" I wish I no longer had to say 'I.'
I wish I could cease to care for all things.
I wish someone else could say 'he' for me. "
At the age of eight, on the eve of his exodus from a civil war-torn Lebanon, Wajdi Mouawad sowed these words into the silence of his room. Thirty years later, they have sprouted into Seuls.
Harwan, a Lebanese doctoral student in Montreal, finds himself stranded in the final stretches of his degree. His niche dissertation, Frames as Spaces of Identity in the Solo Performances of Robert Lepage, is a clinical mirror of his own fractured existence. Caught between conflicting cultures and torn by the very frameworks meant to define him, Harwan watches as his estrangement from his father deepens and his mother tongue, Arabic, dissolves word by word.
When language can no longer function, body and color seize the stage. A brush in hand and paint hemorrhaging the space, Harwan transfigures both himself and the theatre into a vast, visceral canvas, commencing a ritual of unlearning silence to rediscover the syntax of living.
Seuls marks a definitive milestone: Mouawad’s first work as sole author, director, and performer, inaugurating his acclaimed Cycle Domestique. In French, the title Seuls is a pluralized solitude—an acknowledgment that the man alone on stage is never truly solitary. Through a polyphonic layering of text, video, recorded echoes, and live painting, the work shifts restlessly between forms of expression. Drawing inspiration from Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, Mouawad summons the child perpetually unable to find his way home.
In an era where home and belonging have become fugitive concepts, and the sense of internal exile is a universal condition, Seuls offers no easy solace. The man standing naked amidst the paint is Harwan. He is Mouawad. He is the reflection of any one of us.
Wajdi Mouawad is a playwright, director, actor, and the preeminent force in contemporary Francophone theatre. Born in Lebanon, 1968, his portfolio traces a trajectory of exile from Beirut to Paris and then Quebec. Having over forty publications translated into twenty languages, his voice has become a definitive bridge between Mediterranean history and Western avant-garde theatre.
Mouawad’s reputation is anchored in his tetralogy, Le Sang des promesses, an epic exploration of ancestral trauma and identity scarred by war. While Littoral (Tideline) serves as the cycle's haunting genesis, its successor, Scorched (Incendies), reached global acclaim through Denis Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated cinematic adaptation.
Rooted in the triptych of ancestral memory, war, and identity, Mouawad’s writing transmutes private trauma into modern epics, often fusing the gravitas of Greek tragedy and French linguistic density with the cinematic momentum and magical realism of Québécois aesthetics.
In 2009, Mouawad served as the Associate Artist of the Festival d’Avignon, premiering his monumental eleven-hour marathon, Le Sang des promesses. Since 2016, he has presided as the Artistic Director of France’s Théâtre National de la Colline. His career is marked by the highest honors, including the Grand Prix du Théâtre de l'Académie Française and the European Drama Award. In 2025, he was appointed to the Collège de France to deliver his landmark lecture series, "The Verb of Writing"—an ontological deconstruction of the creative act as a fundamental mode of existence, and a metaphysical trajectory through the verbs to be, to see, to tremble, and ultimately, to die.
© Erwan-Floch
Director/Actor: Wajdi Mouawad
Stage Technician: Eric Morel
Video Technician: Stephane Lavoix
Light Technician: Gilles Thomain
Sound Technician: Annabelle Maillard
Special Thanks: Bureau Français de Taipei
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