Hamlet's Arab Journey by Litvin Margaret;

Author:Litvin, Margaret;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

A DILEMMA

This chapter has explored several incarnations of the Arab Hero Hamlet. We have seen how this revolutionary hero came into his own as the representative of a betrayed and justice-minded new generation after the 1967 defeat. This Hamlet, driven by the sense that the “time is out of joint” and that he is “born to set it right,” is a fighter for justice, brutally martyred by an oppressive regime. Known only in foreign (Soviet-bloc) versions before 1967, he grew to be expected by Arab critics and cultured audiences alike in the 1970s. Versions appeared in Syria and Egypt and in state-run, commercial, and high school productions.

As we have seen, the Arab Hero Hamlet is neither a Nasser nor an anti-Nasser, but he cannot be understood outside the context of the Arab nationalist hopes Nasser first inspired and then disappointed. Nasserism’s collapse after 1967 filled young theatre people in Egypt and other Arab countries with something like the white-hot “passion for cognition” that the Soviet director Kozintsev describes in his Hamlet: “the aspiration to discover the meaning behind what is happening.”116 Then Nasser’s death in 1970 cast the dead leader as Hamlet’s father, a ghost whose moral demands could neither be fulfilled nor ignored. Abandoning previous efforts to reform their regimes, therefore, the dramatists took their anger directly to the public. They posed what they saw as Hamlet’s question: how to confront injustice, or what to do with a political structure “cracked to its very foundations.”117 These playwrights and directors worked bravely and idealistically through the post-1967 “thaw.” But it was only about a decade before this effort, too, brought them to a dead end.

By 1976, as al-Duwayri’s play shows, serious theatre had become largely “culinary,” and playwrights and audiences knew it. The theatre was no longer a branch of the government; political leaders neither heeded its advice nor used it as a communication channel with the people. Censorship continued mainly out of old habit or increasingly generalized paranoia. Disappointing, too, were Brechtian efforts to use the theatre for grassroots community mobilization or mass civic education. The audiences, unwilling to mobilize politically, were as disappointing as the regimes.118 Playgoers mainly wanted entertainment—albeit politics as entertainment.

Dismay spread through theatre communities in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Arab world. Many writers went into exile. Syrian writer Saadallah Wannus, whose Party for June 5 had opened the floodgates for a frank new strain of drama after 1967, kept silent for thirteen years, from 1977 to 1990.119 Alfred Farag (author of Sulayman of Aleppo; see chapter 4) exiled himself from Egypt (1973–86), writing plays in Egyptian Arabic that were neither produced nor published. He and others blamed the “crisis” or “decline” of Arab theatre on many factors: lack of state funding, emigration of writers and critics, high ticket prices, lack of central planning of theatre seasons, and so forth.120 Yet beyond these signs of neglect, the lull in production points to playwrights’ and directors’ basic uncertainty about the purpose of drama. Veiled allegory and direct talk had each run their course, and political justice was no closer.

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