BEIRUT: Though he is the front man for the city’s newest performance venue, the figure called Roberto Kobrosli is hesitant about being given too much credit.

“In Lebanon we have a fixation on names,” he gestures expansively. “People don’t talk about [the company] mtc touch in these terms. In fact this is a group effort. It’s a space and tomorrow I could die or someone else in the team might die and someone else could join.”

The new space is Metro al-Madina, a concept that Kobrosli says he and his creative collaborators have been working on since 2007. The team has worked together for about 12 years, having developed five theater plays, all staged between Masrah al-Madina and the Monnot Theater. Fans of Arabic-language comedy may also recognize Kobrosli’s stand-up routine.

The Metro is situated in one of Ras Beirut’s most venerable cultural spaces. Hamra’s Saroulla Theater fell into disuse until a few years ago, when it became the home of Nidal Ashkar’s Masrah al-Madina, formerly based in Clemenceau. The Metro has set up shop in the Saroulla’s little theater (neé Metropolis Cinema) – with a capacity of a little over 100.

Patrons are now welcomed by a fully stocked bar in the venue’s foyer (three different Irish whiskeys are on hand) and Kobrosli’s team has fiddled with the theater’s terrace seating to give it the look of an intimate cabaret from last century.

“Cabaret” immediately springs to mind, but the MC seems ambivalent about what to call the Metro. One thing he is certain about is that he wants it to be a Beirut space.

“In this city, everything is camouflaged,” Kobrosli says. “All the sectarianism and the parties and the families, they’re coming from outside usually – from the south, from the east, from the mountain. They come here and they want to camouflage. Nothing is clear. You look for the pharmacy and it’s hidden behind a tree.

“The Metro could be an alternative space ... It could be nothing. Right now we’re cooking. Our aim is to have a real identity with this city’s audience, to work with them in building this.

“This is the state of it right now. Tomorrow you’ll find it’s reached another level and after that another level. It’s constantly being tested.”

The Metro had its debut Saturday night with a program of music and musical comedy that all conform to the cabaret concept.

The evening opened with Kobrosli himself – resplendent in an outfit that might have been made from the skins of recycled disco balls – at the head of a four-man lounge act.

The quartet’s musicianship had a self-assured retro chic about it. Kobrosli’s performance – as he shimmied about the stage singing Beirut-accented rhyming couplets like a character from the oeuvre of Sasha Baron Cohen – was an amusing bit of tongue-in-cheek geek.

The music was followed by a short stand-up routine introducing the audience – “Dudes,” in Kobrosli’s dialect – to the venue and the house rules. Smoking, for instance, should be restricted to the lobby bar, a wise decision given the size of the space.

Over the course of the evening the audience was treated to a retrofitted variety show of more or less comic musical numbers.

Anchoring this range of acts was the homespun cool of Kobrosli’s quartet, who are also the musical straight men for the evening’s comic tour de force – the outbursts of a George Wassouf wannabe, draped in a scarf-like “Lebanon” pennant, who unexpectedly burst out from back stage with faux-tarab invocations of a bygone Lebanon.

Toward the end of the evening, a pair of shirtless young men with drums accompanied the smiling skitterings of a pair of florid samba dancers, then, as a chaser, performed a little capoeira.

Between the ribbing of Lebanese patriotism and the nod to cartoon Brazil, came what was for some in the audience, the most difficult part of the evening. The curtain parted to reveal a member of the troupe standing in a glittering kuffiyya and sunglasses, his thawb pulled up to his thighs, occasionally emitting a chuckle that at once suggested lechery and dim-wittedness. The fellow proceeded to regale the audience with tales of desert life, replete with invocations of the heat and his great affection for his camel and, of course, his sheep.

Some audience members laughed uproariously. Others, who perhaps have friends from the Gulf, did not and may have found the sketch offensive.

“Actually the character’s not ‘Khaliji,’” Kobrosli says, “He’s bedouin and we have bedouin in Lebanon too. People here don’t know what they are. That’s why you don’t have the feeling ‘I am Lebanese,’ which is also why we have this complex – ” Kobrosli puts his hand to his heart and begins to sing, “‘Lubnan! Lubnan! Ya Lubnan!’

“With this skit we wanted to make a test ... Here you have a cabaret so you should have a little porno. Usually in Lebanon the silly programs have a Khaliji character and they make fun of him. We take it to the extreme.

“For me, the desert areas, they have a full-package culture ... a whole lifestyle. Nothing ever happens and you take it for granted. Then there came the satellite dish and the mobile phone. Before his life was full. It’s only now with all this stuff that he finds his emptiness.

“You can respond to such a sketch at any number of levels. It can be funny. It can be offensive. It can provoke you to think. Gradually, maybe we should build the philosophy of this piece but not immediately. It’s a process.”

If you could generalize about the acts in the prototype edition of Metro al-Madina, you might say that each played on local stereotype and cliché, always with a critically edged local sensibility in mind. This is why certain acts – the faux-tarab vocalist and Kobrosli himself – have a more refined comic edge.

No resident of Rio de Janeiro would recognize Brazil in the samba-capoeira act because it’s a Beirut perception of what “Brazil” means, so at present it’s simply an exotic entertainment with no comic value. The “Bedouin/Khaliji” act is also about alien representation but it’s aiming higher.

This is challenging stuff for the artists. The fact that they want to apply a sophisticated vaudevillian sensibility to the Lebanese condition – which is the embodiment of factional irritability – and to do so within a Beirut commercial venture – where tastes are fickle at the best of times – makes Metro al-Madina a courageous undertaking.

“It’s not really courageous,” Kobrosli says, “but for this city it’s brave. All the world is burning, man, but here people are enjoying their laziness. All the moms, the fathers, the employees, the artists, the politicians, they’re all saying, ‘It’s nice.’

“So there’s stagnation. You can smell the boredom everywhere you go. You see people buying cars, buying clothes, [expressions of] stagnation.”

Kobrosli says he decided to leave this country in 2007 and moved to Cairo. He then returned in the spring of 2008 with a new play.

“It was nice,” he smiles. “We are [two floors below ground] in the Saroulla Building, so I think it’s cool. Anytime is a good time to have cabaret.”

Metro al-Madina is open from 6 p.m., with performances Thursdays through Saturdays. For more information, call 01-753-021.