting contrast. One minute, you are listening to a generic, bubbly K-pop track like "Cupid" by Fifty Fifty, or Taylor Swift’s "Anti-Hero" blaring from a speaker. The next minute, Salma is delivering a gut-wrenching soliloquy on grief and survival that sounds thousands of years old. The music also includes Marwan Pablo's Egyptian trap song "El Mabda2," grounding the soundscape in the chaotic energy of modern Cairo.
It shouldn't work. On paper, mixing Taylor Swift with ancient Greek lamentations about war crimes sounds messy. But on stage, it is genius. It highlights the bizarre double life we all live now, jumping between mindless entertainment and raw human suffering in the span of a single swipe.
The Anatomy of Class Denial in Modern Egypt
If you've followed El Attar's career, you know he has a fixation on the Egyptian bourgeoisie. His 2015 Avignon hit, The Last Supper, and his 2018 play, Mama, tread similar ground. He knows this social class intimately because he grew up around them. He isn't interested in making a cheap, moralizing satire where we just laugh at bad rich people. He wants us to see how their apathy is a systematic form of violence.
In Salma, Mon Amour, the family members are not monsters. They are polite, well-dressed, and highly educated. They discuss business contracts and wedding caterers with the same casual air they use to dismiss the suffering of Palestinians. When Salma tries to bring up what is happening, they shut her down. They tell her she is being dramatic. They worry about her mental health, not because they care, but because her distress is making their dinner parties uncomfortable.
This reflects a very real, very ugly truth about how class operates. The wealthy don't need to support violence actively to perpetrate it; they just have to look away and keep consuming.
How El Attar Moves Beyond Simple Political Slogans
It would have been incredibly easy for El Attar to write a straightforward, didactic protest play about Gaza. But those plays are rarely good. They end up preaching to the choir, making the audience feel righteous without actually challenging their perspective.
Instead, the Egyptian director focuses on the psychological toll of silence. He asks a much harder question: what does it do to your soul to live in a world where you are expected to pretend everything is fine?
Shifting the Narrative Lens
By framing the tragedy through the lens of those who suffer the least from it, the production forces the Western European audience at Avignon to look at themselves. Most people sitting in those theatre seats belong to the same comfortable, global middle-and-upper class as the characters on stage. They, too, are watching the horror from a safe distance.
The play doesn't offer any comforting answers. There is no happy ending where the family learns their lesson and joins a protest march. Instead, the tension builds and builds, punctuated by the jarring sound of sudden gunfire and prop weapons on stage. It leaves you feeling anxious, complicated, and deeply complicit.
What This Means for the Future of Arab Performance Art
This production is part of the 2026 Mediterranean Season, an initiative designed to build cultural bridges between France and countries like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt. But Salma, Mon Amour isn't some polite, state-sanctioned piece of cultural diplomacy. It is a sharp, jagged critique of both Western hypocrisy and Arab elite complicity.
El Attar’s work proves that Arab artists don't need to rely on Western styles of documentary theatre to be taken seriously on the global stage. By blending classical European tragedy, modern digital realism, and dry Egyptian humor, he has created a theatrical language that feels entirely original and desperately necessary.
If you get a chance to see Salma, Mon Amour as it tours Europe—including its upcoming run at the MC93 in Bobigny this autumn—do not miss it. It is uncomfortable, but it's the most honest piece of art you will see this year.
Go book your tickets. Pay attention to how it makes you feel when you check your phone on the train ride home.
