TheTruth Face | Ibrahim Shaghlawi Post-War Theatre in the Vision of Yousif Eidabi…

In the moments after war, the question of reconstruction is no longer limited to buildings, bridges, and roads, but extends to something deeper: awareness, memory, and the ability to live together and accept the other. Here, theatre rises as one of the most sensitive spaces for measuring the health of society, because it is the mirror that does not flatter, and the platform that reshapes the major questions.

From this perspective, the interview conducted yesterday by the colleague at Al-Tayar newspaper, Samah Taha, with Dr. Yousif Eidabi, gains a value that exceeds the cultural frame, becoming an important political document about the meaning of the state, identity, and the role of art in re-founding the social contract in Sudan.

Eidabi, born in 1944 in Atbara, studied law and then cinema, produced films that won awards, obtained a PhD in theatre, and early on founded the current of the Forest and Desert School and the project of Theatre for All the People of Sudan. He supervised the development of theatrical and cinematic curricula and managed specialized cultural programs, investing his academic experience to establish an interactive theatre directly linked to social and political issues. He is considered one of the national figures in the field.

Eidabi does not speak of theatre as an aesthetic luxury, but as a social and political tool capable of engaging with reality, questioning authority, and repairing what has been destroyed in the collective conscience. When he describes any theatre that does not side with people’s issues as “an unacceptable extravagance,” he draws a clear line between an art that accumulates aesthetic symbolism and an art that reproduces isolation, in a country that is still bleeding.

This stance is authentic in Eidabi’s career, and an extension of his founding vision since the 1970s, when he formulated the project of Theatre for All the People of Sudan, in intellectual harmony with the Forest and Desert current that sought to reconcile the Sudanese conscience with its cultural and intellectual plurality and to dissolve the exclusionary duality between Arabism and Africanism. In this context, theatre becomes a unifying language, capable of crossing linguistic and ethnic barriers, and of shaping a new, rising national narrative founded on diversity, not on cancellation or marginalization.

Yet this vision, as Eidabi acknowledges through the interview, collided with the limits of the state and its institutions. Attempts to integrate the academic with the professional, the theoretical with the craft, stumbled due to a bureaucracy that does not recognize the symbolic value of popular culture makers.

Here the political dimension of the crisis becomes evident: theatre did not fail because of artistic or professional shortcomings, but because the state did not place it, in proportion to its impact, within its developmental priorities, leaving it outside policies of recognition, planning, and support.

Now, war has brought this question back to the forefront. Theatre practitioners, as Eidabi indicates, did not wait for state institutions, but went to the people: to displacement camps, to children and women, to the margins of cities. Participatory Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed emerged as forms of soft resistance that restore the human voice and open a safe space for dialogue in times of fear. This shift reflects a new awareness of the function of art as a mediator of social justice, not merely a performance on a stage.

From here, the return of the National Theatre in Omdurman gains its political significance. It is not only a cultural event, but an important declaration of the state’s return to the space of influence.

When the state pledges to support theatre in the presence of Sovereignty Council member Lieutenant General Ibrahim Jaber, with the participation of the Governor of Khartoum and the Minister of Culture, Information and Tourism, and through this celebration reopens the National Theatre, it affirms an undeniable truth: the battle after war is not only a security one, but a struggle over awareness, national memory, and the rewriting of the war narrative.

The theatre is not merely a space for performance; it becomes a cultural weapon that reshapes identity and safeguards the values of unity and social reconciliation. For it to fulfill its national role, the role of state governments must be activated to strengthen provincial theatre, so that it leaves the capital and reaches all parts of Sudan, becoming a real active force that confronts the daily struggle over narratives, identity, and national memory with awareness and deliberate influence.

But this recognition remains fragile unless it is transformed into a clear cultural policy adopted by the state, one that integrates theatre into reconstruction projects as a tool for repairing the social fabric and a field for community reconciliations. Theatre, as Eidabi sees it, is not a space for spectatorship, but a laboratory of awareness that retrains society to accept difference and breaks the cycles of hatred.

In this sense, the slogan “Rejecting Hate Speech” that accompanied the reopening of the National Theatre is not merely a moral statement, but a political necessity. A state that does not invest in culture leaves a vacuum filled by narratives of violence. But a state that sees art as a partner lays the foundation for sustainable peace, because peace, at its core, is a collective act of imagination for a shared future alongside a national project around which people gather.

Eidabi affirms that theatre practitioners and intellectuals today face a dual duty: creativity and direct engagement with local communities, transforming challenges into opportunities, and launching a theatrical discourse that addresses environmental, social, and political issues, plants the values of tolerance and peace, and returns people to the space of normal life.

Yousif Eidabi, with his experience extending between Khartoum and Sharjah, between theory and practice, presents a model of the institutional intellectual who does not stop at describing the crisis, but proposes a horizon for emerging from it. His message to theatre practitioners — “Continue creating, because creativity is the boat to the light” — is not a romantic call, but a soft political manifesto that reminds us that culture is not a margin, but the heart of the battle over the meaning of the homeland.

In light of the continuation of war and the worsening of suffering, the stage, culture, and the arts can become essential means to reduce conflicts, overcome political, ethnic, and religious divisions, and create a safe space for dialogue and social reconciliations, away from strife.

 Theatre here is not merely a stage, but a state project, and a platform for restoring hope and shaping Sudan’s future after devastation, where deferred beauty meets the urgent need to restore life and society.

Thus, according to #The_Truth_Face in post-war theatre, not only are texts rewritten, but Sudan itself is reimagined: a homeland that embraces its diversity, reconciles its memory, and grants its people a stage on which they stand together—not facing each other on battlefields, but conversing in a space of humanity and the values that govern the country.

Wishing you well and in good health

Thursday, 12 February 2026

Shglawi55@gmail.com