Yusuf Idris’s 1964 play al-Farafir and its manifesto-like preface, “Toward an Egyptian Theatre” (first published as a series of articles in 1963), are considered to be landmark texts in the history of modern Arab theatre in their call for dramatic innovation which both points to the future and draws on a long history of so-called “indigenous” Arab dramatic forms. Most of the existing scholarship on these texts addresses the cultural significance of this appeal to turath; relatively little discusses the explicitly political importance of these works, and that which does focuses exclusively on the Egyptian national context. While an understanding of this national political context is obviously crucial, to think about these works only in terms of the national is incredibly limiting. Upon closer inspection, the political implications offered by al-Farafir and its prefatory essay clearly exceed the bounds of the nation, pointing to both regional politico-cultural concerns and, in an era of continuing decolonizing struggles and various forms of Third Worldist solidarity, more global discourses addressing the relationship between political and cultural hegemony. This paper is interested in tracing the simultaneously national and more-than-national significance of al-Farafir and “Toward an Egyptian Theatre” through a dual approach: first, by examining the import of Idris’s reclamation of the word “masrah,” usually used only to refer to dramatic literature conceived along the lines of a western European model of “theatre,” and his attendant creation of the neologism “al-tamasruh” to denote the scene of theatre that he is calling for. This careful attention to the way individual lexical items are deployed by Idris will bring to light how his essay dispatches with hegemonic narratives of literary genealogy and rewrites the origins of “theatre” along an emancipatory universalist model, while at the same time retaining a specific claim to Arab and Egyptian heritage. Second, the paper will outline the forms of political relationality fostered by implications of al-tamasruh as praxis and, accordingly, the performative force of al-Farafir itself, arguing that the formal and aesthetic innovations of this play are intrinsically political in nature. In an attempt to further highlight the trans- or international resonance and import of Idris’s work, the paper will end by pointing to the ways in which these texts may be read in conversation with other works by contemporary Arab dramatists, such as the Syrian Sa’adallah Wannus and the Iraqi Yusuf al-‘Ani.