Whether set in the distant past, in a fable like setting, or contemporary Syria, political imprisonment and torture are some of the most repeated scenes in Syrian political theatre. This paper examines how the theatre has managed to depict such a fraught subject in a society that carefully polices speech, arguing that contemporary theatre makers and performance activists consciously manipulate a trope made familiar in the 1970s. In the process, I argue, these contemporary theatre practitioners both open and foreclose possibilities for revolutionary imaginings. The paper explores interrogation scenes in three recent plays, one staged several years before the current uprising and two that have been repeatedly mounted during the uprising: The Solitary (2008) by al-Khareef Troupe, Tomorrow’s Revolution is Postponed Until Yesterday (2012) by Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, and Please Look Into the Camera (2012) by Mohammad al-Attar. The Solitary repeats scenes familiar within a history of oppositional theatre but undermines the idea of meaningful political resistance by substituting the personal for the political. Tomorrow’s Revolution explicitly references Syria’s theatrical past, but transforms the cynicism of earlier works into a revolutionary imagining of a future Syria unified by global and social media rather than a dictator’s yoke. Please Look into the Camera employs verbatim theatre practice punctuating fictional narrative with language marked as “real,” forcing a greater accountability onto the audience. These works constitute a fundamental break with past theatre practice, even as their debt to theatre pioneers is manifestly evident. Lisa Wedeen has argued that the state asserts its power whenever a cultural production disingenuously announces its irrelevance to the present moment. Her argument is especially relevant to the political theatre of the 1970s. It is not that censors were oblivious to hidden meanings; rather, the shared disavowal of these meanings was itself a performance of power. We see this in the interrogation scenes in plays such as The Jester (1973), October Village (1974), and Cheers my Homeland (1978) all by Muhammad al-Maghut, The Dervish Seeks the Truth (1970) by Mustafa al-Hallaj, and The Path (1976) by Walid Ikhlasi. The repetition, across decades of similar scenes of detention and interrogation constitutes an ongoing debate about what it means to be political and how one can to achieve political speech.

After the 1967 defeat of Arab states by Israel, Saadallah Wannous wrote one of his most celebrated plays, H?aflat samar min ajl khamsah h?azi?ra?n [Soirée for the 5th of June], which appeared the next year and won a prize from Syria and the UNESCO. A highly political work that embodied Wannous’s call for a “politicized theater,” it also demonstrates his attempt to renew Arab theater and strengthen its potential to change the consciousness of the masses. Within the context of Wannous’s “politicized theater,” Soirée has been read as an example of the peculiar relationship between authority and the individual. It aesthetically depicts the Arab society as being unable to either face a military defeat or to democratically analyze the reasons for its occurrence. In this paper, I argue that Wannous presents a contingency between constructive dialogue and the practice of freedom which is yet to be granted. I demonstrate how this play exposes more than the impact of creating a gap between an authoritarian regime and the uninformed and marginalized individual. Rather, it shows how such a gap triggers the questioning of authority and in so doing, generates considerable confusion. The events of 2011-2012 in Syria ushered in a new reality where escalating uprisings prompted voices from both the regime and its dissidents to engage in dialogue leading to a solution for an unprecedented political crisis. As I show in this paper, such a call for constructive dialogue lies at the heart of Wannous’ work and his vision for a politically active subject inside and outside his theater. He proves to be not only an artist seeking insights from the past, as he is usually studied, but also an intellectual who looks into the future and seeks to create a possible democratic society modeled on the dialogical structure of this particular play.

The Petrarchan love romance Majnun Layla was born in the desert of Najd (Saudi Arabia) and circulated across fourteen centuries in many tongues and media. Qays falls in love with Layla during their childhood and after reaching adulthood her father refuses any contact between them and hence his agony that ends up with his wandering in the wilderness obsessing about her and composing some of the most beautiful love poems in Arabic literature. It was first collected and written down during the 10th century by Ibn Qutaybah in his classic volume al-Shi’r wal -Shua’ra’ (the Poetry and the Poems), then circulated through major canonical literary works chief among them al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs). In this paper I will inspect the renowned Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi’s dramatic rendition of this story. The verse drama Majnun Layla which was published in 1931 came at a time when the discourse of tradition and modernity was at its apogee. This paper will explore how Shawqi’s dramatic text and the meta-text (i.e. the epilogue that followed the text in the early editions of the book) was meant to be a ready-made cultural script for resisting customs and old practices that forbade the union based on love. At the heart of this play are two main discourses of what is known in semiotics as the discursive utterance governed by practical and cognitive dimension (that of Layla) and the discursive utterance governed by passion (that of Qays). I will show how these discourses are in many ways a reflection of the resistance of the discourse of tradition to that of modernity and vice versa. But at the same time I will showcase examples from Shawqi’s script to illustrate instances of uncertainty and indecision about what to resist.

Theater is a dangerous genre, one whose potential power as a vehicle for social and political change has been attested by scholars and practitioners from Richard Schechner to Saadullah Wannous. In the wake of the massive demonstrations, upheavals, and revolutions now referred to as the Arab Spring, Arab playwrights, actors, and directors are making dynamic and creative attempts to harness theater’s power for their own ends. This paper will trace the recent history of drama in Yemen and Oman, examining the evolving use of theater as a means and a locus of protest over the last five years in each country. Neighbors on the southern and south-eastern tip of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen and Oman share certain cultural similarities, yet remain historically, politically, and economically divergent. This paper will thus examine the ways in which those similarities and differences have nurtured and/or stunted recent developments in the performing arts. From each country, the paper will focus on three recent provocative performances that have reached the stage, illustrating the types of change they call for, and the means by which such calls are expressed. This paper will argue, inter alia, that Yemeni theater practitioners were remarkably outspoken in their protests against various forms of patriarchal and political authority in 2009 and 2010. However, when Yemen was rocked by massive socio-political protests in 2011, a temporary shift occurred, whereby such outspoken voices began to emanate more frequently from genres such as song and film. Oman, which as the Economist notes has been called “the world’s most charming police state,” serves as a useful comparison in this case, since 2011 there saw much smaller and fewer demonstrations, and since the Sultanate sponsors and oversees its numerous theater groups in ways that Yemen does not. The paper will also consider such issues as self- and official censorship in each country, the nature of sources of funding for dramatic productions, and comparative levels of state investment in performance spaces and infrastructure, in order to further its argument about the complex relationship of provocative performances to macro- and micro-structures of power and authority in Yemen and Oman.