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Contemporary Theatre in Egypt
Includes the proceedings of a symposium on this subject held at the CUNY Graduate Center in February of 1999, along with the first English translations of three short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights who spoke at the Alfred Farag's The Last Walk; Gamal Maqsoud's The Absent One; and Lenin El-Ramley's The Nightmare. This volume also contains a bibliography of English translations and secondary articles on the theatre in Egypt since 1955.
- GenresDrama
84 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1999
About the author
Marvin A. Carlson
65 books8 followersPh.D.in Drama and Theatre, Cornell University. Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies.
Research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has been awarded the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Prize, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University, a Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens. His best-known book, Theories of the Theatre (Cornell University Press, 1993), has been translated into seven languages. His 2001 book, The Haunted Stage won the Calloway Prize.
His newest book, Speaking in Tongues, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2006.
Research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has been awarded the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Prize, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University, a Visiting Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens. His best-known book, Theories of the Theatre (Cornell University Press, 1993), has been translated into seven languages. His 2001 book, The Haunted Stage won the Calloway Prize.
His newest book, Speaking in Tongues, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2006.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 12, 2021
Alfred Farag's The Last Walk: This play is a one woman show about a woman who has essentially been beaten and disparaged her entire life. Unfortunately, my copy of the book is missing the last couple pages of the play, so I don't have a good sense of how it actually ends, which I suspect is extremely important for this play. The opening section is basically just this woman tied to a post by her husband, who spends much of the play justifying why her family, classmates, and then her husband all beat her. I would like to think there's a turn in the missing pages, which challenges this complicity with the violence against her.
Gamal Maqsoud's The Absent One: What I find most striking about this play is how it centers differing perspectives. The play is about this one family, with a grandmother, a mother, and her children. The mother is mourning the loss of her oldest child who was arrested (or kidnapped, maybe, it's not super clear). She remembers her son as a kind and gentle boy, but the grandmother characterizes him as spoiled and cruel to his classmates. Simultaneously, the grandmother has told the children to take the cat and get rid of it somewhere where it won't be able to find its way home. She characterizes the cat as a terror that keeps her up every night. But for the children, the cat is almost a helpless, loving creature that they can't bear to abandon--so they bring it back, much to their grandmother's chagrin.
https://youtu.be/pvb7j2UgW-M
Lenin El-Ramley's The Nightmare: This play reminds me a lot of Beckett's work, especially a play like Endgame. It is strongly absurdist, with surrealist connections between ideas, hints of religious rituals, popular/folk culture songs and stories, allusions to other plays or literature (e.g., "To be or not to be" from Hamlet; or a scene where the characters watch a cockroach that has flipped on its back, which may be an allusion to al-Hakim's Fate of a Cockroach and/or Kafka's Metamorphosis). Like much absurdist theatre, I think the major theme here is the difficulty of finding/making meaning in the world, especially in terms of building or creating something. The Young Man--who seems as close as we get to a protagonist--is continually trying to create, compose, think, speak, or otherwise express himself in some way, and he continually either gives up or is derailed by the bizarre behavior of those around him.
https://youtu.be/_MLPGSV9v3o
Gamal Maqsoud's The Absent One: What I find most striking about this play is how it centers differing perspectives. The play is about this one family, with a grandmother, a mother, and her children. The mother is mourning the loss of her oldest child who was arrested (or kidnapped, maybe, it's not super clear). She remembers her son as a kind and gentle boy, but the grandmother characterizes him as spoiled and cruel to his classmates. Simultaneously, the grandmother has told the children to take the cat and get rid of it somewhere where it won't be able to find its way home. She characterizes the cat as a terror that keeps her up every night. But for the children, the cat is almost a helpless, loving creature that they can't bear to abandon--so they bring it back, much to their grandmother's chagrin.
https://youtu.be/pvb7j2UgW-M
Lenin El-Ramley's The Nightmare: This play reminds me a lot of Beckett's work, especially a play like Endgame. It is strongly absurdist, with surrealist connections between ideas, hints of religious rituals, popular/folk culture songs and stories, allusions to other plays or literature (e.g., "To be or not to be" from Hamlet; or a scene where the characters watch a cockroach that has flipped on its back, which may be an allusion to al-Hakim's Fate of a Cockroach and/or Kafka's Metamorphosis). Like much absurdist theatre, I think the major theme here is the difficulty of finding/making meaning in the world, especially in terms of building or creating something. The Young Man--who seems as close as we get to a protagonist--is continually trying to create, compose, think, speak, or otherwise express himself in some way, and he continually either gives up or is derailed by the bizarre behavior of those around him.
https://youtu.be/_MLPGSV9v3o
Displaying 1 of 1 review