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Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology
Translations of twelve popular Arabic plays written and produced during the past thirty years introduce readers of English to the vibrant theater scene of the Arab world.
- GenresDrama
416 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1995
About the author
Salma Khadra Jayyusi
27 books19 followersSalma Khadra Jayyusi (born 1926 or 1927) is a Jordanian-Palestinian poet, writer, translator and anthologist. She is the founder and director of the Project of Translation from Arabic (PROTA), which aims to provide translation of Arabic literature into English.
In 1960, she published her first poetry collection, Return from the Dreamy Fountain. In 1970, she received her PhD on Arabic literature from the University of London. She taught at the University of Khartoum from 1970 to 1973 and at the universities of Algiers and Constantine from 1973 to 1975. In 1973, she was invited by The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) invited her for a lecture tour of Canada and the US, on a Ford Foundation Fellowship, in 1973. In 1975, the University of Utah invited her to return as a visiting professor of Arabic literature, and since then she has been based at various universities in the United States.
In 1960, she published her first poetry collection, Return from the Dreamy Fountain. In 1970, she received her PhD on Arabic literature from the University of London. She taught at the University of Khartoum from 1970 to 1973 and at the universities of Algiers and Constantine from 1973 to 1975. In 1973, she was invited by The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) invited her for a lecture tour of Canada and the US, on a Ford Foundation Fellowship, in 1973. In 1975, the University of Utah invited her to return as a visiting professor of Arabic literature, and since then she has been based at various universities in the United States.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 22, 2019
The China Tree, by 'Isam Mahfuz: This is one of those plays I really struggle with, because to me it reads like an absurdist play (and I really like it in that way), but I also worry that there are cultural clues and contexts that I'm not picking up but which signal that I should be reading it very differently. There's definitely a satire of government/legal institutions, a lot of word play, circular reasoning, repetitions, etc. all of which suggest a connection with absurdist theatre. But again, I don't know much about Arabic theatre beyond what I've read in the intro to this collection and a couple of other books. From the intro, it does seem like a lot of post-WWII Arab dramatists were heavily influenced by European theatre practice, especially French, so the absurdist connection makes sense.
The play is about Sa'dun, a jeweler who gets (maybe) tricked into making an intricate jewel for a princess, and then when he tries to deliver it he's arrested and put on trial for a murder, but the facts of the case keep shifting, and the play shifts back and forth between the courtroom and the doorway that Sa'dun is trying to enter to deliver the necklace, where he's spoken to by a mysterious voice. It's sometimes difficult to follow (as absurdist theatre often is), but a very clever, bizarre play.
That's Life, by Mamduh 'Udwan: I don't generally like monologue plays anyway, but when the speaker is as much of a dick as 'Udwan's Abu 'Adil then I like it even less. 'Adil is in his home shortly after the death of his wife, and he wanders through blaming her for being sick, trying to deny responsibility for his pretty obvious faults (like beating her, looking at other women, buying subpar groceries because he's afraid of the outside world, etc.), philosophizing about the rights of a man, and convincing himself that his children are ungrateful. Basically, he's a misogynistic bastard. According to the introductory materials, 'Udwan specifically writes him this way to highlight the problems of patriarchal tyranny in Syrian culture, and by implication larger forms of tyranny.
The King is the King, by Sa'dallah Wannus: This is a really interesting meditation on the nature of power, both in terms of how power is fundamentally performative and in terms of the violence that power inevitably depends upon. Drawing from a 1,001 Nights tale, The King is the King tells the story of a bored king who decides to play a prank by putting a random commoner on the throne in his place, but when the commoner begins to play the part of the king more forcefully and effectively than the real king, the joke loses some of its humor. The king (now pretending to be a courtier) repeatedly assumes that people will identify the imposter and he will get a good laugh before returning to the throne, but one after another everyone treats the commoner as though he is the king, even admiring the king's new decisiveness and power.
The Path, by Walid Ikhlasi: A great satire focusing on the career of 'Abd Rabbo, a poor man who is put on stage and becomes a famous comic actor going by the name Abido. Part Lou Costello, part Lear's Fool, Abido is a comic genius who savagely points to the hypocrisy and avarice of the powerful, while emphasizing the virtues of the poor and suffering. He is naturally witty, and because he says things without fear the authorities and the media often takes his anti-establishment wit as humor, when in fact his criticisms are stridently serious. Eventually the authorities try to destroy him, and 'Abd Rabbo must rediscover his true path.
The Zanj Revolt, by 'Izz Al-Din Al-Madani: Like many Arabic plays, this one takes historical events and presents them in a slightly mythologized way to make a contemporary point. This is essentially a Brechtian strategy, but in many Middle Eastern and North African contexts it has been a key strategy to avoid censorship of plays because the critiques being leveled in the shows are not directly addressing the national governments. Al-Madani's The Zanj Revolt dramatizes events from a 9th century slave rebellion in what is today southern Iraq. The rebels, led by 'Ali ibn Muhammad, sought to establish an independent state populated by freed slaves and no longer under the control of the Abbasid Caliphate. In this dramatized version, one of the key themes is the insidiousness of economic colonialism, as the ruling Zanj council initially agrees to a massive loan from the Abbasid peace delegation with the hopes of building their new nation. But when the ex-slaves aren't able to deliver the quantity of salt they had agreed upon, the Abbasids impose stricter terms in exchange for a further loan. While the council is initially eager to agree and they sign the terms, the young Rafiq convinces them that the Abbasids have used money to re-enslave them through the exploitative terms of the loan, and the council agrees to abandon the deal and declare war against their exploiters. Global north countries have repeated used the strategy of loans and international aid money offered with conditions to gain economic and political dominance over weaker global south nations, so Al-Madani's concern is a legitimate one, and he urges people in the global south to resist the attempts to re-establish colonial style control through finance.
Darkness, by Balalin Company of Jerusalem: This is a deeply metatheatrical play, being set entirely during a power outage that interrupts the official show that's supposed to be performed. The lighting equipment breaks down, and the play largely consists of the attempts to fix it and the different perspectives, philosophies, and ideals that come into conflict. One of the big conflicts is over the role of women in society, and whether they should be virtually enslaved or whether they should be liberated to be full contributing members of society. Nadia, who has electrical engineering degrees, wants to help fix the lights, but her fiance doesn't want her to do any work and another man demands that she be removed from the stage because of her gender. There are several other areas of disagreement, including personal responsibility, religion, culture, etc.
The Bird Has Flown, by 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Surayyi': The central theme of this play is the culture clash between a strongly traditional Arabic/Islamic culture and liberal Western values as Middle Eastern countries like Kuwait become increasingly wealthy and central to the world economy through their oil production. In this play, a traditional Kuwaiti patriarch finds out that he has a son with a former (Indian) wife, and that his son had been raised in London but is now coming to live and work in Kuwait. Knowing only a little textbook Arabic, and no Kuwaiti dialect, the son, Yusuf, struggles to fit into a culture very different than the one he was raised in, and his new found family has little patience for explaining a world view that to them is simple and obvious. This inevitably leads to culture clashes and tensions.
The Key, by Yusef Al-'Ani: Another great example of how Arab playwrights often use myth, folk tales, or historical settings to cushion contemporary political messages in order to avoid censorship or backlash. In the Euro-American tradition we would call this Brechtian, and while Brecht was an influence of Arab dramatists, they also drew on longer traditions of indirect political commentary. The Key takes a folk song about a series of tasks being given--the grandfathers give the speakers a cake and cloak which they need to lock in a trunk, but they need a key from the blacksmith, and to pay him they need to get money from the bride, but she needs a lamp that fell in the well so she can see to find the money, but to get the lamp from the well they need a rope from the bull's horns, but the bull needs grass from the garden, but the garden needs rain to grow the grass, and only God can send the rain--and uses that song as the basis for most of the play's action. It begins with a debate between a husband and wife over whether to have a baby, she wants one and he doesn't want to bring a child into the dangerous and chaotic world. Based on what their grandfather's say (in a kind of mystical realm outside regular time and space) they settle on the idea that starting out on the journey described in this song will help them establish a paradise where everything will be good and stable for ever. So they set out on the journey with the husband's brother, who's rather rational, detached, and modern, but also devoted to his homeland and family. Bad luck basically follows them throughout the quest. When they finally get back to their own place with the quest essentially a failure, but the wife pregnant anyway, the brother realizes the true lesson of the whole quest, which I won't spoil.
Night Traveler, by Salah 'Abd Al-Sabur: I like absurdist drama, especially of the Ionesco school where a lot of stuff happens (as opposed to the Beckett school, which runs on an absolute minimum of action), and Night Traveler is in that vein. The play is set on a train and has only three characters: the Narrator, the Passenger, and the Conductor. The Narrator narrates, while the Conductor effectively conducts a trial of the confused Passenger for murdering God and stealing his identity card. The charges are based on a slippage between one's identity card and one's identity--which is thematically reinforced by the continual changes in what the Conductor claims his identity is, beginning with Alexander the Great, then adopting several different names, then claiming to be a sheriff, etc.--with the premise that God's identity card would be blank as He is beyond identity as such.
'Ali Janah al-Tabrizi and His Servant Quffa, by Alfred Farag: I wasn't a huge fan of this play, in part because it just seemed so slow, which for me doesn't work in a comedy. The basic idea is essentially that a poor man comes to a new town and makes his servant pretend that they're rich so the townspeople will give them a bunch of money, which the man then spends lavishly. But it's such a lengthy play, and a lot of it seems to depend on visual humor (like the scene early on where the man and his servant pretend to eat an excellent meal when in reality there is no food).
The Comedy of Oedipus: You're the One Who Killed the Beast, by Ali Salim: What's so interesting about this version of the Oedipus myth is that it doesn't take the most well known component of Sophocles Oedipus the King--namely, the killing of Laius and the incestuous relationship with Jocasta. Instead, Salim focuses on the role of the sphinx as a threat to Thebes (the Egyptian city, not the Greek city) as a collective. Oedipus ostensibly answers the riddle and kills the beast, whereupon he becomes king and immediately sets about making technological improvements. However, the progress he introduces is counteracted (or at least weakened) by corrupt and sometimes oppressive officials. The play satirizes the role of official narrative in controlling the populace, while at the same time somewhat exempting Oedipus himself because he seems to actively oppose the use of these official narratives, while promoting a kind of democratic endorsement of authority.
Strangers Don't Drink Coffee, by Mahmud Diyab: This is a great Kafkaesque play, where a totally innocent person is confronted by an intractable and apparently official power to which there is no rational response. The Man attempts to prove to a series of semi-robotic strangers that he is actually the owner of his house, but they reject his claim and eventually destroy all of his personal, legal, and official papers. They never explain why, or what their authority is, but their bizarre mechanical behavior is deeply sinister.
The play is about Sa'dun, a jeweler who gets (maybe) tricked into making an intricate jewel for a princess, and then when he tries to deliver it he's arrested and put on trial for a murder, but the facts of the case keep shifting, and the play shifts back and forth between the courtroom and the doorway that Sa'dun is trying to enter to deliver the necklace, where he's spoken to by a mysterious voice. It's sometimes difficult to follow (as absurdist theatre often is), but a very clever, bizarre play.
That's Life, by Mamduh 'Udwan: I don't generally like monologue plays anyway, but when the speaker is as much of a dick as 'Udwan's Abu 'Adil then I like it even less. 'Adil is in his home shortly after the death of his wife, and he wanders through blaming her for being sick, trying to deny responsibility for his pretty obvious faults (like beating her, looking at other women, buying subpar groceries because he's afraid of the outside world, etc.), philosophizing about the rights of a man, and convincing himself that his children are ungrateful. Basically, he's a misogynistic bastard. According to the introductory materials, 'Udwan specifically writes him this way to highlight the problems of patriarchal tyranny in Syrian culture, and by implication larger forms of tyranny.
The King is the King, by Sa'dallah Wannus: This is a really interesting meditation on the nature of power, both in terms of how power is fundamentally performative and in terms of the violence that power inevitably depends upon. Drawing from a 1,001 Nights tale, The King is the King tells the story of a bored king who decides to play a prank by putting a random commoner on the throne in his place, but when the commoner begins to play the part of the king more forcefully and effectively than the real king, the joke loses some of its humor. The king (now pretending to be a courtier) repeatedly assumes that people will identify the imposter and he will get a good laugh before returning to the throne, but one after another everyone treats the commoner as though he is the king, even admiring the king's new decisiveness and power.
The Path, by Walid Ikhlasi: A great satire focusing on the career of 'Abd Rabbo, a poor man who is put on stage and becomes a famous comic actor going by the name Abido. Part Lou Costello, part Lear's Fool, Abido is a comic genius who savagely points to the hypocrisy and avarice of the powerful, while emphasizing the virtues of the poor and suffering. He is naturally witty, and because he says things without fear the authorities and the media often takes his anti-establishment wit as humor, when in fact his criticisms are stridently serious. Eventually the authorities try to destroy him, and 'Abd Rabbo must rediscover his true path.
The Zanj Revolt, by 'Izz Al-Din Al-Madani: Like many Arabic plays, this one takes historical events and presents them in a slightly mythologized way to make a contemporary point. This is essentially a Brechtian strategy, but in many Middle Eastern and North African contexts it has been a key strategy to avoid censorship of plays because the critiques being leveled in the shows are not directly addressing the national governments. Al-Madani's The Zanj Revolt dramatizes events from a 9th century slave rebellion in what is today southern Iraq. The rebels, led by 'Ali ibn Muhammad, sought to establish an independent state populated by freed slaves and no longer under the control of the Abbasid Caliphate. In this dramatized version, one of the key themes is the insidiousness of economic colonialism, as the ruling Zanj council initially agrees to a massive loan from the Abbasid peace delegation with the hopes of building their new nation. But when the ex-slaves aren't able to deliver the quantity of salt they had agreed upon, the Abbasids impose stricter terms in exchange for a further loan. While the council is initially eager to agree and they sign the terms, the young Rafiq convinces them that the Abbasids have used money to re-enslave them through the exploitative terms of the loan, and the council agrees to abandon the deal and declare war against their exploiters. Global north countries have repeated used the strategy of loans and international aid money offered with conditions to gain economic and political dominance over weaker global south nations, so Al-Madani's concern is a legitimate one, and he urges people in the global south to resist the attempts to re-establish colonial style control through finance.
Darkness, by Balalin Company of Jerusalem: This is a deeply metatheatrical play, being set entirely during a power outage that interrupts the official show that's supposed to be performed. The lighting equipment breaks down, and the play largely consists of the attempts to fix it and the different perspectives, philosophies, and ideals that come into conflict. One of the big conflicts is over the role of women in society, and whether they should be virtually enslaved or whether they should be liberated to be full contributing members of society. Nadia, who has electrical engineering degrees, wants to help fix the lights, but her fiance doesn't want her to do any work and another man demands that she be removed from the stage because of her gender. There are several other areas of disagreement, including personal responsibility, religion, culture, etc.
The Bird Has Flown, by 'Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Surayyi': The central theme of this play is the culture clash between a strongly traditional Arabic/Islamic culture and liberal Western values as Middle Eastern countries like Kuwait become increasingly wealthy and central to the world economy through their oil production. In this play, a traditional Kuwaiti patriarch finds out that he has a son with a former (Indian) wife, and that his son had been raised in London but is now coming to live and work in Kuwait. Knowing only a little textbook Arabic, and no Kuwaiti dialect, the son, Yusuf, struggles to fit into a culture very different than the one he was raised in, and his new found family has little patience for explaining a world view that to them is simple and obvious. This inevitably leads to culture clashes and tensions.
The Key, by Yusef Al-'Ani: Another great example of how Arab playwrights often use myth, folk tales, or historical settings to cushion contemporary political messages in order to avoid censorship or backlash. In the Euro-American tradition we would call this Brechtian, and while Brecht was an influence of Arab dramatists, they also drew on longer traditions of indirect political commentary. The Key takes a folk song about a series of tasks being given--the grandfathers give the speakers a cake and cloak which they need to lock in a trunk, but they need a key from the blacksmith, and to pay him they need to get money from the bride, but she needs a lamp that fell in the well so she can see to find the money, but to get the lamp from the well they need a rope from the bull's horns, but the bull needs grass from the garden, but the garden needs rain to grow the grass, and only God can send the rain--and uses that song as the basis for most of the play's action. It begins with a debate between a husband and wife over whether to have a baby, she wants one and he doesn't want to bring a child into the dangerous and chaotic world. Based on what their grandfather's say (in a kind of mystical realm outside regular time and space) they settle on the idea that starting out on the journey described in this song will help them establish a paradise where everything will be good and stable for ever. So they set out on the journey with the husband's brother, who's rather rational, detached, and modern, but also devoted to his homeland and family. Bad luck basically follows them throughout the quest. When they finally get back to their own place with the quest essentially a failure, but the wife pregnant anyway, the brother realizes the true lesson of the whole quest, which I won't spoil.
Night Traveler, by Salah 'Abd Al-Sabur: I like absurdist drama, especially of the Ionesco school where a lot of stuff happens (as opposed to the Beckett school, which runs on an absolute minimum of action), and Night Traveler is in that vein. The play is set on a train and has only three characters: the Narrator, the Passenger, and the Conductor. The Narrator narrates, while the Conductor effectively conducts a trial of the confused Passenger for murdering God and stealing his identity card. The charges are based on a slippage between one's identity card and one's identity--which is thematically reinforced by the continual changes in what the Conductor claims his identity is, beginning with Alexander the Great, then adopting several different names, then claiming to be a sheriff, etc.--with the premise that God's identity card would be blank as He is beyond identity as such.
'Ali Janah al-Tabrizi and His Servant Quffa, by Alfred Farag: I wasn't a huge fan of this play, in part because it just seemed so slow, which for me doesn't work in a comedy. The basic idea is essentially that a poor man comes to a new town and makes his servant pretend that they're rich so the townspeople will give them a bunch of money, which the man then spends lavishly. But it's such a lengthy play, and a lot of it seems to depend on visual humor (like the scene early on where the man and his servant pretend to eat an excellent meal when in reality there is no food).
The Comedy of Oedipus: You're the One Who Killed the Beast, by Ali Salim: What's so interesting about this version of the Oedipus myth is that it doesn't take the most well known component of Sophocles Oedipus the King--namely, the killing of Laius and the incestuous relationship with Jocasta. Instead, Salim focuses on the role of the sphinx as a threat to Thebes (the Egyptian city, not the Greek city) as a collective. Oedipus ostensibly answers the riddle and kills the beast, whereupon he becomes king and immediately sets about making technological improvements. However, the progress he introduces is counteracted (or at least weakened) by corrupt and sometimes oppressive officials. The play satirizes the role of official narrative in controlling the populace, while at the same time somewhat exempting Oedipus himself because he seems to actively oppose the use of these official narratives, while promoting a kind of democratic endorsement of authority.
Strangers Don't Drink Coffee, by Mahmud Diyab: This is a great Kafkaesque play, where a totally innocent person is confronted by an intractable and apparently official power to which there is no rational response. The Man attempts to prove to a series of semi-robotic strangers that he is actually the owner of his house, but they reject his claim and eventually destroy all of his personal, legal, and official papers. They never explain why, or what their authority is, but their bizarre mechanical behavior is deeply sinister.
Want to Read
September 5, 2017"That's Life"
"Strangers Don't Drink Coffee"
"Night Traveler"
"Darkness"
"The China Tree"
"The Comedy of Oedipus"
"The Bird Has Flown"
"Strangers Don't Drink Coffee"
"Night Traveler"
"Darkness"
"The China Tree"
"The Comedy of Oedipus"
"The Bird Has Flown"
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews