Following Québécois Tabarnak and Des putes et des voleurs—both winners of the Comedy Show of the Year award at the ADISQ Gala, a first in 45 years to win two years in a row—Adib Alkhalidey returns with Comme les Mongols à Baghdad.
This new show is about transmission. The transmission of meaning, knowledge, wounds, fears, contradictions, and impulses that span an era that sometimes seems to have lost faith in its own ability to pass anything on at all.
Reflecting his branching train of thought, the show unfolds through themes as varied as tax evasion, political corruption, the nightmare of putting children to sleep, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, Jesus, and the reality of blended families. By tackling the most sensitive, intimate, or taboo subjects of our time, Adib Alkhalidey seeks less to provide answers than to reveal what emerges when we dare to face certain truths head-on. Driven by a rare freedom of expression—likely amplified by sleep deprivation and the questionable honesty of exhausted young parents—the show ultimately transforms this chaos into something strangely lucid, as if all these scattered branches secretly stemmed from the same tree.
Comme les Mongols à Baghdad is a deeply funny show, at times brutal, at times unsettling, but always driven by a sincere desire to bring together what the times are determined to keep apart.