The Ministry of Culture’s Theater Affairs Center sponsored two plays, My Cloud and The Time Machine, which were performed at the Doha International Book Fair.
Artistic director Rima Bahzat commented that the Theater Affairs Center’s play My Cloud was performed as part of the opening ceremony. The play focuses on autistic children and explores their talents, which they cannot express and cannot be discovered without understanding how they think.
Bahzat explained that My Cloud tells the story of an autistic child who lives in her own world, her cloud, which is separate from the real world. The child has difficulty connecting with her family and communication challenges accumulate. The plot comes to a climax when her mother finds art to be a solution. The mother helps her child spend more time in nature, and eventually the child starts expressing herself by drawing with a red pen. Bahzat added that the Theater Affairs Center is putting on another show, The Time Machine. This play, which is 20 minutes long, aims to familiarize children with the world’s great inventors. Every day, the story line changes to introduce another inventor, with the first show about Thomas Edison. She concluded by remarking that these plays are interactive and educational.