Robert Fisk: Torture in Lebanon via a Toronto stage

Scorched is the right title for Wajdi Mouawad's play about Lebanon. The word "Lebanon" doesn't occur in the script and "the army invading from the south" - the Israeli army, of course - remains preposterously anonymous. But any playwright who calls a town "Nabatiyeh: or refers to a prominent Shia figure called "Shamseddin" - the late Mehdi Shamseddin was the leader of the Shia clergy in Lebanon - hasn't tried very hard to hide the country in which his powerful, murderous scenario takes place. Suitably bloody, Scorched is a story of love, family honour, civil war and barbarity.

Wajdi Mouawad, who is of Lebanese Christian Maronite origin but is now a French Canadian - his play was written in French and translated into English for its latest performance at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto - has written a programme note in which he acknowledges his own background, even the devastating Israeli-Hizbollah war last summer. But his play, he says, is "anchored above all else by poetry, detached from its political context and instead anchored in the politic of human suffering, the poetry which unites us all".

The plot is simple. Nawal, an old lady, dies in Canada, and her son and daughter try to discover - from two sealed envelopes left to them by their mother - why she had remained silent for years before her death. In her youth in Lebanon, it transpires, Nawal's lover made her pregnant and the child was taken from her to preserve her family's honour. So she sets off, amid the massacres of the Lebanese civil war - there is a terrifying moment when blood from the victims of a bus massacre sprays over the young Nawal's clothes - to find her missing child.

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After watching Scorched, I went backstage to meet the actors and actresses - one of them gives a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a jazz-crazed sniper - only to find they had no idea that they were, in some cases, playing real people. They didn't even know that Israel had farmed out Khiam's torturers to western countries as "refugees" who would be killed if they returned to Lebanon.

The Israelis, of course, didn't mention their role in Khiam's horrors - which is why, several years ago, two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police turned up at my home to ask if I could identify any torturers who might have been given asylum in Canada. I told them that their names were now written on the gates of Khiam prison.

But I do know that one of the torturers - who, of course, appears in Scorched as Nawal's rapist - is believed to have found guilty sanctuary in Toronto where he has set up in business. In other words, he probably lives less than three miles from the Tarragon Theatre in Bridgman Avenue. And who knows, maybe he will drop by for a ticket this month, just to enjoy the suffering he caused in a faraway land to which he will never dare to return. Would that be history? Tragedy? Or art?

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