Your Typical Mix of Romance, Tragedy & Subculture

On Wednesday 3rd of October I attended a play held in Katara titled Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad. The play was heavily glocalized in terms of production design and content .The script was tweaked to be made applicable to the events which occurred/are occurring in Iraq. Globalization can be seen by the fact that the Iraqi Theater Company is touring to certain countries to showcase their adaptation of the famous Shakespearean play.

To be honest I was quite hesitant to attend. Being a huge Shakespeare fan, I automatically thought that it would be extremely unoriginal since ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a play that has been taken on heavily. However, I was pleasantly surprised to how original and glocalized the play was. Also, the production was extremely beautiful and simple. The mood of the scenes was incorporated in the lighting and sound used. The sound was somewhat manipulated to act as a constant reminder to the war and tension in Iraq.

My friends and I are really into plays and have very similar tastes in terms or music and television shows. I guess we internalized the same cultural attitude. There’s a sense of reassurance one gets when having similar social interactions with a group of individuals. Interestingly enough I heard about the play from a person who isn’t part of my close social network. Even though the person was a weak tie, in a social network sense, he virtually introduced me to the play by posting the link on Facebook. Having diversity in a social network proves to be beneficial in terms of accessing knowledge. By posting the link on Facebook he passively influenced his Facebook friends to know attend or at least know that this event is taking place in Doha.

During class a metaphor was used to describe identity and the ways in which we perform in our everyday life. The metaphor suggests that social roles are like dramatic performances “enacted” on a public stage. While watching the play I couldn’t help but think of the metaphor and how it applies to the different roles we play in different situations. My student self is completely different to my role as a daughter. In our roles we act depending on whom we’re interacting with and what is expected of us. The actors in the play were doing so in trying to communicate a certain message about the destruction of war and the destructive tension between different religions.

Also, the subcultures within the play could be applied to our everyday life. The mujahedeen and the musicians stood out as subcultures. In the play the mujahedeen took part in destruction, which essentially led to the death of the two main characters. The intensity of the subculture was evident by the fact that the character had no problem getting himself killed in the name of what he and his subculture believes in. The musicians on the side of the stage were not part of the play yet they provided an interesting soundtrack.

The evening spent made me realize the ways in which pop culture is diffused and the power of interpersonal word-of-mouth communication.