As depicted online, the Syrian Uprising is equal parts tragedy and revelry. Resistance videos on YouTube pages alternate between documentation of civilian deaths; rallies replete with singing and line dances; anti-regime graffiti artists at work; and political animations, puppet shows and video mash-ups mocking the regime. The pro-regime Internet-users who critique these sites are quickly drowned out by oppositional voices. Sites lauding Bashar al-Assad have generated much less traffic, either because of waning support for the regime or (more likely) because of the lack of creativity in Bashar video-paeans. Even as violence between the Free Syrian Army (the loose network of opposition fighters) and regime forces dominates daily life, an army of unarmed activists continues to march, dance and sing – all of which is captured on digital cameras. These videos are posted, reposted, sampled and recirculated; occasionally they make their way to Arab satellite stations. In short, the Syrian mediascape is awash in user-generated content that often incorporates mass performance. A full analysis of the Uprising must take this creative resistance into account. Elsewhere I have examined the use of martyr imagery by cyber-activists.Footnote ¹ Here I look to online activists who have tapped a Syrian tradition of clowning. Specifically, I turn to two prominent Internet personalities: the Malas twins, Ahmed and Mohammad, two actors who have become the unofficial clowns of the Uprising. These actors have emerged from a vibrant culture of resistance that has drawn in millions of viewers/responders.

I am particularly interested in the Malas twins for their adaptation of tropes prominent in the history of Syrian oppositional theatre to a global mediascape. I will argue that it is not simply that they have made use of Facebook and YouTube but that much of their work reflects on the possibilities for and failures of social media and satellite television to forge a new idea of Syrian identity, one that prominently features active participation in the public sphere. In particular, I will analyse two of their works, Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday and Najim and Abu Hamlet in the Shadow of the Revolution, that invoke strategies of past political theatre while providing a new insistence that resistance is inevitable and will ultimately triumph. These works employ two common tropes of Syrian political theatre: the interrogation scene as emblem of a nation's social and political ills, and the defeated performer as a symbol of the silenced citizen. In the past these tropes were invoked to lament the absence of a public sphere and viable avenues of resistance; however, the Malas twins use these tropes to assert the inevitability of resistance. This new confidence is a product both of the subject matter of the plays and of their means of distribution; we persist in resistance because new technologies have given us new options and have transformed who we understand ourselves to be.

The Syrian mediascape – crowded as it is with tens of thousands of videographers, animators, Photoshop aficionados and performers – should be a significant object of analysis in any assessment of the Uprising. In the four months after the Syrian government lifted its ban on Facebook in February of 2011, the number of accounts more than doubled, reaching 580,000 (previously Syrians could only access Facebook through foreign proxies). By June of 2012, the number of Facebook users in Syria had skyrocketed to 2,932,680, or 15.3 per cent of the population. In addition, 20.7 per cent of the Syrian population regularly uses the Internet.Footnote ² Oppositional materials clearly circulate widely through the Syrian cybersphere, with hundreds of thousands of people subscribing to many of the oppositional Facebook pages and popular YouTube videos often recording over a million hits.

With videographers throughout the country documenting regime violence, there is a great deal of tragic imagery flowing into the Syrian mediascape; however, some of the most widely disseminated videos are comic and irreverent. One case in point, a video depicting Bashar al-Assad in idiotic raptures as he surfs between cartoon shorts of ducks, registered nearly one and a half million views since it was posted in the spring of 2012, making it one of the most popular oppositional clips on the Internet.Footnote ³ The video appears to be part of an outpouring of YouTube videos in March and April that depicted Bashar al-Assad as a duck, as more and more Internet users Photoshopped images of Assad, his adviser (and rumored mistress) Hadeel al-Ali, and waterfowl.Footnote ⁴ Private emails leaked in March revealed that Syria's first lady referred to her husband as ‘Duck’, and Internet users were quick to substitute that name for ‘the Lion’ (the literal meaning of the president's last name).

Irony and irreverence are not simply the province of video responses, but are also evident in mass actions. In the first year of the Uprising, YouTube videos showed raucous crowds packing city squares and chanting mocking protest songs like ‘Come on, Bashar, Time to Leave’. The proliferation of such songs, often performed to traditional line dances, prompted the New York Times to liken the Uprising to a ‘dance-athon to dislodge a despot’.Footnote ⁵ These mass gatherings grew less common once the Syrian government began employing airstrikes. However, one need only turn to the remarkable village of Kafr Nabl in north-west Syria for evidence that townspeople turn out to mock the president and chide the international community. The village of 15,455 people has become widely known online for the sardonic banners and cartoons carried in protests, which are documented on the village's Facebook page, Occupied Kafr Nabl (Kafr Nabl Muhtila). The regime has responded with shelling, and, as recently as 5 November, Syrian jets bombed the centre of the village in the middle of the day (as documented on the YouTube channel FreeKafranbel). Yet in the following weeks, the residents were again marching with sardonic banners berating world leaders for their indifference to the suffering of millions of Syrians, and carrying ironic posters: UN leaders as cigarettes stubbed out in an ashtray called Syria, bombs with Syrian and Israeli flags falling on homes beneath the words ‘War on Terror’. One poster depicts a Muslim cleric, a priest, a businessman and a soldier in combat fatigues toppling a representation of Assad; classes and sects are united and those carrying guns are deserters of the Syrian Army (rather than turbaned mujahideen).

This last poster responds to a growing fear in the United States and Europe: that what began as a peaceful protest movement has become a chaotic mix of foreign jihadists, Salafists and bloodthirsty militias. For obvious reason, US analysts debate the character of the Uprising; there is great concern that violence will spill over into neighbouring countries, that a post-Assad Syria could see continued sectarian bloodshed or even genocide, or that the country could become a haven for extremists. These are hugely important and very real concerns. However, it is striking that these analysts have not taken up Syria's cybersphere in any sustained way but have instead focused on the composition and ideologies of the myriad militias challenging the Assad regime. First, no one can accurately assess the ideologies of these militias. As Nicholas D. Kristof has noted, some of the apparent increase in Islamic militancy in the resistance may be ‘Kabuki’. As he notes, ‘Groups of fighters have realized that the best way to get weapons is to grow beards, quote from the Koran and troll for support in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.’Footnote ⁶ Second, the future of Syria does not lie exclusively in the nature of militias but also in the beliefs and self-representations of larger oppositional communities. Finally, if the world is to assist in the reconciliation process that must follow the bloodshed in Syria, it would do well to identify and support those members of the creative resistance who have consistently sought to frame resistance as acts of civic empowerment that unite Syrians across class and sect.

The Malas twins are prominent in this constellation of Syrian artists working from within and outside the country to imagine a free and united Syria. Since the start of the Uprising, they have staged their work for small audiences in the bedroom of their home in Damascus and in a Damascus prison where they were detained. They have performed for larger audiences in theatres and cultural centres in Beirut, Cairo, Moscow, Avignon, Grenoble and Paris. They have a substantial following for their YouTube and Facebook accounts, where they post their webisodes, improvised skits and recordings of theatrical performances. They differ from many of their companion cyber-performance activists in their theatre background, a background that enables them to connect their poeticizing of political struggle to a rich history of Syrian oppositional theatre. Their work comments on and activates the politicizing potential of social media and satellite television while also reflecting on the susceptibility of the Arab mediascape to authoritarian control. I will argue that it is with this danger in mind that the twins have repeatedly returned to performance, seeking out live performance opportunities both in and outside Syria, citing a Syrian history of oppositional theatre in their work, and reflecting on theatre as an inherently oppositional form. When the public sphere is carefully regulated, they would seem to assert, the most radical act one can take is to put on a play.

Ahmed and Mohamad Malas trained in private acting schools in Damascus after they were repeatedly denied admission at the Damascus High Theatre Institute. They were working in children's theatre when, in 2009, they decided to stage a two-hander they had written, Melodrama, in their own bedroom for a handful of spectators. The play depicts two theatre extras, Abu Hamlet and Najim, who are trapped in insignificant roles and, ultimately, their own apartment. What they anticipated would be a one-time experiment ran for 122 nights as interest in the piece spread. Eventually they took the play to Amman and Cairo.

With the start of the Uprising in 2011, they created a new two-hander for their bedroom theatre, Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday, this time depicting a conversation between a detained protestor and an official in the security forces. On 5 May 2011, in the midst of the siege of Daraa, the Malas twins were among the over three hundred Syrian artists and intellectuals who signed a petition condemning the crackdown and calling for humanitarian access for the delivery of food, water and milk. In response, twenty-one Syrian production companies circulated their own statement promising to blacklist the actors and writers who had signed the ‘Milk Statement’. On 6 July the actors performed Tomorrow's Revolution at Beirut's Sunflower Theatre, and then on 13 July they took part in an anti-regime march that featured over two hundred actors, authors and public intellectuals, the first such march prominently featuring celebrities. Authorities broke up the march and arrested thirty, including the Malas twins as well as such major figures as the directors Mohamad Malas (uncle of the Malas twins) and Nabil Maleh, and the actress Mai Skaff – all of whom had helped orchestrate the Daraa petition. They were held for a week, during which time the Malas twins staged Tomorrow's Revolution twice for the prisoners and guards, an experience that the twins later described as one of their ‘most important achievements, something that can probably never really be repeated’.Footnote ⁷ A week later the twins took the play to Avignon Theatre Festival.

The Malas twins continued their oppositional work, developing an Internet following. In August they reprised the two characters from their first play, Melodrama, this time placing them in a room besieged by the Syrian military. Najim and Abu Hamlet in the Shadow of the Revolution was posted on YouTube in three episodes in August 2011. On 28 August they performed Tomorrow's Revolution in Moscow, although they performed in a relatively small space. Over 16,000 have viewed the production through YouTube. In October they fled to Beirut after Syrian intelligence officials summoned them for questioning. In Beirut, the twins joined the Syrian puppet troupe, Masasit Mati, and in November of 2011 the troupe began uploading the first season of Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator – seventeen episodes depicting the bloodthirsty Beeshu (the diminutive for Bashar) and his security chief as finger puppets terrorizing citizens to no effect. (The Malas twins did not participate in the second season of Top Goon because they disagree with the troupe's rejection of armed resistance. The twins explain that they support both peaceful protest and the Free Syrian Army.Footnote ⁸) Fearing for their safety in Beirut, they then fled to Cairo at the end of 2011.

They were especially productive in 2012. They transformed Najim and Abu Hamlet in the Shadow of the Revolution into a one-act piece (retitled Two Actors in the Shadow of the Revolution), which they performed in February at Rawabet Theatre in Cairo. They regularly post short films on their YouTube account in support of the Syrian Uprising. They shot a feature-length film about the Uprising, The Eastern Gate, directed by Ahmed Ataf. They shot a new YouTube series about the humanitarian crisis in Syria titled The Cherry Trilogy. In addition, they continue to tour Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday, most recently performing at the Grenoble Theatre Festival in November.

Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday references a history of political theatre while grounding itself in contemporary media and events. In doing so, the play makes common cause with oppositional theatre of the past while underscoring the distinctiveness of the present moment. On the one hand, Tomorrow's Revolution presents the choices available via satellite television as the illusion of a public sphere. On the other hand, the play suggests that this illusion has in fact created an appetite for freedom and that this appetite, combined with growing frustration in the face of rampant corruption, will inevitably lead to a radical transformation of Syrian society.

The play reprises a scene regularly employed by past playwrights – the darkly comic interrogation – but transforms it into an affirmation of Syrian unity. The best-known interrogation scenes come from the plays of Muhammad al-Maghut and they conclude in one of two ways – either the interrogator secures a meaningless confession that only serves to demonstrate the inane sadism of the state or the interrogator fails to secure a confession because of the anarchic energy of the clown/detainee. We see each strategy in two of Maghut's most popular plays, October Village (1974) and Cheers Homeland (1978), plays that are both widely available on DVD in Syria and on YouTube.Footnote ⁹

The interrogation scene in October Village demonstrates the sadism of the state. The comic character, Ghawar, is detained not for his seditious speech but for his silence. In its paranoia, the state reads every citizen as a potential enemy, and so those who do not protest are the more dangerous for their stealth. Ghawar is beaten into confessing ‘things he did not say but intended to say’, a confession in the broadest sense of the term and one that serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the power of the state to break its citizens. In Cheers Homeland misrule replaces state idiocy. Ghawar is again interrogated, this time with electrical wires attached to his rear (a more stageable version of genital torture). However, the ensuing shocks only prompt manic laughter. Ghawar explains his mirth: ‘Electricity has reached my ass long before it will reach my village! I'll return home with my ass held high.’ After other failed attempts at torture, he is commanded to lift his legs for an old-fashioned beating. Ghawar refuses, asserting that even the newspapers (the state's mouthpiece) command citizens to raise their heads, not their legs. The scene ends with this triumphant joke. Misrule overrides state power, even though we know that the security apparatus's defeat is only temporary and that somewhere, offstage, Ghawar endures a savage beating. Whether inanely paranoid or undone by chaos, the state is ridiculed as ineffective. However, both October Village and Cheers Homeland also acknowledge that the power of the state is ultimately inescapable. By contrast, in Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday, the security officer eventually accepts the detainee as a kindred soul and at the end of the play they say a prayer for all who have died in the unrest. The play posits a utopian moment of reconciliation.

Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday begins with the kind of comic reversal that saw Ghawar triumphing over the security services thirty-five years earlier. The detainee enters, but it is the security officer who is collapsed, exhausted from a gruelling routine of endless interrogations. The protestor wakes him with something of a taunt, repeating the popular chant: ‘God, Syria, and freedom only’.Footnote ¹⁰ The security officer awakes and before he even opens his eyes he complains, ‘Protestors from morning's ass’, later asserting that officials don't even have time to shave for the constant flow of detained protestors. Like Ghawar, the protestor uses witty responses to undermine the official's authority. The official asks if the protestors ‘even know what this freedom that [they] are all shouting about means?’ The answer is ‘no’, but that is the point; the officer does not know what ‘cordon bleu’ means, the protestor points out, but one can still crave a food they've never tasted.

As in October Village and Cheers Homeland, the state's use of the language of democracy in Tomorrow's Revolution underscores an absence of human rights. In October Village, the security officer precedes Ghawar's beating with the ironic assertion that the interrogated must speak because freedom of expression is a sacred principle imported from Europe. Similarly, the security officer in Tomorrow's Revolution begins beating the protestor while shouting, ‘We told you we wanted a discussion, so discuuuuuussss!’ The play is very conscious of its forebears in this respect. Just before the beating, the protestor momentarily crosses his legs, indicating an ease that belies the oppressive nature of the ‘discussion’ between citizen and state representative. The security officer instructs the protestor to relax and lift his leg to where it was before if he doesn't want to find ‘his legs above his head’. The protestor responds with the above-mentioned line, ‘Sir, we citizens raise our heads, not our legs.’ The security officer catches the reference: ‘So you watched Cheers Homeland before joining us, Monsieur Ghawar.’ The security officer apparently has a recording of the play, a staple of Damascene DVD kiosks. While security officer and protestor subscribe to vastly different ideologies, both were schooled in a tradition of oppositional theatre.

The shared mediascape of security officer and protestor is more evident in their access to television than to the Internet. The officer begins his search of the protestor by asking him where he's hiding his Facebook. However, while the officer may not quite understand Internet technology, others in the regime do. The officer reads a report to the protestor that includes the incriminating statements he published on Facebook – your online activity is being monitored (even if some in the security services do not quite grasp the meaning of ‘online’). The two are on much more equal footing when it comes to satellite television. In an impassioned speech the protestor declares himself ready for whatever is about to befall him, whether the officer chooses to discuss the situation or to ‘beat, insult, and humiliate [him], strike [his] head with clubs, and to trample on [him] with other officers’. Noting the choice he's been offered, the officer asks if the protestor thinks this is an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and whether he will use his lifeline before answering. Later, the officer confuses an actor with a role performed, expressing surprise that Abou Assam (from the popular television series The Neighbourhood Gate) would sign the traitorous ‘Milk Statement’. The protestor explains that love of country prompted the statement, not treachery (though he neglects to explain that Abbas al-Nouri – the actor who created Abou Assam – did not sign the statement).

Their shared appreciation for The Neighbourhood Gate (and several other television programmes) is one of many points of commonality the two discover as they move from antagonists to compatriots. When the protestor complains of the crippling daily expenses of omnipresent corruption it prompts the officer to such an outpouring of hardships that the protestor reflexively warns him to lower his voice lest the police hear. However, their friendship really develops when it comes to light that the protestor is a member of the president's own religious sect, the Alawites, whereas the officer is of the Sunni majority who constitute the bulk of the opposition. Moreover, both men claim lineage from multiple sects and religions. In addition to Alawite and Sunni, the two discuss their Druze, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic ancestry. Resistance to the regime, or support for it, is not evidence of narrow confessional motivations but of a love of country. Some Sunnis support the regime; some Alawites oppose it. Far from being a country of sectarian schisms, the play depicts a Syria of sectarian harmony and intersectarian marriage.

An undercurrent of violence undercuts the play's hopefulness. The revolution, after all, has been postponed until yesterday, suggesting a continuous deferral; there is no returning to yesterday. From the present moment of rampant violence and fears of a future sectarian backlash, the play's depiction of fraternity between Sunnis and Alawites (as well as Druze and Christians) feels as falsely nostalgic as the television series The Neighbourhood Gate that the two characters repeatedly reference. That five-season miniseries, set in the 1930s, depicted a Damascene neighbourhood that was united in its resistance to French rule and appeared, in the words of one scholar, ‘a utopia of social integration and mutual assistance’.Footnote ¹¹ At the close of Tomorrow's Revolution Postponed until Yesterday, the official decides to release the protestor, who pledges to continue non-violent resistance. They agree that three principals unite Syrians: a commitment to peaceful opposition, resistance to Israel, and that ‘The Neighbourhood Gate is about us’. Television, specifically the nostalgic fare offered by Gulf satellite stations, is presented as a potential basis for a new Syrian identity in a post-Assad future. The assertion clearly rings false from the present; on 2 November 2012, Mohamad Rafeh, a pro-regime actor who starred in The Neighbourhood Gate, was kidnapped and found dead the following day.

The play ends as the two men recite the Fatiha for the dead, a prayer that – improbably – the security officer dedicates to the martyrs of a long list of Syrian cities under government siege, as well as all civilian and military victims of the conflict, ‘for they all carry Syrian citizenship’. As they finish their prayer, we hear a recording of the famous Quranic reciter, Mishary bin Rashid Alafasy, reciting the Fatiha as church bells ring out. Whether or not the nation has consciously decided to mourn together as these two men have, the nation is occupied in mourning their respective dead.

For all its hopefulness, Tomorrow's Revolution ends with a meditation on death, and the Malas twins’ subsequent work, even at its most exuberant, reflects their status as exiles from a country with a mounting death toll. Their two-minute film Once upon a Time There Was No More Space (uploaded on 11 July 2011) depicts a Syria in which public space for death announcements has been entirely exhausted. The camera focuses on the death announcement of the country's most famous victim, Hamza al-Khateeb, the thirteen-year-old boy from Daraa whose mutilated body was returned from police custody at the start of the Uprising. The camera pulls back to show row upon row of death notices constituting a wall of paper that extends onto surrounding trees. Mohammad Malas enters with a bucket of paste and a handful of rolled notices, and additional notices pinned to his coat. He pauses to read the notices or perhaps contemplate the lack space for new notices. He eventually turns and pastes a rolled sheet onto the empty space that separates him from the camera, effectively enclosing himself in a box of death notices.Footnote ¹²

Similarly, their three-part YouTube film Najim and Abu Hamlet in the Shadow of the Revolution (uploaded on 25 and 28 August 2011) depicts an oppressive claustrophobia produced by the escalation of state violence. The film reprises the two characters that first appeared in the twins’ 2009 play Melodrama, which they staged in their small bedroom – christened the Room Theatre for the event – for a ten-member audience at a time. As before, the limited opportunities for the two characters (unemployed extras) contrast with their names and aspirations. The younger Najim, whose name means ‘star’, longs for fame on television and in film; the elderly Abu Hamlet, as his name suggests, aspires to major roles in classic theatre. In Melodrama, a world of limited opportunity is evident in the stage space (which was little over a metre square), in the characters’ obsessive attention to a theatre culture that excludes them, and in circular conversations (that mixed references to Beckett and popular culture), culminating in their inability to find the exit to their own room.

There is a long tradition in Syrian theatre and film of depicting the actor's difficulty in gaining access to the stage as symbolic of restrictions on the public sphere. The most famous work in this genre may be Nabil Maleh's highly popular The Extras (1993). It depicts a tryst between a supernumerary of the National Theatre and a widow that is suddenly interrupted when security forces arrest a blind musician in a neighbouring apartment. There are also several plays in this tradition, including Walid Ikhlasi's The Path (1975) and Sa'dallāh Wannūs's Soirée with Abu Khalil Qabbani (1976). The most relevant example is again a work by Muhammad al-Maghut, Out of the Flock (1999). In that play, the main character specifically likens his condition as understudy to the status of the Arab world – unable to act and instead forced to wait silently offstage. When delegates of the Arab League attempt to destroy a production of Romeo and Juliet, this understudy resists by attempting to stage his own suicide and so complete a silenced play.

Najim and Abu Hamlet in the Shadow of the Revolution makes important changes in this genre. First, resistance is infused with hope. Second, the metaphor is made literal: when the play declares that the state is besieging the arts it means quite literally that soldiers may break down the doors at any moment. The first episode begins with Abu Hamlet's observation that ‘They've surrounded the Room Theatre.’ Najim jumps to a theatrical pose as if holding a rapier and shouts, ‘My kingdom faces stallions!’ to which Abu Hamlet responds with one word: ‘Tanks.’ If there was any confusion as to who ordered the tanks, Abou Hamlet adds, ‘They have forbidden bringing milk into the theatre.’ The Milk Statement – calling for, among other things, the delivery of foodstuffs into besieged cities – was the first instance in which artists expressed solidarity with the victims of government repression. The response was immediate. Through the blacklist, allies of the government conspired to deprive those artists of their livelihoods. Now the artists are themselves besieged, though Najim, who relies on the Syrian media for information, is slow to grasp his situation. When Abu Hamlet notes that the milk merchant has been arrested, Najim replies that Al-Dunya (the television station owned by the president's cousin) had reported that the merchant was a ‘foreign infiltrator’.

The confused pair try to make sense of the changes afoot in the second episode, but are too timid to tackle most subjects. Najim is ready to answer the question ‘to be or not to be’ but responds with terror when Abu Hamlet asks what Facebook is. That word has been expunged from Syrian dictionaries, along with ‘freedom, revolution, and demonstration’. Abu Hamlet asks for an explanation of the Baath Party but that subject renders Najim ill. He is much more comfortable discussing history, or rather a version of history shaped by a party that sees itself as the sole legitimate descendent of all Arab heroes.Footnote ¹³ In their zeal or confusion, the two stretch Baath history to encompass all Arab history. Both Tarik ibn Ziyad and Saqr Quraish (medieval conquerors of what is now southern Spain) were active Baath Party members in the Andalusia chapter. Similarly, Khalid ibn al-Walid (a companion of the Prophet) had a Baath past. History shows that even one of the prophets was a prominent party member. Najim whispers the name and on the YouTube upload it remains inaudible, though in the script for the theatrical version of the series the name is written: ‘Hafiz al-Assad’. The idea that party devotion to the ruling family approaches idolatry has been a common trope of opposition activism, at least since a video of soldiers forcing a detained man to chant ‘There is no God but Bashar’ went viral in August of 2011.Footnote ¹⁴ However, an even more wondrous claim ends this episode. ‘Probably’, they reflect, ‘Facebook itself is the doing of the Baath Party’. Truly, they seem to announce, God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

The regime's blasphemy turns to violence in the third episode when Najim and Abu Hamlet address the state of Syria's favourite television shows: Assad's soldiers have not only surrounded the Room Theatre, they have assaulted the most beloved characters of satellite television. In their earlier play, the Malas twins offered Syrian television production as a potential unifying force. Both protestor and security official could agree that ‘The Neighborhood Gate is about us’. In their later play, the idea of television as salvation is deliberately deflated. Abu Hamlet announces that the two must flee since this is ‘the final episode’. When asked ‘To where?’ Abu Hamlet responds that when they darken his gate, he will flee to the ‘the neighborhood gate’. A distraught Najim doubles up in pain, his hand over his heart, and announces that they have broken it down. Najim then runs through the virtuous characters in the show, explaining who was arrested, who was tortured and how, and who was stripped naked. (The authorities apparently left the show's villains alone.) He then recounts the sad fates of the characters of a series of popular programmes filmed in Syria: The People of the Flag (a period drama set in Damascus) lost their moustaches and their flags to Bashar's thugs, The Palestinian Exiles were sent packing to the Golan without weapons, the inhabitants of The Lost Village were imprisoned or killed by ‘friendly fire’, the titular character in Abou Janti King of the Taxis lost his cab when he refused to hang a picture of the president therein. The mediascape proves to be shaky ground for imagining a new Syrian community. After actors who called for humanitarian aid to besieged cities were blacklisted, it became apparent that television production in Syria was largely subservient to the state.

The two actors eventually consider making a desperate run to one of the three state theatres, but their locations – next to the old Officers’ Club or in areas known for the high number of security officials – make such treks perilous. With no other choice they decide to make their last stand in the Room Theatre. First, though, Najim makes a confession: ‘I am an artist and an infiltrator.’ Abu Hamlet responds, ‘And I too am an artist and an infiltrator.’ Having first proposed reconciliation through television, the twins now offer theatre as dissidence. They embrace the regime's dismissal of the opposition as foreign infiltrators; as artists they make it their business to sneak complexities over the borders of the tightly controlled everyday. The camera tracks down during their final exchange.

While the state had successfully contained the old theatre, situating it next to government institutions and then surrounding the stage with security officials, the new theatre – the one secreted away in bedrooms or disseminated online – resists control from above. To attend such a theatre is the equivalent of taking part in a demonstration. This theatre might have an audience of ten squeezed cheek by jowl or ten thousand at computers spread across the region. Ten or ten thousand, they populate an emerging public forum, one which may play a significant part in the constitution of a post-Assad Syria.