The Man of the Kasbah

Theatre + Q&A | In ENGLISH | Doors open 19:30 | Duration: 90mins

Tickets 12€

At the door 14€

Warning: Full frontal, male nudity | +18

This play will also be performed in SPANISH on January 19th. See here for tickets.

A solo performance, written and directed by Adam Belarbi. This three-act monodrama follows Mohamed Saïd as he navigates his identity within the strictures of Moroccan norms of masculinity. The performance boldly addresses male trauma and the often-overlooked scars of circumcision, framing these personal experiences within broader themes of repression, identity, and silenced male vulnerability. The show is distinguished by its innovative theatrical language, combining poetic text, minimalist staging, experimental techniques, and elements of cruelty theatre. Raw, physical, and sensorial, the work delivers a visceral and provocative experience that challenges audience expectations and invites profound reflection.

The show begins with Mohamed Saïd, a young man from Tangier, sitting completely naked on a traditional Moroccan couch, his body curled into himself as he uttered poetic words recounting a night that had changed everything for him. With rage, heartbreak, and a thirst for vengeance, he confesses to the audience that in his Kasbah, every child is named “Mohamed,” and that it’s believed that the worst punishment a man can face is to be forced to sit naked on a bottle. Looking directly at the audience, he declares he is no longer afraid. In an act of desperation, he announces his intent to cut off his own penis. Just as the decisive moment arrives, the stage plunges into darkness.

The second act opens in darkness with the sound of a recorded newscast: a journalist reports that a man in his twenties was rescued at the last moment before he could mutilate himself, and that he has now been transferred to the “International High Court of Men” for investigation. The reporter adds that the man insisted on bringing a piece of furniture with him. When the lights return, Mohamed Saïd appears on stage, dressed in a traditional Moroccan Jabadour, and is subjected to interrogation under the category of “men abandoned by the eastern winds.” The audience quickly learns that Mohamed Saïd has come to accuse the men of the Kasbah of a crime, and as the questioning deepens, his confessions reveal the suffocating codes of masculinity that shaped his life.

Through these revelations, the audience discovers how Mohamed Saïd’s understanding of pleasure was once limited to the infamous Soap of Palm, a product men of the Kasbah used in secret for masturbation. He then confesses that everything changed the night before, on the occasion of his younger brother’s ninth birthday. His family had summoned the hajjam, a local figure with a role similar to that of a barber, who also performs a traditional ceremony ritual that declares a boy a man.

After the ceremony, Mohamed Saïd went to repaint a grand riad belonging to an artist newly arrived in the Kasbah. Finding the house was nearly impossible — no one in the Kasbah knew its location — but upon arriving, Mohamed discovered that the artist paints men from the Kasbah in torn Djellabas, using every color except white. The artist, whose facial features eerily mirrored his own, became a living reflection for Mohamed. What began as curiosity quickly transformed into attraction. Although MOHAMED had only ever been with women, he chose this time to experience intimacy with a man for the first time in his life. Inch by inch, the artist touched his body as though redrawing its lines, reintroducing him to sensations he had never allowed himself to feel.

But then came a moment of rupture: Mohamed noticed that the artist’s body carried an extra fold of skin between his legs. The artist explained he was not circumcised. Like a child, Mohamed’s curiosity overflowed with questions. Yet as the conversation unfolded, a buried forgotten memory resurfaced: the long-suppressed trauma of his own circumcision. Overcome with hyperventilation and hysteria, Mohamed collapsed under the weight of the memory — he remembered the brutal ritual performed without anesthesia, identical to the one his brother had just endured.

In anguish, Mohamed screamed for his lost skin to be returned. Consumed by fury, he painted his body with every color except white, betraying the very walls he had repainted all his life. At the climax of his breakdown, the artist stepped forward to comfort him, offering him something that could never be taken away: the unexplored depth of his own body, his P-spot. As Mohamed cursed the men of the Kasbah, who spit on him in contempt, he took their spit to the artist, demanding to be fingered, to be penetrated, to reclaim a pleasure long denied. But in that moment he realized: there was no artist. It was himself all along, facing his reflection in a cracked mirror, locked in the solitude of his own room.

The circumcision of his younger brother had ripped open his own wounds, triggering both the memory and the discovery of his body — fully, for the first time in his life, free from the shackles of cultural masculinity. The performance culminates in an act of raw, transgressive liberation, as Mohamed Saïd experiences the forbidden intensity of a prostate orgasm before the audience. The scene is both hysterical and ecstatic, a scream of hunger and pain, revealing a pleasure that had been violently erased from his existence.

Written, directed and performed by Adam Belarbi.

Developed in 2025 at Nau Ivanow- A space of performing arts in Barcelona

Artist's statement: I wrote this monodrama as a personal journey of healing from the violence embedded in Moroccan traditions and societal norms of masculinity. Like many Moroccan men, we undergo circumcision ceremonies as children, where we are declared “men,” and throughout our upbringing we are fed rigid ideas of what it means to be masculine: the number we are to emotions, sensuality, and vulnerability, the more “manly” we are considered.

I created this show to give voice to those silenced experiences, to scream the unspoken screams of countless children. It explores the mental struggles men endure under societal pressure to conform to a prescribed form of masculinity. Refused in Morocco, this work found a space for development in Spain at Nau Ivanow, and I am now committed to sharing it across Europe.

The Man of the Kasbah is more than a performance; it is a man’s cry against injustice and the oppressive expectations of social masculinity.