Finding Abu Rish

As the tanks rolled into Beirut in 1982, a beggar pushed through the crowd. The citizens knew the man as 'Abu Rish', but they were about to discover they didn't really know him at all. For the passed few years he had lived amongst them as a homeless man, characterized for by a feather in his hat and a tent on the lawn outside the American University. His relationship with his neighbors had grown over that time, and although he had arroused the suspicions of local militia, he had earnt the peoples' trust by surviving those interrogations with his reputation in tact. However, on that one fateful day, he cast off his beggar's rags to reveal military fatigues and jumped atop a tank. From this vantage points he pointed out the rebel militia men and women to be captured by the advancing army. 'Finding Abu Rish' is an immersive investigation into who this most notorious of spies was. All testimony we have collected has been wildly divergent on every detail from character to appearance, so we are creating a reconstruction of his life based on these tales to allow the Lebanese people an opportunity to experience the time and his involvement. We start with the publication of a comic book, which not only provides context and presents the difficulty of investigating such unreliable testimony, but is also the participants guide and ticket for a site specific city wide immersive recreation of events, utilisising immersive theatre and period appropriate investigative tools, participants will be tasked with investigating the decades old mystery.