The premise behind Photo-Romance (2009), a ninety-minute performance by Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh, is the adaptation of a film that is never mentioned by name and only obliquely referenced on stage. Ettore Scola's Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, takes place over the course of a single day in the spring of 1938, when Adolf Hilter pays a visit to Benito Mussolini in Rome. Loren plays Antonietta, a beautiful but long-suffering housewife, married to a card-carrying fascist and limited in her worldview. Antonietta's entire family has gone to join the parades and celebrations marking the historic encounter, leaving her alone for the day. Mastroianni plays Gabriele, a radio broadcaster, recently sacked from his job and about to be deported by the authorities for harbouring not only anti-fascist but also homosexual inclinations, who happens to live in the same apartment block. The two meet when Antonietta's bird escapes its cage, flies out the window and lands on Gabriele's ledge. They befriend one another, fight, form an unexpectedly intimate bond and feel, throughout the film, for the edges of each other's solitude.

As the background story of Photo- Romance goes, at some point during the conceptualisation of the piece, Mroué sought out one of Scola's heirs to ask for permission to adapt the film - a gesture of courtesy more than legal compliance. To Mroué's surprise, the heir turned him down. Who knows what shape or structure the performance might have taken had Scola's heir said yes, but the refusal seems to have pushed Mroué and Saneh to peel back and reflect on their artistic practices and critical intentions. The result is a performance that sifts through the sediments of collaboration and the creative process. Constructed as a conversation about a script in progress, Photo-Romance questions what it means to make original work, what it means to adapt the work of others, to appropriate, alter, manipulate, craft and finesse a work into being. It also asks what it means to do so with a partner, in life as in art, in a manner that constantly needles the substance of the relationship, which itself exists in a context that invariably imposes its own ideas of what the substance of that relationship should be. That context is defined by the codes and mores of Lebanese society, by the machinations of the country's sectarian political system and by gender roles prescribed by a thin body of law, which - on matters of sex, marriage, family, inheritance and personal status - tends to revert back to the religious community to which one belongs, not as a matter of choice but by birth and paternal lineage. The piece represents the most densely layered articulation of a question that has preoccupied Mroué and Saneh's work for more than two decades: how to use the presence of the body on stage as a metaphor for the struggle to be a complex, multi-faceted individual in a sectarian state, and how to access a just, equitable and participatory experience of citizenship in a functional but deeply flawed democracy.

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Both born and raised in Beirut (in 1967 and 1966, respectively), Mroué and Saneh met when they were students at the Lebanese University. They collaborated on a stage adaptation of Elias Khoury's novel The Journal of Little Gandhi (published in Arabic as Rihlat Ghandi al-Saghir in 1989) when they were still in their early twenties. Since then, they have worked together formally and informally on an ever-more multidisciplinary body of work, which includes experimental performances, singlechannel videos, installations combining photography and text and a few 'proper' theatre works. (They also married at some point, though they rarely, if ever, refer to one another as husband or wife.) For the jointly authored performance Biokhraphia (2002), Saneh interrogates herself onstage with a tape recorder and video screen, demanding to know the story of how she got shot during Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war, whether or not she was politically active at the time, what the point of theatre is, how her sex life with her husband is, why she is such a confrontational woman and why her generation is such a mess.

Mroué's magisterial play Who's Afraid of Representation (2004) introduces a game played by himself and Saneh, replete with rules and references to an art-historical textbook that runs through anecdotes from the history of performance art (VALIE EXPORT in Action Pants: Genital Panic (1969) and Tap and Touch Cinema (1968); Chris Burden's Through the Night Softly (1973); Marina Abramovic's Rhythm O (1974)) but soon bleeds into the story of a civil servant who went to work one day and gunned down his co-workers, killing eight and wounding four. In the play's dramatic climax, the civil servant gives, with mounting desperation, a number of justifications for his crime - his motives were financial, or sectarian, or psychological, or political - before lamenting that never once in the process of his legal prosecution was he ever asked to re-enact his crime.

Saneh's Appendice (2007) is a performance accompanied by an interactive website, for which she tries to circumvent religious laws prohibiting cremation in Lebanon by asking other artists to sign various parts of her body as artworks to be incinerated in the event of her death. The performance is particularly chilling as Mroué delivers the entire monologue on behalf of his wife, who sits on stage, silent, throughout. How Nancy Wished That Everything Was an April Fool's Joke (2007), a piece written by Mroué and Fadi Toufic, offers a garrulous, episodic history of the civil war through the experiences of four fighters who served in different militias and never seem to die, despite the fact that they are killed at the end of every story they tell. Nancy suggests a preoccupation with Lebanon's civil war, which, while certainly prevalent in Beirut, is otherwise absent from the oeuvre that Mroué and Saneh have assembled. As artists, they are less enthralled with documents, archives and engagements with memory and history than are other Lebanese artists of their generation. Mroué's performance Make Me Stop Smoking (2006) is a subtle satire of the archival genre. (Taking the form of a lecture or an artist's talk, the piece finds Mroué on stage, alone, sharing the contents of a personal, idiosyncratic archive that consists not only of historically significant documents but also bank receipts, project proposals and press reviews of his work. 'What is all this for?' he asks, before explaining that his archive has become a burden, and that he wants to share it, in essence, to be rid of it.) Instead, Mroué and Saneh are more concerned with conditions prevailing in the era after the civil war, and beyond that, with how to replenish theatre with potential and eke out an emotionally fulfilling and intellectually sustaining existence in a particularly troubled part of the world.

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The prop dominating the set of Photo- Romance is an enormous white screen that cuts the depth of the stage in half. On one side the musician Charbel Haber sits with his guitar, surrounded by amps and pedals. On the other side Mroué perches on the edge of an armless, black leather chair, hands clasped together, elbows resting on his knees. Saneh, meanwhile, bounces periodically from a high stool behind a lectern to a low-slung seat next to Mroué. Photo-Romance does not so much adapt Scola's film as disembowel and reconfigure it, with each of the three characters transmitting different elements of sound and image onto the screen between them, which operates as a kind of public space, a site of contestation where opposing and competing visions may be played out.

Haber is the lead singer of Scrambled Eggs, a well-known post-punk band in Beirut. He runs his own label, composes soundtracks for films, collaborates with visual artists and juggles a sizable number of side projects, including La Chambre, the Grendizer Trio and the Moukhtabar Ensemble. In Photo-Romance he plays himself, providing the performance with a live score, interjecting a few lines of dialogue here and there, and generally serving as friend, witness, comic foil and occasional decompression switch for the action between Mroué and Saneh. Saneh also plays herself, in a manner of speaking. She steps onstage to present, explain, justify and defend the work on behalf of herself and Mroué. Mroué's character is more slippery, as he interprets both himself and his nemesis, namely, a censor tasked with advising an artist, from a position of ill-begotten authority, on what to keep and what to cut from a work she has made with her partner. In the script for Photo- Romance, Mroué's lines are interchangeably attributed to 'Rabih' and 'The Judge'. On several occasions, Saneh addresses Mroué and in the same breath says that, unfortunately, Mroué couldn't be there to partake in the conversation.

The doubling of Mroué's character is a nod to the process by which a theatre director in Lebanon must run his script by the censorship apparatus of the state before presenting his work to the public. Here, by inhabiting both the artist and the censor at once, Mroué directs attention to the worst consequence of that process, its internalisation as self-censorship. It is worth noting that censorship is a rather arbitrary affair in Lebanon, a structurally weak and economically laissez-faire state. The laws tend to be loose and archaic, and their enforcement applied in unpredictable bursts, often for the sole purpose of scoring quick political points on the local scene. Censorship falls not under the Ministry of Culture but rather under the Ministry of the Interior, and so it is meted out haphazardly by soldiers. For artists across different disciplines, this leaves a lot of wiggle room in terms of what one can get away with, and how one can manoeuvre. But it also raises a number of prickly issues about artistic integrity and autonomy, particularly as those soldiers in the security forces often hilariously or sadly overstep their bounds in deciding what is appropriate for the public to see. One story, repeated often enough to suggest it is apocryphal urban lore, says that in the mid-1990s, when Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction arrived in Lebanon, the censors were so appalled by the temporal disjunction of the plot that they re-cut the film so local cinemas would screen it in chronological order, protecting the public, as it were, from the sinister fragmentation of time.

After some preliminary banter among the characters, Photo-Romance begins with Mroué asking Saneh: 'Okay, so what's the story?' She responds by stressing the need for them to go through and evaluate the work at hand.

Rabih: What are you afraid of?

Lina: Everything. Political censorship, religious censorship, sexual censorship, exceeding the allotted budget, evaluating the work's originality. Everything.

Rabih: Wow, all that? The budget and the production are not my business. Censorship and originality, fine.¹

Saneh explains that she is concerned about the relationship between their work and a certain film. Mroué asks for a description of their approach. A free adaptation? A source of inspiration? 'I cannot explain it this way,' Saneh responds. Mroué asks for a broad outline and says, as an aside, that he has, in fact, seen the film in question, and found it very beautiful. From there, Saneh runs through the decisions she and Mroué made to distinguish their work from the film. First, they shifted the setting from Rome in 1938 to Beirut in 2007, placing their work in the context of Lebanon's increasingly tense political situation in the aftermath of the war with Israel in 2006. That war divided the country even more starkly into opposing camps - the ruling March 14 coalition and the opposition March 8 coalition - which were named for competing demonstrations that took place in downtown Beirut in the spring of 2005, on 14 March and 8 March, respectively.² Instead of a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini, Mroué and Saneh imagine a reprise of the two March demonstrations, in their performance held in the same space on the same day, so that the entire population is out onto the streets at the same time, leaving the characters (played by Saneh and Mroué) alone, like Antonietta and Gabriele, for the day.

Saneh explains that in their adaptation, the characters from the film have also changed. Lina is the female protagonist, a divorcee whose ex-husband, revealed to have been an abusive brute, has nonetheless taken custody of their children. Since her marriage fell apart, Lina has returned to Lebanon from Saudi Arabia, and now lives with her mother, her brother and his family. Rabih is the male protagonist, a print journalist who lost his job for questioning the extent to which the war of 2006 was really a catastrophe. By sectarian profile, both characters are nominally aligned with the resistance and the March 8 camp. Lina's character limply follows the party line, but Rabih's character is more of an activist and political dissident, a former communist who fought in the resistance back when it was a leftist concern and was detained in Israel's notorious Khiam prison in South Lebanon. Like so many former leftists and communists in Lebanon, the character Rabih plays was politically marginalised and intellectually sidelined by the rise of Hezbollah as the entity that took charge of the resistance against Israeli incursions into Lebanese territory. He is also a somewhat enlightened figure in his understanding of how gender roles, and housework, might be more beneficially distributed.

As Saneh reads the script to Mroué (and, by extension, to the audience), she periodically cues visual material to be projected on the imposing screen. The first bit of footage is a mock documentary about the simultaneous demonstrations in Beirut. After that, she projects portions of the 'film' she and Mroué are in the process of creating. The film is in fact a stop-motion animation, which consists solely of black-and-white photographs. The conceit captures the very different strengths of Mroué and Saneh as intensely physical performers - Saneh seems to act from the core of her body and conveys meaning through grand gestures with her shoulders and hips, versus Mroué's far more microscopic shifts in facial expression - without capturing a single fluid movement. The film, of course, is silent, so Saneh, with great virtuosity, races through all of the dialogue from her seat behind the lectern. Haber adds the music to the mix, and Mroué, at Saneh's prompting, is called on to provide a few sound effects. In between the stretches of film, Mroué and Saneh discuss various aspects of it, with Mroué, in his role as the censor, occasionally declaring that bits of material must be cut lest the piece provoke sectarian strife.

While the themes of collaboration, partnership, authorship and authenticity reverberate broadly, there are a few elements of the performance that carry particularly local resonance. One is the fact that a moment before the lights dim and the performance begins, Lebanon's national anthem blares over the sound system. When Photo-Romance premiered in Beirut, during the fifth iteration of the Home Works Forum in April, more than half the audience automatically rose to its feet. This is a knee-jerk reaction. For more than half a century after Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, the national anthem preceded most cultural events in the capital - up until the early 1990s it was even played in cinemas before the start of feature films, and on stateowned television stations before the nightly news began. Outside of government-run venues, playing the national anthem as a prelude to an evening has since fallen out of favour. But for a local crowd, its incongruous reprisal signals a sly forcing of the audience's hand - do you sit, or do you stand? - which underlines the sensitive and notably subtle connection that Mroué and Saneh draw between fascism, nationalism and the competing loyalties demanded amid the absurdities of Lebanon's current sectarian system.

The significance of the setting portrayed in the mock documentary is key. Martyrs' Square, the physical and symbolic heart of Beirut, currently is little more than a long stretch of gravel due to the fact that Solidere, the private real-estate corporation that has been managing the urban renewal of Beirut's city centre since the mid-1990s, has largely ignored this patch of public space in favour of the more commercially lucrative plots that surround it. 'Whatever one wants to say about the reconstruction plan currently being put into effect in central Beirut is almost (but not quite) beside the point,' writes the scholar Saree Makdisi in a critique of the economic imperatives behind Solidere's scheme. 'For the object of discussion - the centre of the city - virtually does not exist any longer; there is, in its place, a dusty sprawl of gaping lots, excavations, exposed infrastructure and archaeological digs.' Makdisi continues:

Blank or not, the city centre is a surface that will be inscribed in the coming years in ways that will help to determine the unfolding narrative of Lebanon's national identity, which is now ever more open to question. For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that identity, as well as of Lebanon's relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared-out blankness of the centre of Beirut; indeed they will determine the extent to which this space can be regarded as a blankness or, instead, as a haunted space: a place of memories, ghosts.³

Makdisi's criticism, articulated in the essay 'Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere' in Critical Inquiry, appeared ten years before the setting of Photo-Romance, and eight years before Martyrs' Square was transformed into a site of real contestation, first teeming with the demonstrations that led to the formation of the ruling March 14 coalition, and then, throughout much of 2007 and 2008, surrounded by soldiers and occupied by the March 8 coalition's opposition sit-in. But the sheer spectacle of these events smoothes over the ways in which this carved out space represents a low-burning conflict over a city ravaged by real-estate speculation, which has led to the destruction of as many buildings as the wars that preceded the reconstruction era. Despite the specificities of the site, the blankness of Martyrs' Square, like the blankness of Photo-Romance's white screen, also represents a version of the public space Chantal Mouffe imagines as a site of agonistic confrontation, where an individual, 'inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities, and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification', as she wrote in The Return of the Political (1993), might reclaim his or her role as an active protagonist in political life.⁴

A final component worth lingering on in Photo-Romance is the fanciful notion, explained to Mroué by Saneh onstage, that the camera used to produce the projected film is only capable of capturing individuals. It cannot detect communities or groups. Comparing two scenes from the beginning and the end of the film, Saneh explains about her own character in the performance: 'And here, as you've noticed, we could still hear the family talking when she appeared in the image […] Because contrary to the first scene, where she doesn't appear, when she is still integrated in the communitarian discourse, here she alone appears. That's because she has started to feel herself an individual, distinct from her group. But this newfound individualism will condemn her to solitude and anguish, you see?'