Scorched  

»There are truths one has to discover for oneself.« / Nawal in Scorched

Jeanne, a mathematician, and her twin brother Simon, an amateur boxer, are suddenly torn from their peaceful lives when their mother dies and leaves two letters behind with her mysterious will.  After a five year silence, her death forces her two children to search for a father they had believed was killed during the war in their mother’s homeland and a brother whom they had not previously known existed. 

Reluctantly, Jeanne and Simon travel to their mother’s homeland.  Here their search for their father and brother leads them to the heart of the keenly-kept secret of their own origins. Step by step Jeanne and Simon dig further into the incomprehensible story of a steadily building catastrophe and an image emerges of their mother which goes beyond her silence – to a maladjusted, rebellious woman who has fought with everything at her disposal and lost horribly. With every fresh clue these enlightened young people leave their previous innocence and lack of history further behind.  Suddenly the civil war which had once seemed so far away, whose war crimes trials their mother had spent ten years watching, has more to do with them than they can bear.

A thriller and a horror trip, both a contemporary play and an ancient tragedy, set in a country laid waste by civil war. Wajdi Mouawad gradually uncovers the truth across a taut web of different times and locations. The way in which apparently unrelated events coincide endows the drama with the parablelike quality of a modern tragedy.

A visiting production from the Burgtheater Vienna.