Kevin Spacey of 'House of Cards' skips SAGs to watch his Arab students perform

Actor couldn’t make it to LA because he had committed to watch a play put on by young theater students he had...

SHARJAH: House of Cards star Kevin Spacey couldn’t make it to Los Angeles to accept his Screen Actors Guild Award on Sunday, because he had committed to being more than 13,000 kilometres away, in Sharjah, to watch an Arabic play put on by young theater students he had spent two weeks personally mentoring, The National reported on Monday.

Spacey took a seat in the front row at the Sharjah Institute for Theatrical Arts with Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammad, Ruler of Sharjah, for the hour-long production of Dhow Under the Sun, by the Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak.

That the play was in a language he does not understand did not seem to concern him. Neither did missing the SAG Awards, where the Oscar-winner picked up a gong for his work on the Netflix series House of Cards, adding to the Golden Globe Award he took home a week before.

The play, with 34 hand-picked participants from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian Territories, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan, was the product of a two-week long Home Grown theatre workshop, a partnership between the Kevin Spacey Foundation and Middle East Theatre Academy (Meta) in Sharjah.

Addressing the crowd before the play started, Spacey said: “Tonight is the kind of night I grew up with.

“This is what I experienced when I was very young and in my theatre class, I was a part of many programmes where I was brought together with other emerging artists to put on plays in workshops with professional directors and working actors," he added.

He further said just as the UAE was brought together by the spirit of a man who believed he could unite all under one banner, we celebrate that spirit by bringing together these young, remarkable talents from so many different places.

As the play began, Spacey leaned forward, ignoring the titles that flashed on the screens placed at the edge of the stage. He put on his glasses, intently following the expressions and body language of the lead characters, Ghalia and Anis.

The theatre veteran, who completed an 11-year-stint as the artistic director of The Old Vic Theatre in London last year, slipped into the Emirates under the radar two weeks ago to personally train the participants.

One of those was Emirati multimedia design professional Rashed al Nuaimi, 22, who was chosen for the workshop after a strenuous audition process last year.

“Kevin Spacey told us that ­regardless of where we come from or the language we speak, human emotions are the same,” said Nuaimi.

“Each one of us had to read a couple of lines from our character and he’d tell us how to express better," he added.

The play was commissioned specifically for Home Grown and explores themes prevalent to the region. After being hit by an environmental calamity, families of a fictional country are displaced and forced into a refugee camp where they have to deal with the struggle for daily amenities, electricity and survival. Writer Abdulrazzak’s story was inspired by true accounts of young Syrian refugees who had to abandon their homes and education when the civil war began. The play tackles the issue of statelessness, global warming and corruption, while managing to infuse it with a touch of humour and glimmer of human spirit.

“There is a dictator in the camp controlling the electricity and people are struggling to find it,” explains Nuaimi. “Ghalia, a young refugee, is a threat to this bully as she is working on building a new source of energy.”

Nuaimi says Spacey didn’t mince words when it came to critiquing their performance.

“He was so honest with his feedback,” he said.