Egyptian and Arabic theatre

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.

Post war Egyptian novelist, playwright, short-story-writer and essayist who modernised Arabic short-story and laid the foundation of modern Egyptian theatre which was copied throughout the Arabic speaking nations. He broke taboos, stood for human rights and individual freedom.  Jailed by  Nasser's regime he was nicknamed Egypt's chekov for characters he presented in his work

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)

In November 2011, on the brink of a new wave of conflict over Egypt’s future, an obviously energized audience crowded into Cairo’s Rawabet Theatre for The Tahrir Monologues, a documentary play celebrating the Eighteen Days leading to Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Apparently a premature celebration, the show turned out instead to be a self-conscious nostalgia exercise meant to register the decay of revolutionary ideals. This essay analyzes Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unraveling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to an American University in Cairo production of Saadallah Wannus’ 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012-3. Why this play now?  The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion, and ultimately, I argue, its prophetic pessimism.

Le società arabe moderne hanno visto partecipare attivamente ai loro cambiamenti narratori, drammaturghi e poeti. Il pensiero e le aspirazioni degli arabi nel farsi nazione sono stati veicolati da narrazioni che hanno descritto e rappresentato tanto le élite quanto le classi popolari, gli ambienti urbani o rurali. Sebbene spesso gli autori abbiano attinto a eventi e situazioni del presente o di un passato non lontano, sono state talvolta le epoche più remote a offrire materiale attraverso cui raffigurare l’individuo e il suo mondo, esprimendo concezioni della vita interiore e di quella civile. In una lunga serie di scambi e contaminazioni, temi elaborati dalle antiche civiltà sviluppatesi sulle sponde del Mar Mediterraneo e nei territori limitrofi hanno, infatti, reso possibile la formazione di un patrimonio culturale condiviso su più piani: intellettuale, estetico, morale e ideologico. Tratti del vivere sociale e individuale, manifestazioni materiali e spirituali di popolazioni diverse – dalla Mesopotamia al Vicino Oriente, all’Egitto faraonico e copto, alla Grecia, a Roma, a Bisanzio, alla civiltà arabo-islamica – si sono integrati per costituire un’eredità trasmessa anche alla cultura araba moderna. Gli echi di un passato storicamente documentato o mediato dalla letteratura scritta e dalla tradizione orale sono diventati motivi d’ispirazione nella creazione di nuovi racconti e nella riscrittura di antiche narrazioni. I miti, con e grazie al loro alto valore simbolico, hanno continuato a esercitare un proprio ruolo, esprimendo strutture fondamentali della psiche, dell’esperienza e del comportamento umano.

This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ways the rewriting process has varied in different contexts and at different times. Drawing on concepts from Theatre and Performance Studies, Translation Studies, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Diaspora Studies, scholars and practitioners from Egypt and the West enter into dialogue with one another, expanding understanding of the different fields. The articles focus on the ways theatre texts and performances change (are rewritten) when crossing borders between different worlds. The concept of rewriting is seen to include translation, transformation, and reconstruction, and the different borders may be cultural and national, between languages and dramaturgies, or borders that are present in people’s everyday lives. Essays consider how rewritings and performances cross borders from one culture, nation, country, and language to another. They also study the process of rewriting, the resulting representations of foreign plays on stage, and representations of the Egyptian revolution on stage and in Tahrir Square. This assessment of the relationship between theatre practices, exchanges, and rewritings in Egyptian theatre brings vital coverage to an undervisited area and will be of interest to developments in theatre translation and beyond.

ABSTRACT In 1955, Iraqi Jewish immigrant artists founded Ur Ensemble (Lahakat Ur in Hebrew) and produced in Arabic the Majnūn Laylā (The Madman of Layla) by the Egyptian poet and playwright Aḥmad Shawqī. The Israeli Establishment subsidized and supported the Ensemble and intended the play for Palestinian spectators in Israel. It is a puzzling fact, because the policy of the Zionist melting pot required Middle Eastern Jews to move away from Arab culture and adopt a western orientation. I argue that the Israeli establishment perceived the Ur Ensemble as a propagandistic vehicle in order to display the state’s favourable attitude towards the Arab minority for the international community. However, in practice, the theatrical event created an Arab-Jewish dialogue based on a shared Arab culture contrary to the establishment's political intentions.

The aim of this article is to offer an insight into dimensions of institutionalised theatre in the 2011 revolution in Egypt through the example of two plays by one of the most distinguished contemporary Egyptian playwrights, Lenin al-Ramlī (b. 1945). I examine how the intellectual’s selfless advocacy for change dramatised in al-Ramlī’s pre-revolution 1989 play Ahlan yā bakawāt (‘Welcome Beys’) turns into the intellectual’s isolation from the scene of change in the post-revolution 2016 play Iḍhak lammā tamūt ('Laugh When You Die'). I apply Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias to explain how the times and spaces dramatised in al-Ramlī’s plays intersect with the spatiotemporal coordinates of their productions. I argue that through their representations of the characters of intellectuals, which are self-reflective of the Egyptian intellectual establishment, the plays challenge rather than justify the solutions adopted by intellectuals in their negotiations with political authorities and the public during two contrasting types of crisis: oppression and revolt. The choices of times and spaces in which the characters are introduced contribute further to this task.

Few scholars have addressed Arabic adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew, though it remains among the most popular Shakespearean comedies in the Arab world. The first Arabic performance of Shrew in Egypt in 1930 marked a significant landmark in the history of Arab Shakespeares, as the translator rendered the play in colloquial Egyptian Arabic, rather than in the formal, classical Arabic accessible to the educated elite. As such, the play offered the uneducated Egyptian public – and women in particular – unprecedented access to this work of Shakespeare. Instrumental to the adaptation’s success was Fāṭima Rushdī, owner and lead actress of the company that performed this first Arabic Shrew. In this and other roles as one of Egypt’s first renowned Shakespearean actresses, Rushdī not only effectively recast Shakespeare in an Egyptian mould, but also cast Egyptians in a Shakespearean mould, with effects that still echo today.