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Looking into strangers’ bedrooms or refrigerators: something that is normally simply not done is in X Homes the name of the game. Here the lines between reality and theatre are blurred – also in the latest sojourn: Beirut. By Gerd Brendel

To the left the city highway, to the right barbed wire. En route to our first stop Raghida, a journalist colleague from Beirut, and I traverse an urban no-man’s-land. “Follow the wall to the corner, then turn left into the little alleyway” – is written on the flyer that we were handed at the café, our meeting place. We are on our way to X Homes. This is the name of a theatre format in which the visitors are sent in pairs to roam through a district of the city, from one private apartment to the next, on a theatre journey into a private sphere.

For behind the normally closed doors the visitors are awaited by mini-dramas, an installation, affable residents or simply nothing at all. Matthias Lilienthal invented the format a few years ago for Berlin and meanwhile, thanks to the Goethe-Institut, he has shown it successfully in São Paulo, Johannesburg, Warsaw, Istanbul and other cities. Now it is the turn of Beirut. The first tour takes us through Khamdaq al Ghamiq. The area around the “Green Line” was the scene of fierce fighting in the civil war. Christians used to live here, now it is mainly occupied by Shiites. Posters of Hisbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah are pasted to the lampposts.

He is also present in the living room of our first stopover. Beside him hangs a photo of a young man. “A martyr, for sure,” whispers Raghida. His grandfather, seated on the couch, tells us that he already demonstrated against the French colonial rulers before independence. But neither his past nor his dead grandson will save him from soon being evicted, together with his neighbours and his family, to make way for new luxury apartments and office towers.

“We are mired in the malaise“

We take a look around the neighbours’ tiny apartment and are filmed as we do so. Thus we, the voyeurs, become the object ourselves. A few stops further on we find ourselves once again in the role of intruders: on the fourth floor of a high-rise building we are given a torch and sent into a pitch-dark apartment. The living-room cupboard contains bric-à-brac. A man is lying in the bedroom. Somewhere a door slams. On the kitchen table is a cigarette with a lighter. For whom? In the darkness we dream up our own stories.

At the end of our first tour through Khamdaq al Ghamiq a video is waiting for us in a bakery. In the film the mother of the filmmaker Marwan Hamdan talks about her marriage to a Muslim against the will of her Christian family. Up to the present day her brother has still not forgiven her, and this although he was a dedicated official of the Communist Party. Hamdan has accompanied his mother’s narrative with scenes from old Soviet films: an ironic comment on the failure of the great leftwing Utopias. And today?

Marwan has given up hope of a secular, liberal society. “We are mired in the malaise, only questions,” he says, and as we leave he gives us each a freshly baked sesame ring. Only questions, no answers, also remain at the end of our second tour the next day in Bourj Hammoud, a traditional Armenian district. Whereas the previous day revolved around the desolate past and present, here the visitors are drawn into the dreams of the inhabitants.

Scary worlds

This time I am together with Kevork, an Armenian engineer. In an apartment an improvised marriage brokering awaits us, in the next a children’s choir. In a dimly lit corridor someone gives us an iPad. On the screen Hassan talks about his great loves; we walk down the steps with him to his modest apartment. There he himself sits, on the bed, and looks at the visitors with his melancholy, seductive smile. In the film he talks about his present girlfriend, a Philippine; she has left everything for him, now she is only there for him, and the real live Hassan shows us the tattoo with her name, which he pierced himself.

Afterwards Kevork confesses that the story scared him. The worlds into which the Liilienthal project leads us are as strange to my bourgeois Beirut companions as they are to me, the foreigner.

With one exception perhaps: the last stop is a dilapidated cinema. Where normally the exclusively male movie-goers are more interested in the man sitting next to them than in the films on screen, showing now are excerpts from half a century of Arab-Egyptian film history from a queer perspective: female couples drooling over each other, an Oriental version of Charlie’s Aunt, Yussuf Chahine plays himself as a successful film director who dances with a young man through – of all places – an Egyptian film-Berlin. Almost a happy end.