Arabic Theatre

For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike.

On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father.

Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a distinct Arab Hamlet tradition, Hamlet's Arab Journey represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation.

This essay deals with the life and work of distinguished Syrian playwright Sa'dallāh Wannūs with special emphasis on his concept of the theatre of politicization (masraḥ at-tasyīs) which
originated directly in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967. The paper concentrates on some of Wannūs’s most crucial ideas concerning the theatrical project which was to a certain extent inspired by techniques of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre and whose aim was to encourage the audience to engage freely in a discussion on important social and political matters. This essay also briefly introduces some of the author’s most famous plays, like Soirée for the Fifth of June as well as his other dramatic works written within the scope of the project, like The Elephant, Oh, King of Ages, The Adventure of the Mamluk Jābir’s Head or The King is the King. Since many of Wannūs’s plays include elements of Arabic popular narrative tradition, the paper tries to explore this aspect of his works as well.

Considéré souvent comme le «parrain du théâtre arabe», Molière arrive dans le monde arabe grâce à une adaptation de L'Avare par le libanais Marun Naqqaš (1847): à partir de ce moment, la dramaturgie arabe ne cessera plus de puiser à son répertoire. À travers un corpus de pièces provenant du Liban, de l’Egypte, de la Tunisie et du Maroc, ce travail entend définir la place de Molière dans la genèse d’un théâtre national arabe

L'étude suivante propose un aperçu général de la traduction au théâtre des langues de l'Union Européenne vers l'arabe et vice versa, retraçant plus d'un siècle de traduction entre les deux rives de la Méditerranée, avec un intérêt particulier pour les pratiques contemporaines de la dernière décennie. Elle s'appuie sur les états des lieux conduits par Transeuropéennes et la Fondation Anna Lindh sur la traduction de la littérature et de la pensée en Méditerranée, ainsi que sur des bibliographies et des bases de données de maisons d'édition et de moteurs de recherche spécialisés, des articles et des revues en ligne dédiés au théâtre et à la traduction, et sur des informations du terrain.

Malgré l’existence de formes parathéâtrales telles que les "Gestes" ou les Maqamat des poètes arabes du Xème siècle (Al Hamadhânî par exemple), nous tenons à signaler que le théâtre de texte – comme l'entend la tradition occidentale – du monde arabe est né de la traduction du théâtre européen dans la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle. De là, le théâtre de l'Europe n'a cessé d'être traduit, publié et joué en arabe classique et dans tous les dialectes de la région. Cependant, l'intérêt que portent les éditeurs et les praticiens de théâtre européen pour l'écriture théâtrale arabe est largement inférieur, et cela à cause de différents facteurs que nous tenterons d'analyser ci-dessous.

Aujourd'hui, il est nettement plus facile de parler de la traduction du théâtre français, anglais, italien ou allemand en arabe, qu'il ne l'est pour ce qui concerne la traduction du théâtre syrien, libanais, égyptien ou irakien dans les langues européennes. Dans un souci d'approche constructive, nous avons donc choisi de présenter la traduction du théâtre arabe en Europe en général et de nous arrêter sur des chapitres clé de l'histoire de ces flux de traduction à titre d'exemple, tout en éclaircissant les nuances géographiques et linguistiques nécessaires pour les fins de cette synthèse.

"L’arabo anziano" is a poem published in Cairo in 1869 and authored by James Sanua (1839 – 1912), an Egyptian Jew of Italian origins who is considered as one of the pioneers of the Arab theatre and one of the first Egyptian nationalists. The poem is a precious testimony for the time Sanua spent in Livorno, Italy, and reflects his links with Freemasonry. This article intends to focus on the role of this poem for a comprehension of the rise of nationalism in James Sanua’s ideals and tries to shed light on his Italian experience through new unpublished documents found in the Historical Archives of the Jewish community of Livorno.

Language and culture in standard Arabic and Egyptian vernacular translations Lucia Avallone The translation of theatrical works in which dialects are present is a delicate process of mediation requiring a careful valuation of formal and communicative textual aspects. For mediating between two different universes the translator must firstly choose whether to transmit the original text language variation-through the strategies available in the target language-or whether to ignore it, transferring the script into the standard target language. Accordingly, both the source oriented and the target-oriented translations are possible and produce results worthy of being examined, from the perspective of a wide interdisciplinary area including linguistic and cultural studies. Arabic versions of Italian theatrical and narrative works, originally characterized by the use of dialects, show a variety of solutions to the problems arising while translating, which are interesting for reflecting on the general decision-making process of translation and on the language choices adopted in a given target culture. My contribution aims to present the outcomes of a comparison between the original text of Filumena Marturano (1946), one of the comedies written by the Italian dramatist Eduardo De Filippo, and both the standard Arabic translation (2006) and the Egyptian vernacular script of its stage representation (1998). In the source text there are many Neapolitan vernacular expressions, as dialect is a major feature in typifying characters and environment, but the translations resort to a general neutralization of the foreign culture, through standardization or homogenization with the Egyptian culture.

Employing a methodology which gathers the traditional Arabic rhetoric-grounded tools of analysis, cross-temporal sources on ethnopoetics, and Arabic folk literature, this paper focuses on mawwāl’s revival (Egyptian traditional folksong) within Najīb Surūr’s (1932-1978 ) experimental dramaturgical production. In particular, providing a brief philological overview of mawwāl’s challenging origin and evolution, this study argues how an Arabic linguistically/rhetorically grounded approach to the little-explored mawwāl’s structure and subjects, not only enhances how it is clearly based on rhetorical patterns. It also enable us to reconstruct a more organic criticism on Surūr’s conscious attempt at broadcasting an innovative form of playwriting within the framework of innovations provided by the Sixties and Seventies’ generation of Egyptian authors.

This article offers a comprehensive analysis of Sulayman Al-Bassam's cultural self-positioning in his Shakespeare adaptations up through and including Richard III: An Arab Tragedy (2007-9).  Published in Shakespeare Yearbook, vol 20 (Aug 15, 2011): Shakespeare After 9/11: How a Social Trauma Reshapes Interpretation, special issue edited by Matthew Biberman &  Julia Reinhard Lupton. Probably the only chance I'll ever get to share a table of contents listing with Slavoj Zizek!

This paper focuses on different theatrical experiences that, through re-enactments of memories of a near past, intend to give a response to the current events in Syria. These experiences replay, on the one hand, the memories of Syrian women refugees living in Amman and in the Sabra, Shatila, and Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camps in Lebanon and, on the other hand, the personal stories of arbitrarily detained and sometimes tortured victims of the Syrian security forces. The paper will mainly draw attention to four theatrical experiences: the “Syria Trojan Women Project” (http://www.syriatrojanwomen.org) that began by creating drama workshops in Amman, Jordan in autumn 2013, with a group of Syrian women, all of whom were refugees living in Amman under the direction of Omar Abusaada (the process became a documentary film, Queens of Syria by Yasmin Fedda); “Antigone of Syria” (http://www.apertaproductions.org/current-project/), an eight-week drama workshop with 35 Syrian women that culminated in three performances at al-Madina Theatre in Beirut in December 2014; “66 Minutes in Damascus”, devised by Lebanese director Lucien Bourjeily on 2012, where the audience is plunged into a recreation of what it might be like to be detained in Syria; and “Can You Please Look Into the Camera” by Syrian playwright Mohammad al-Attar. The central issue of the paper is to examine how real-life testimonials and subjective experiences become art practices and theatrical performances in a particular style of Arab theatre that is becoming very common these days.

My preface to the Oberon Books edition of Sulayman Al Bassam's play text UR, premiered at Munich's Residenztheater in September 2018. The play is based on the ancient poem "Lamentation for the Destruction of Ur."

See the play: https://www.residenztheater.de/inszenierung/ur
Buy the script: https://www.oberonbooks.com/sulayman-al-bassam.html

S’il a existé dans le monde arabe diverses formes spectaculaires et culturelles aussi bien rituelles que populaires tels la halqa, le Taziyé, le Samer ou Khayal al Zill, le théâtre arabe, dans sa forme et son acception modernes, n’est apparu qu’au XIXe siècle au contact de l’Occident. La première manifestation eut lieu en effet en 1847 à Beyrouth, quand un commerçant maronite du nom de Marun al Naqash prit l’initiative de construire une scène à l’italienne et d’y faire jouer al-Bakhil (l’Avare), pièce inspirée de l’œuvre de Molière. Après cette première représentation, le théâtre se propagea dans le reste du monde arabe en prenant d’abord pied en Égypte où il connut sa plus grande évolution grâce à des circonstances historico-politiques favorables et grâce au concours décisif de quelques pionniers, dont une majorité de Levantins, qui contribuèrent à l’enracinement du théâtre dans le paysage culturel arabe.
Le théâtre occidental, au travers de son répertoire, de ses acteurs, de ses courants et sensibilités, va constituer un modèle, une source d’inspiration, un fonds dans lesquels les dramaturges arabes puiseront avidement.
Tout au long de l’histoire du théâtre arabe et jusqu’à aujourd’hui, les liens que maintiendront les artistes et intellectuels arabes avec le théâtre occidental suivront deux voies : l’une directe et l’autre indirecte. Ces deux voies, selon les cas, tantôt se rejoignent et s’entrecroisent, tantôt s’éloignent dans une évolution parallèle.

Saʿadallah Wannus is widely recognized, both in the Arab world and in Europe, as the most important post-1967 playwright in Arabic. This essay will analyze three very nearly simultaneous recent productions of the same Wannus play, Tuqūs al-Isharāt wa-l-taḥawulāt (Rites of Signs and Transformations, 1994) staged in three languages and four countries. The play itself, violent and beautiful, carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when traditional political, religious, and gender structures of authority are suddenly undermined in a society previously deformed by a long experience of despotism.
In November 2011, Egyptian director Effat Yahya adapted Rites at the American University in Cairo; it was her first experience directing an Arab play. As the “Arab spring” degenerated in the background, Yahya translated the play from Syrian-tinged Modern Standard into Egyptian colloquial Arabic (keeping only the monologues in MSA); her “translation” Egyptianized the play and ultimately softened its political bite.
Less than two years later, in summer 2013 Rituel pour un métamorphose became the first play translated from Arabic to be performed at the Comédie-Francaise. Working from Rania Samara’s dutiful translation, Kuwaiti director Sulayman Al-Bassam had to negotiate the expectations of the Comédie’s French cast and Paris audience; all parties had their own ideas about what an Arab play produced in Paris should be about.
Meanwhile, Robert Myers and Nada Saab were rendering the play into English for a groundbreaking pair of staged readings in Beirut and Chicago in 2014, with two very different casts directed by Lebanese director Sahar Assef.
Drawing on published translations, scripts, performances, and extended interviews with all the translators and directors involved, this essay will interrogate the motives, strategies, and unexpected turns involved in carrying this play, itself all about “turning” and transformation, across linguistic and political boundaries at a volatile historical juncture.
(Full book at https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/arts-theatre-culture/drama-and-theatre-general-interest/theatre-sadallah-wannous-critical-study-syrian-playwright-and-public-intellectual?format=HB)

With the still-ongoing Arab Spring that has passed by five Arab countries, the basic slogan
has been freedom. With a close scrutiny at the social movements that led to the uprising, we
notice that the educated youth have been part and parcel in igniting the uprisings. However,
this youth has rarely had any temporal or spatial opportunities to manifest or express their
callings for freedom, so where does that motivation come from? How can we understand and
articulate the youth’s role in the uprisings? Were education and literature an eye opener for the
youth? Had literature, in all of its forms, been an impact on the early steps of the callings for
freedom? How has the Arab youth been implemented or described in the pre-Arab Spring
narratives? This paper investigates how the social and political environment was imagined
across Egypt and Syria during the Pre-Arab Spring. I will focus on the political dimension that
spread over to the literary production in contemporary narratives; taking into account the
dichotomy between the theocratic atmosphere and the potential freedom channels- in this case
it is literature- that might have been one of the sparks that ignited the Arab Spring.

More candid and fun than the interview that just came out in PMLA. On the paradoxes of producing Arabic Shakespeare for largely non-Arabic-speaking audiences. Recorded in Beirut, June 2011.
Published in Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, eds., Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (Routledge, 2014). http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/shakespeare-and-the-ethics-of-appropriation-alexa-huang/?K=9781137375766

In 2001, for the first time, an Arabic-language performance by Jewish
actors was performed for a Jewish audience that did not deal with the
Israeli-Arabic conflict. This article’s aim is to discuss how JewishMoroccan ethnic identity is fashioned through Jewish-Moroccan theatre in Israel through three main aspects: 1) Production and lack of public subsidy. The Jewish-Moroccan theatre is positioned on the margins of Israeli theatre, is perceived as amateurish by the tastemakers and gatekeepers of the theatre field, and is therefore not eligible for a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture. Although commercial logic leads the Jewish-Moroccan theatre, its producers identify with its communal
goals as well as the creation of an empowering ethnic identity on
stage. 2) Repertoire. The productions are realized in popular theatre
style and use nostalgia to appeal to Moroccan Jewry, which is incompatible with the Zionist narrative. 3) Reception. Engagement with the performance by the Jewish-Moroccan audience is very active, pointing to a celebration of its identity, culture, and language, as well as a protest against the hegemonic mainstream. Theatre is perceived in Israel as a ‘white space’ belonging to the middle-class, Ashkenazi Jewish hegemony. The spectators of Jewish-Moroccan theatre ‘darken’ the ‘white space’ by transgressing received Western audience-behavior.

The Arabic folk epic The Story of al-Zir tells how the poet al-Zir (also known as al-Muhalhil) takes revenge for the murder of his older brother, the pre-Islamic king Kulayb. In this epic, al-Zir, who is considered the founder of Classical Arabic poetry, represents the cultural unity of the Arabs, while Kulayb represents their political unity. I argue that in the modern era The Story of al-Zir was seen as an ideal representation of national Arab identity. Several modern Arab authors have compared The Story of al-Zir with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This is not only a comparison between two works of literature, but also a comparison between two cultures, the Arab world and Europe.

The oldest extant Hamlet in Arabic, the 1901 adaptation by Tanyus ʻAbdu (طانيوس عبده), is a musical with a happy ending.  Like many early adaptations of classic literary works, ʻAbdu’s version has been exhaustively criticized for infidelity and more recently rehabilitated as a brilliant example of tailoring to the target culture’s values and needs.  Yet much of the distortion or adaptation attributed to ʻAbdu, it turns out, can be traced to his hitherto overlooked French source.  This article identifies that source: an 1840s Hamlet adaptation by Alexandre Dumas père.  Presenting the ʻAbdu and Dumas texts together, I ask why no one has made this little discovery before.  This oversight leads me to question the two currently dominant models of international literary appropriation, which are both binary models.  I then propose the “global kaleidoscope” as a new approach to non-Anglophone Shakespeare.

In Rasha Fadhil’s 2003 play Ishtar in Baghdad, she has Ishtar and Tammuz, mythological figures from Iraq’s ancient past, appear in Baghdad during the Iraq War, and has them experience many of the horrors associated with the American occupation, including being tortured at Abu Ghraib prison. This article demonstrates that, in writing the play, Fadhil attempted to engage audiences both in Iraq and across the wider world. Fadhil’s attempt to appeal to Iraqi audiences was related to her employment of a common technique in Iraqi drama: discussing the political present by invoking characters from history or Iraqi mythology. But Fadhil broke new ground by ‘mix[ing …] legend and reality,’ rather than keeping the action safely confined to the past or a mythical realm. Her play was also revolutionary in its focus on women within a story that, within Iraqi drama and media, would normally focus primarily or exclusively on men. Ultimately, the risks that Fadhil took have limited the play’s appeal to Iraqi theatremakers and readers. Fadhil’s play also aspired to touch and influence people across the wider world. Specifically, she wanted to use the play to expose and condemn the corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of American neo-imperialism.

PLEASE NOTE: A limited number of free eprints are available via this link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NTQMJNZWHQRI8HS4CFXV/full?target=10.1080/14682761.2021.2017138

Over the past two centuries, Yemen has been the scene of an important literary flowering. Despite the never-ending struggle of play-writers against the socio-political difficulties of the country, the emergence of the Modern Yemeni Theatre doubtless represents an example both of an innovative and high value literary production. Continuously facing social, political and cultural problems, Yemeni authors and players have always shown a great capability of keeping up with the times. Their works talk about doubts, questions, passions and issues of the modern man, going beyond the “local” dimension and constantly dialoguing with their Western counter-parts.

Contemporary theatre in Yemen utilises a diverse range of theatrical forms, from stark tragedy to improvised comedy, from the musical to absurdist theatre. Yet by and large, across all of these sub-genres, Yemeni productions tend to be performative rather than narrative. This paper will examine a striking exception, a one-woman show entitled 'Mukāfāt Nihāyat Khidma' (‘End-of- Service Payment’), written by Munīr Ṭalāl and capably acted by Yemeni actress Amānī al-Dhamārī at the 2014 Festival of Yemeni Theatre in Sana’a.
    Through the fictionalised autobiographical narrative of the protagonist, delivered initially to an absent character and later to the audience as to an interlocutor, the play explores the struggles of single women in Yemeni society ــــ the pressure to accede to early or arranged marriages, the difficulties of pursuing higher education, the often frustrated desire to participate in society outside the protective walls of the domestic sphere. This narrative highlights its own inherent paradoxes, as a woman’s monologue written by a male playwright, and as a supposedly private lament against the seclusion and isolation of women, delivered on the public stage by an eloquent and determinedly visible young actress.
    This paper explores the careful construction of the protagonist’s narrative, her strategies for eliciting the complicity of her audience, and her self-portrayal not merely as a marginalized woman but also as a frustrated artist and performer, whose sculptures in sand and performances of puppet theatre illustrate her latent, uncultivated talents and the marginal locus she inhabits within Yemeni society.

The author examines the limitations and potential in the "Arabization" of the playwriting process through an exploration of the Lebanese Civil War and the inheritance (or erasure) of intergenerational memory.  Through a series of studio and written explorations, the author investigates conventional play-writing techniques and questions the capacity to de-center the locus of knowledge from a European lens.  The two-year exploration culminated in the play "The Green Line," which in and of itself is a discussion of transmigration and racial/ethnic building identity politics. The author interrogates the effectiveness of the "Arabization" endeavor and discusses findings that point to the potential ways the exploration failed and succeeded.