In today’s day and age, one cannot help but look at the television and often pass judgment upon the Arab world. Extremists, some call them. Fanatics. What many do not realize is that even within the heart of the Middle East lay visions of the same culture and art, the same expressions of sociopolitical turmoil, the same struggle for man’s life and happiness. In the times following the establishment of Israel, following the ascent Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Arab socialism in Egypt, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the removal of foreign powers in return for tyrants so wholly their own that the artists and dreamers of these nations could not stay silent.

What is perhaps most interesting is the form in which pieces of political theater and demonstration emerged in these nations. Dramatic minds and intelligentsia turned toward the West for inspiration, a way to speak out and effect change in society. In Israel, May, 1948, a mere two days after its birth, the groundbreaking “He Walked in the Fields”, a play about a kibbutz member who dies in the fight for statehood presented in a collage of flashback vignettes, is directed in Brechtian form by Yosef Milo at the new Cameri Theater. A few years later, the Zirah Theater began to introduce the actual works of writers such as Brecht and Beckett. “The first performance of “Waiting for Godot,” after the legendary Paris production, was shown in a tiny auditorium in Tel Aviv,” (“The Development of Israeli Theater”) wrote Shimon Levy, scholar, director, and chairman of the theater department at Tel-Aviv University. “In later productions, Godot was clearly identifiable as an Israeli cultural hero… Modern classics such as Beckett on the one hand and Brecht on the other, in the many Hebrew productions that were staged, played [a] crucial role in Israeli theater… It is often through foreign eyes that Israeli artistic directors show the Israelis their own image, since the alienation necessarily involved in a foreign play creates an otherwise impossible to achieve distance from the socio-artistic mirror of theater” (“Beckett Criticism in Israel”, Levy).

Similarly Saad Ardash brought back these conceptions to Egypt after a scholarship in Italy in 1961. On Brecht, he said, “I felt I had stumbled upon a treasure… his theatre seemed perfectly suited to the needs of the moment and the national goals of the “52 Revolution” (Al-Ahram, No. 381). With the establishment of his Pocket Theater, he directed productions of Beckett”s “Endgame” and Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs.” It was a means of opening the floodgates towards a new era of Middle Eastern political theater.

When speaking of absurdist works such as “The Chairs”, it becomes important to explore works with similar themes and constructions. In particular, “Strangers Don’t Drink Coffee” by Mahmud Diyab shares a great degree of congruity in its message that we lack the ability to communicate meaningful ideas to one another, and that we are caught up in the universe of our own misconceptions which can often deny actual reality. We are offered the picture of an unnamed character called, “Man,” who is apparently the owner of the home where the action takes place. He rants and raves to himself about mundane things, horoscopes, days long gone, and speaks to his wife whom we never see or hear from. Eventually another man appears called, “Stranger,” who begins to examine the house and seemingly stake out the property.

He flashes a yellow card which denotes some kind of ambiguous government-mandated authority that Man cannot quite make out. Man makes repeated attempts to offer Stranger coffee, but he is turned down every time with the same mantric phrase: “I don’t drink coffee” (“Modern Arabic Drama”, 392). Stranger says very little compared to Man’s running monologue of dreamlike musings that twist in and out of past, present, and future; his words are limited to asking for or processing information about the house and property, making requests that Man stop talking, and turning down the aforementioned coffee. The original Stranger leaves, only to be replaced by more and more clones of the dubious original, poking, prodding, and deconstructing Man’s sense of self, of home, and identity. One sees similarities in another absurdist work of Diyab’s, “Men Have Heads” (“Short Arabic Plays”, 114). A man and wife receive a beheaded corpse in a box. Their struggle to conceal the body leads them into all sorts of explorations of their relationship, society, abuse, and more, until at the end another box is received with the severed head, a head which happens to be the husband’s head.

One can also look towards some of the later works of Tawfiq Al-Hakim. “As a result of a sojourn in France as Egypt’s permanent representative at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), he fell under the spell of theater of the absurd… Al-Hakim’s absurdist technique coincided with his disillusionment with the cause of the revolution, clearly revealed in a series of works… Their mood is best expressed in the message of “The Fate of a Cockroach,” a strange work consisting of two deliberately juxtaposed plays: the grotesque political world of the first play, a fable marked by the savagery of its political satire, provides the context of the absurd human relations of the second play. A society ruled by a cockroach king will end up making the individuals feel like cockroaches” (“Modern Arabic Drama”, 5).

We can now begin to understand how absurdist theater operated in a political atmosphere. In particular, one can observe the differences in what I call the “oppressor”, which is a principle present in all works of absurdism. The “oppressor” is that which prevents the characters from moving beyond their preconceptions into an actual reality. Instead, the characters exist in a sort of pseudo-reality which is colored by their opinions, thoughts, and memories to such an extent that they almost become trapped by themselves. Often we will find that the conception of “existence” itself as a human being is accredited with this property of the “oppressor.” Fate and God prevent the characters from having power or control. Everything is determined randomly, because life is random. We can find these same principles embodied in Diyab’s “Stranger.” These so-called Strangers are faceless, nameless entities that exert some sort of indefinable control or influence over the action of the play. They are the “oppressor.” They have little in the way of any kind real motivation or goal. They operate as a matter of fact, not for any particular reason. The main difference we will see between western and eastern absurdism is that this “oppressor” principle often falls into the realm of the government in Middle Eastern works, rather than the broader category of “existence.” Regardless, we see that the “oppressor” functions identically in both examples.

While in the west, absurdism may have passed out of “political theater” and into something more exploratory, eastern absurdism is always political theater. It is a form that has been adapted to their particular line of thought and questioning. Men like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco have had their works almost canonized in the world of Middle Eastern theater. Unfortunately, absurdism was often left in the back burner in lieu of more Brechtian sorts of works, particularly in Egypt. Alfred Farag wrote, “Realism had begun to pall on us, and we had two alternatives: the theater of the absurd and Brecht’s epic theater. We opted for the latter” (Al-Ahram, No. 381). Even the aforementioned Diyab, who had previously enjoyed many comparisons to the sometime Italian absurdist Luigi Pirandello, eventually turned to a more Brechtian form. It seemed that the Egyptian dramatists felt that Brecht was more suited to their form of political theater, that it might, “…grapple with our social problems and such hot political issues as capitalism, fascism, colonialism and justice.” After having examined a number of these absurdist works, one cannot help but wonder at the validity of this. It seems that the political objectives of certain absurdist works were clear and that the dramatists of the day simply preferred the harsh starkness of Brecht’s form to demonstrate their ideas.

In fact, the theater of the absurd has seen a slight resurgence in recent years, still bearing its political message in the Middle East. The American University in Cairo premiered its first production of Pirandello’s absurd work, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” since a 1962 performance at Saad Ardash’s Pocket Theater several years ago (Al-Ahram, No. 664). Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman wrote and directed the political absurdist film, “Divine Intervention,” in 2002. The film is a compilation of disparate vignettes, mostly taking place in the city of Ramallah and the checkpoint running between the Palestinian city and Jerusalem. It opens as any absurd work might, with a nonsensical scene of Palestinian youths chasing a harried Santa Claus through the woods to the church at Nazareth, where he is slain by a knife. We are then treated to a scene of an older man driving down the streets, smiling and waving as he curses at the people around him, saying things such as, “Fuck your sister,” or, “Go get fucked and get paid for it.” One then follows the seemingly subjective occurrences of violence, arrest, hate, racism, and more. These themes are strongly political, and displayed in the uniquely absurd manner of non-sequiturs and arbitrary happenstance. The characters exist in a world that makes no sense. Suleiman will often show us the same locales, but with events so wildly different that one cannot help but observe a more allegorical meaning behind it all. We see the image of a man repeatedly throwing his trash into his neighbor’s garden, for example. Towards the end of the film, we see the man’s home as we always do, but instead his neighbor throws her trash upon his property. The man appears and chides her, saying that she should respect her neighbors. When she tries to protest, saying that he does the same to her, he objects by stating that while he does such things often and therefore is not at fault, she is being a bad neighbor by overstepping the bounds of her “lot” as it were. He must throw his trash. She must receive it. She is controlled by some invisible absurd principle which makes little sense beyond some thought of previously established parameters.

Ultimately, one can see the benefits of absurdist political theater in the Middle East. It has a way of broaching topics without shouting in the audience’s face. It seemed that dramatists at the time preferred to display a more defined and concrete message, whereas absurdist works can often be interpretive and subject to the opinions and experiences of the viewers. In Brecht, they found a clear way to deliver their points of conjecture. In absurdism, the Middle East was given an opportunity to explore in all its myriad facets the oppression of their government.