Rabih Mroué dramatizes the phenomenon of disappearance… into an existential and political metaphor."Missing Employee": the thin line that lies between lies and the truth. Pierre Abi Saab[…] the eyes are focused on the scene. On the latter, a long table is laid, it is probably a desk; behind the table, a chair faces the audience. However, the chair is empty and will remain so for the rest of the play. "Missing Employee" is a play without theatre or actors. There are three large screens on the back wall. One of the screens is placed in the centre of the scene, right behind the chair, and is framed by two other screens on both sides. Both these screens are placed a little higher up. Where are the actors? What surprise are we to expect from Rabih Mroué? Rabih Mroué is the author, the director and the interpreter of this work. He has accustomed us to the most unimaginable challenges in each of his new works. His work always sits on the thin razor edge that lies between the real and the imaginary. While we’re on the subject, where is Rabih Mroué? Could it be that he is waiting outside for us (in reference to his previous creation "Enter Sir, We Will Wait for You Outside" that was presented in 1998)? Suddenly the "image" of the actor appears on the screen in the centre. He speaks to us as though he was a lecturer or television program host… The audience looks for the original, for the bodily presence of the actor. The reason we came to the theatre is to see a flesh and bone actor playing. In vain: the scene will remain empty, and we will soon find out that Rabih Mroué sits amongst us, in the same ⒏ȋ㙱. Just as if, wanting to see his own performance, he would choose to sit himself comfortably with us, in the same 赇㈸屍烠, in front of a camera that would project his virtual presence onto the screen, in the centre of the stage. […] This absence of the actor’s flesh and bone body, and this man who “hides” and delegates his presence to his image, is in an organic relation both to the subject and to the theme of his play. In this new creation, Rabih Mroué works on the poetry of the phenomenon of disappearance, in its symbolic dimension, as possibly being the only means or the only access to freedom for individuals that are trapped by a society of confessional, tribal, parental, or regional communities… The actor – in his own name - tells us that, at a particular moment in time, he started cutting out small ads in newspapers. These are all related to the disappearance of people (missing persons). He tells us how he started to collect them in a scrapbook (which makes me think of a sort of “chronicle of disappearance”, in reference to Elia Sleiman’s film). Rabih Mroué looks at disappearance as one of the “signs of modernity" (!), meaning a sort of escapism, an escape through the thin cracks in the burden of the hegemony of communities. He says that his interests lies in the phenomenon of disappearance as a suspended existence, as the "death of the idea but not of the body"; when the individual “exists and does not exist at the same time, when he is both alive and not alive (…), absent but perhaps coming back”, which implies and imposes the renewed adjournment of everything, even that of tears… The absence is thereby an aesthetic choice, a political and existential metaphor, the touchstone in the work of Rabih Mroué. The absence or disappearance of the actor, the author, the text; the absence or disappearance of the hero, the character, and the subject (do we need to add: the absence of the State, of the legal institutions, of justice and of logic? However, Rabih Mroué’s work is far from being charged with any ideological pretence), and finally, the absence or the disappearance of "the play" itself, which we came to watch. Because, (at least it would appear, but appearance is here the essence of the work), the only remains are these newspaper clippings, which have been carefully assembled and archived in three scrapbooks, of different colours and sizes. Three school copy books that the actor - narrator (who plays his own "real" character) handles, consults, and reads passages from, commenting, explaining, contemplating, synthesizing, while trying to untie the strings - that are inexorably intermingled - with an extremely complex, difficult, worrying, and strange story line. Bit by bit, the story is clarified, and the play builds itself through the keen effort of the actor to solve the enigma, to discover the secrets, and to make absence present. […] A second camera, placed on top of Rabih Mroué and handled from the ceiling of the 뢀≽鰛ꓤ, films the articles that have been clipped and stuck in scrapbooks, the headlines, the dates, the photographs of the missing persons, and projects them onto the right-hand screen. […] Additionally, another actor, who is mute, accompanies Rabih Mroué (Hatem Imam). He too is seated amongst the audience at the other end of the 砷웩痤. He is making notes, on a white sheet of paper, the main facts, events, adventures, developments, and the notorious characters of the story. He achieves this through the means of plans, graphs, tables, family genealogical trees, statistics, etc., until he reaches a very significant chart, insofar as it manages not to reveal anything of this complex intrigue. A third camera films and projects this work onto the left screen […] Rabih Mroué works reality on the basis of the following consideration: by competing in strangeness with the imaginary or the factious, reality (in itself) becomes an artistic creation, which is both complex and composed. Thus, Rabih Mroué continues, in his new creation "Missing Employee", his artistic research on the sense of the spectacle and of theatricality, playing on their extreme limits in order to better explore their possible functions today, in the era of Internet and of the multi-media. Once again, his deduction is the impossibility to know and recognize the theatre, such as we know it and such as we have become accustomed to it. And so, he deviates theatre from its natural course, trying out new means and novel techniques, swimming against the current, moving away from what we have already seen. Within the framework of contemporary Arab theatre. He goes towards the non-theatre, the non-play, in order to grace us with rare moments of “theatre”, of “theatricality”, and moments of communication. Rabih Mroué tries to tell us that from now on, theatre is elsewhere.