ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah.

REVIEW: ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. Directed by Mohammad Basha. The Body Ensemble with the support of Al Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. September 9 & December 12, 2025, Marina Johnson

Artificial Heart: Thinking into the Future at Al Hakawati Theatre in Jerusalem

مش رح اسمحلك تقتل حالك وانا بتفرج ! ناجي ! فكرة خالك عن عالم منزوع السلاح مش حلم.

• السيدة الأولى, قلب صناعي

"I won’t let you kill yourself while I watch! Naji, your uncle’s idea of a world without weapons wasn’t just a dream." - First Lady: Artificial Heart 

The sound of computerized scanning and the rumbling of bass fills the room as the lights rise on a futuristic laboratory. An anatomical scan of a human rotates on the projection screens against the upstage back wall as green coding and programming data pass along the screen. The Professor, stationed center stage, manipulates screens invisible to the audience, moving in quick, sharp gestures. He is dressed in a silver futuristic tunic, and black slacks, with wires passing over his face, prompting the question of man or cyborg. Behind him is a translucent white and silver cylindrical portal, the kind one might associate with a transportation chamber or other liminal laboratory space, and to his left and right are a couch and two chairs. This stylized beginning made my heart race; I had not seen anything like it before in Palestine and I was eager to go on a journey into the past, present, and future. 

Artificial Heart (قلب صناعي) was directed by Mohammad Basha and premiered on August 24th, 2024 on stage at Al Hakawati, the Palestinian National Theatre (PNT) in Jerusalem. I watched the play twice, once at Al Kasaba Theatre in Ramallah on September 9th, 2024, and again at the PNT on December 12, 2024.  Artificial Heart was written and staged in Arabic, but at the performance I watched in December, supertitles were projected, and many foreigners packed the balcony of the PNT to have the best view of the stage and supertitles simultaneously. 

The play unfolds across three plotlines, each exploring humanity's reliance on technology and the emotional consequences of this dependence. Each vignette represents a group of people–young people who grew up with technology and use it as an innate part of their lives, an older family who have technology thrust upon them, and a government that sees an opportunity to use technology to maintain power. The storytelling goes back and forth between the three threads, creating an interwoven narrative of a world that, in many ways, eerily mirrors our own.

The first thread focuses on an aging couple, Abu Omar and Um Omar, grappling with their failing robot helper. Their humorous and poignant interactions with the robot reflect a society heavily dependent on technology. The couple’s dialogue reveals their nostalgia for simpler times and highlights their desire to reconnect with family, especially their absent son, Omar. Their relationship with the robot mirrors their struggles with memory, aging, and loss, serving as a microcosm of a broader human experience overshadowed by mechanization. By the end of the play, it is revealed that their son Omar, whom they repeatedly mention waiting for, does not exist. In fact, they were not allowed to have a child by the governmental regime which deemed their genes unworthy. This eugenicist act has haunted their lives as they dream of the son they were never allowed to have.

The second narrative thread focuses on Sami, a social media influencer obsessed with views and fame. His girlfriend Reema breaks up with him because he is so wrapped up in the promises of a life made easier through technology and cannot take her desire for authentic emotional connection seriously. Sami's infatuation with technological solutions leads him to acquire the robot Sasha, modeled after Reema, as a substitute girlfriend. This relationship showcases the emotional void created by prioritizing efficiency and artificial substitutes over human intimacy. Over time, Sami realizes that Sasha will never seek to connect deeply with him the way that Reema had. Sasha’s inability to return affection in an emotionally connected way is the technological limitation that causes Sami to terminate his relationship with the robot. 

In the last, and most politically charged storyline, the President collaborates with the Professor to develop a robotic version of himself to perpetuate his rule. The project involves suppressing citizens’ emotional data and memories of trauma to keep order and prevent them from becoming aware of the world's problems. As the Professor conducts lab research, the First Lady seeks him out to share revelations about her traumatic past that, unbeknownst to him, intertwines with his own. The Professor, Naji, actually is the brother of the First Lady, sharing a past as a refugee that he does not remember due to the government-mandated pills which cause people to forget and feel good. The First Lady challenges the Professor to confront his complicity in a system that trades humanity for power. At first, he begs her: 

Please, I’ve lived my whole life like this. I don’t want to remember. If the memories are that painful, it’s a blessing that they erased them.  

بترجاك ، انا عشت حياتي كلها بهاي الطريقة ، ما بدي اتذكر ، اذا الذكريات مؤلمة ، هاد بيعني انهم ساعدوني لما محوها.

But, as seen in the epigraph to this review, the First Lady reminds him of the ambitions of their uncle, who aspired to see a world without weapons. While not seen explicitly in the play, there is an implication that the President is not only perpetuating his rule with technology, but that he is using the technology itself as a weapon. The Professor reveals he has been having nightmares about his past, illustrating his body’s inability to forget, even if the pills erase the details from his conscious mind. Eventually, he realizes:

The idea of a world without weapons wasn’t impossible. Maybe human nature can’t give up violence, but it can avoid turning it into the biggest and most profitable trade—the trade of death. Sure, memories are painful, but no one can force what I remember and what I don’t. Revenge... revenge. How can revenge turn a person into a monster, devouring everything around them? How can we be born innocent children and learn to hate? And hate creates even greater hate! Until it drags us into a spiral, speeding us toward our end. And now, your nightmares will begin, Mr. President.

 فكرة عالم بدون سلاح ما كانت مستحيلة ، يمكن الطبيعة البشرية ما بتقدر تتخلى عن العنف ، لكن بتقدر ما تحوله لأكبر واربح تجارة ، تجارة الموت. صحيح الذكريات مؤلمة لكن ما حدا بقدر يجبرني شو اتذكر وشو ما اتذكر. الانتقام…. الانتقام. كيف ممكن الانتقام يحول الانسان لوحش  يلتهم كل اشي حواليه ... كيف ممكن ننولد اطفال أنقياء ونتعلم نكره ؟! ، والكره يخلق فينا كره أكبر! لحد ما يوصلنا لدوامة تسحبنا وتسرع فينا لنهايتنا، وهلا رح اتبلش كوابيسك انت سيادة الرئيس.

The Professor ultimately sabotages the project to reclaim his own agency. At the end of the play, the Professor accesses the project and the images projected are of wars, destruction, weapons, and the technology company, Vita’s, logo. By deleting these files, he takes his own “revenge” here against a fascist system intent on controlling citizens and keeping the arms trade on top. His actions invite the audience to question the roles of memory, morality, and resistance in our lives. These threads, interconnected by themes of loss, humanity, and the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement, collectively critique humanity's surrender to artificial solutions at the expense of emotional authenticity and moral accountability.

From the moment the play began, the projections designed by Hayat Laban left me completely engrossed. Paired with Ramzi Sheikh Qassim’s lighting and scenic design and Ivan Azazian’s sound, the technological world was brought to life in a way I had yet to see on stage. The stage was spare, with few physical set pieces present, yet the design and acting filled the world, leaving nothing to be desired. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Mohammad Basha perform as an actor on stage in plays such as  لا غبار عليه  (No Dust, 2022) and صالح وبسمة ، فسيفساء القدس (Salah and Basma: A Jerusalem Mosaic, 2023), so it was especially exciting to see a play that he had co-written and directed. In an interview with Basha on December 21, 2024, he was quick to tell me that, despite the fact that Artificial Heart asks how much technology “contributes to nourishing our humanity” or “stripping us of it,” creating the play would not have been possible without technology.  Some of Basha’s team had to travel during the creative process, and Zoom and other online communication made collaboration across distance possible. While the play does not touch much on the utility of technology, perhaps because it is assumed that the audience already brings those experiences to the table, the goal of the play was never to vilify technology. Rather, the point of the play is to bring attention to the ways that people use technology to replace their own humanity and governments use it to target citizen populations in ways that are often unknown or unquestioned. 

This point was made clear through the use of double casting, as each actor took on roles that created a thought-provoking counterpoint between each character. Reem Telhami, most recently seen in the Netflix television series Mo, did not disappoint with her sophisticated depiction of a First Lady who has been thrust into a privileged position as the wife of the President but refuses to disconnect from her past as a refugee. Her demands for a better future contrasted with her portrayal of the eager and nostalgic Um Omar with grace. Firas Farrah who co-wrote the script with Basha, shined as Sami, the Professor, and the elderly parents’ robot. His journey as Sami was both funny and emotionally wrought, going from a man obsessed with how technology could improve his life to realizing that a life void of human desires and love is not the answer. His physically nuanced performance as the Professor, navigating screens both visible and invisible to the audience, stole the show. Fatima Abu Aloul played both Reema and Sasha. She was especially hilarious in her role as the robot, as she embodied a character who, despite trying to please Sami, continued to make choices that left him angry and the audience laughing. Nidal Al-Jubeh played both the President and Abu Omar, embodying two men on either side of a harmful relationship. Al-Jubeh’s stern and unflinching dedication as President to the world he is working to establish stood in stark contrast to the world of Abu Omar whose life has been left wanting due to the actions of the President. The irony of this double-casting decision allowed the audience to reflect on two men of potentially the same generation and how they have shaped, or been unable to shape, the realities around them.

In a world currently saturated with conversations about artificial intelligence and the ways that different world governments use it to surveil their citizens, I expected Artificial Heart to tackle the proliferation and dangers of AI. However, after the performance I realized that “artificial” and “heart” were meant to stand in contrast with each other, asking the audience to reflect on what meaning these two words hold in our own lives. The play’s triptych format allows it to tackle its themes from multiple angles. Each story brings a unique perspective, from intimate domestic moments to larger societal commentary, creating a rich narrative experience. Artificial Heart is a dynamic and thought-provoking theatrical exploration of humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, delivering profound commentary on the collision of tradition, progress, and human fragility.

References

• Basha, Mohammad and Firas Farrah. Artificial Heart. Unpublished script in both Arabic and English, 2024.

• Johnson, Marina, and Mohammad Basha. Interview about Artificial Heart. Personal, December 21, 2024.

• Program Note, The Body Ensemble. Artificial Heart, 2024.