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Travelling Theatre: Saadallah Wannous's Journeys between the Local and the International
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
Abstract
This article examines the legacy of Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous through his early commitment to internationalism, with specific attention to his practice as a translator. It argues that to see Wannnous as an international playwright allows for an understudied dimension of the playwright's oeuvre to emerge and sheds light on an important era of post-colonial theatrical practice. By focusing on one of Wannous's most-staged plays, his adaptation of a little-known Peter Weiss play, the article places Wannous in his historical moment and sees how he was affected not just by international developments in theatre and performance, but also by a global geopolitics in which he was deeply invested.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2019
Footnotes
Many thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers for their dedicated and engaged comments. Special thanks to senior editor Paul Rae. This article is dedicated to the memory of Hazem Azmy (1967–2018), who gave this research a platform in its early stages, and who was committed to Arabic theatre's place in the international.
References
Notes
2 For a reflection on Wannous's influence see Houssami, Eyad, ed., Doomed by Hope (London: Pluto Press, 2012)Google Scholar. For a recent number of translations of his plays see Carlson, Marvin and Mahfouz, Safi, eds., Four Plays from Syria (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2014)Google Scholar.
3 See, respectively, Ziter, Edward, Political Performance in Syria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Allen, Roger, ‘Arabic Theatre in Theory and Practice: The Writings of Saʿdallāh Wannūs’, in Journal of Arabic Literature, 15 (1984), pp. 94–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carlson, Marvin, ‘Negotiating Theatrical Modernism in the Arab World’, Theatre Journal, 65 (2013), pp. 523–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 For more on this nationalist perspective on Wannous see al-Rai, Ali, Al-Masrah fi al-Watan al-Arabi (Theatre in the Arab Nation) (Kuwait: National Council for Arts and Letters Publishing, 1980)Google Scholar.
5 Denning, Michael, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London: Verso, 2004)Google Scholar.
6 Carlson, Negotiating Theatrical Modernism in the Arab World, p. 524.
7 Ibid., p. 533.
8 For more on the collective intellectual dejection following the defeat of 1967, see Litvin, Margaret, Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.
9 Hunak Ashia’ Kathira Yumkin an Yatahadath Anha al-Mar’ (There Are So Many Things Still Left to Say), dir. Omar Amiralay, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdFFUdP2aUU&t=1941s, accessed 16 October 2018.
10 Dawara, Fuad, ‘al-Thawra fi'l-Masrah al-Arabi’, Al-Adab, 18, 5 (1970), pp. 50–60Google Scholar, cited in Abdulaziz al-Abdullah, ‘Western Influences on the Theatre of Syrian Playwright Sa'd Allah Wannus’, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1993.
11 Ross, Kristin, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Saadallah Wannous, Al-A'mal al-Kamila 3 (The Complete Works 3) (Damascus: al-Ahali Publishing, 1996), p. 181.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 194.
15 Ibid.
16 For a generous but critical engagement with this tendency see Rustom Bharucha, Thinking through Theatre in the Age of Globalization (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
17 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), p. 64.
18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
19 Litvin, Hamlet's Arab Journey, p. 6.
20 Dawara, ‘al-Thawra fi'l-Masrah al-Arabi’.
21 For more on Idris's al-Farafir see Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘The Imagined Modern Nation in Yusuf Idris’ al-Farafir’, Modern Language Quarterly, 60, 3 (1999), pp. 379–408.
22 Yusif Idris, Nahwa Masrah Arabi: Al-Nusus al-Kamila lil Masrahiyat (Towards an Arab Theatre: The Complete Texts of Four Plays by Yusif Idris) (no publisher, 1974), my translation.
23 Ibid., p. 484.
24 The published text does not cite a date or a location for the initial lecture.
25 Wannous, Al A'mal al-Kamila 3, p. 597.
26 For more on Wannous's relationship with folk idioms and history see Friederike Pannewick, ‘Historical Memory in Times of Decline: Saadallah Wannous and Rereading History’, in Angelika Neuwirth, Andreas Pflitsch and Barbara Winckler, eds., Arabic Literature: Postmodern Perspectives (London: Saqi, 2010), pp. 97–109.
27 Wannous, Al A'mal al-Kamila 3, p. 608.
28 Ibid., p. 708.
29 Ibid., p. 71.
30 Abdullah, ‘Western Influences on the Theatre of Syrian Playwright Sa'd Allah Wannus’, p. 232.
31 The lack of academic critical attention is not mirrored in the Arabic-language press, where these productions were covered and often in glowing terms, usually citing the play as Wannous's masterpiece. For a representative example of the journalistic response to the play see Ahmad Ali Al-Buhairi, ‘Hanzala's Journey: A Dream of Dignity’, Al-Ittihad, 13 February 2013, available at www.alittihad.ae/article/15634/2013, accessed 29 September 2018.
32 Cohen, Robert, Understanding Peter Weiss (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p. 122Google Scholar.
33 Ibid., p. 261.
34 Wannous, , Al-A'mal al-Kamila 2 (The Complete Works 2) (Damascus: al-Ahali Publishing, 1996), p. 7Google Scholar (my translation).
35 Ibid., p. 8.
36 In the Kuwaiti production, for example, there are constant admixtures in the Kuwaiti dialect for comedic effect. In this production, when Hanzala is asked where he is from, he responds, ‘The Cities of Salt’, referencing Abdulrahman al-Munif's novel series about the onset of oil-powered modernity in the Gulf.
37 Al-Ali, who was living in Kuwait in the 1980s, designed the poster for the 1985 Kuwaiti production of the play. The poster features al-Ali's ubiquitous character with his ever-obscured face here hidden by his own feet. For more see al-Ali, Naji, A Child in Palestine (London: Verso, 2009)Google Scholar.
38 Wannous, Al-A'mal al-Kamila 2, p. 53, my translation.
39 Ibid., p. 59, my translation.
40 Wannous, Al-A'mal al-Kamila 3, p. 447.
41 Ibid., p. 6.