On the 1 March 2024, the Franco-Moroccan playwright Mohamed El Khatib will deliver a masterclass in autobiographical theatre to second-year students in French. Over the course of the year, these students from Queen’s and St John’s have been taking part in a course on acting in French centred on El Khatib’s 2021 play, Mes Parents. At the end of El Khatib’s masterclass, they will present a short performance of excerpts from the play and their own scenes and monologues adapted from its themes.
Mohamed El Khatib is the founder of the Zirlib Theatre Company. He came to prominence in France in 2016, when his documentary play about his mother’s death, Finir en beauté, was awarded the Grand Prix de Littérature Dramatique. He has continued to explore family and parent-child relationships through plays that blend literature and reality like C’est la vie, featuring two actors who had each lost children, La Dispute, starring eight-year-old children of divorced parents, and Mes Parents, which was adapted from interviews carried out by acting students with their parents. He is also deeply interested in amateur creativity and access to the arts, as evidenced by work like Stadium, created with football supporters, and Gardien Party, featuring museum security guards. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille.
This is the third year of our series of masterclasses with French theatre directors at Queen’s, following workshops in 2022 and 2023 with Emmanuel Besnault and Anne Monfort respectively.
Image: Yohanne Lamoulère – Tendance Floue
