On 18 November 2011, as the Friday protest in Tahrir Square was beginning to thin, I went with friends to see a documentary theatre piece called The Tahrir Monologues. With the phrase ‘This Is Not a Play’ printed in the programme notes, The Tahrir Monologues harnessed the rhetorical power of personal experience (what Kate McLoughlin termed ‘autopsy’Footnote ²) and the techniques of documentary drama. Directed by former journalist Sondos Shabayek, the performance participated in an ongoing trend of memorializing, celebrating, even reifying the period in January and February 2011 (quickly termed the ‘Eighteen Days’) that had dethroned Egypt's ruling family. But the reminiscing was incongruous; the successor junta had dug in its heels. The military's worst-yet violence against protesters would begin the very next morning, 19 November. Amid teargas and beatings was born the revolution's ‘second wave’ – almost instantly celebrated, in turn, by a new round of memorializing artwork.

This essay analyses The Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unravelling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. I begin by highlighting some paradoxes inherent in the effort to express in theatrical form, in real time, a process of political change that is ongoing and far from unidirectional. Perhaps faster-moving art forms like street art are more honest and more effective in responding to the pace of events and the demands of activism? But this view, although tempting, will not hold. An analysis of The Tahrir Monologues will show that its deployment of nostalgia was more sophisticated than at first appeared; more than simply an attempt to register what was happening to Egypt in 2011, the play was crafted to intervene in a public discourse already sliding toward cynicism.

Yet documentary theatre is (of course) not the only way for Egyptians and others to get a philosophical grip on the Arab uprisings. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to a 2011 Cairo production of a quite different play, Sa'adallāh Wannūs's 1994 masterpiece Ṭuqūs al-Isharāt wa-l-taḥāwwulāt (Rituals of Signs and Transformations) – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012–13. Why this play now? The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion and, ultimately, I argue, its highly convincing pessimism. Complicating the Brechtian consciousness-raising impulses that drove his early plays, Wannūs's late work continues to embody perhaps the most brilliant prophetic voice modern Arabic theatre has ever heard.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the way political movements deploy memory and memorialization.Footnote ³ Cameron Hu, founder of the online archive TahrirDocuments.org, has drawn attention to the way an avowedly neutral archive such as his own differs from ‘the memory ethics of revolutionary agents, of actors actually involved in anti-authoritarian projects’.Footnote ⁴ In particular, he noted the way activists have reified the Eighteen Days as a sort of pristine model that is then available for reference and inspiration during subsequent waves of struggle. Like Hu, I am curious about the way memorialization and protest interact, particularly when they use many of the same genres and media (Facebook posts, folk songs, vernacular poetry, photographs, banners, wall murals, YouTube videos, documentary film, dramatic performance) and occur nearly simultaneously, sometimes overlapping, and exploit each other.

One dark view would be that the gap between activism (which by nature is in motion) and memorialization (which aspires to be fixed) mirrors the gap between ‘political theatre’ and ‘theatre about politics’ that has bedeviled Arab drama for the past thirty-five years. As I have argued elsewhere, a political gesture is not a political action but the stylized reproduction of one.Footnote ⁵ Emotional release and self-glorification can take the place of hard strategizing about the next steps. To praise a revolutionary uprising – to try to tell its story, as though it were already over – is to bury it. A performance like The Tahrir Monologues, which does not reach a mass-market audience, quite literally takes its relatively small activist audience ‘out of the streets and into the theatre’, reversing the neo-Brechtian avant-garde's slogan.Footnote ⁶ And so on. Perhaps that's why young theatre director Hani Afifi told me, in November 2011, that he ‘refused to go see any film with the word “Tahrir” in the title’.Footnote ⁷ Nine months after Mubarak's fall, there were already at least half a dozen.Footnote ⁸ Or why Laila Soliman, another young theatre director, gave her post-2011 documentary theatre project about police and military abuses the ironic title No Time for Art.Footnote ⁹

On this view, slower-moving genres such as film and scripted theatre, while possibly important for building community and sustaining morale, run the risk of defeating their own revolutionary purpose by fixing (capturing, holding still, hence holding back) the very movement they aim to advance. Against the obscene ad-libbing of Egypt's counterrevolutionary forces, only improvisation can work. The most effective revolutionary art (such as graffiti, posters and slogans) would be that which is most agile and most frequently revised, best able to respond to the protean and unpredictable machinations of counterrevolutionary actors. Such in-the-moment art forms can self-consciously deploy their own impermanence both to fight for the revolution's values and to memorialize – without reifying – its martyrs. The evolving murals on Mohamed Mahmoud Street just off Tahrir Square provide a brilliant example: as the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) pursued a cat-and-mouse campaign of painting over street art in the spring of 2012, intensifying in the lead-up to the presidential election in May, a group of graffiti artists (Ammar Abo Bakr and friends) whitewashed into their own earlier commemorative mural to make room for a gigantic, ironically intended rhyming slogan: ‘Forget what is past, focus on the elections.’ Their high-profile act of self-erasure, performed during the last day of presidential voting, produced an effective real-time political intervention as well as a visually stunning city block.Footnote ¹⁰That, one is tempted to say, is the appropriate genre for this uprising.

But having fleshed out this anxiety-driven view, I find I am sceptical of it. Surely theatre and performance – even, or especially, in the midst of an epochal wave of uprisings – can have a role? Surely there is time for art, and in particular for theatre with a deeper aim than simply to galvanize activism or even promote civic awareness? One indication of relevance is in the audience interest. Although Cairo traffic is terrible and people would seem to have more urgent things to do, non-festivalized experimental plays by relatively unknown young directors draw substantial audiences.

Let me go back to 18 November 2011. That day's protest in Tahrir Square was the largest in months. I attended with some friends, despite other friends’ warnings that it would be an ‘Islamist’ protest, much like the so-called ‘Kandahar Friday’ march of July 2011. Bridges around the square were parked solid with buses bringing pro-Brotherhood protesters from Damietta (in the Nile Delta, three and a half hours’ drive away) and elsewhere around the country. The protest was also an Islamist show of force; in the Muslim Brotherhood's first public challenge to the ruling SCAF, Brotherhood supporters and Salafi parties were protesting against a pre-constitutional declaration that sought to render the military immune to civilian oversight.Footnote ¹¹ In retrospect, the 18 November 2011 protest can be seen as one turning point in the complex collaborative/competitive relationship between Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and the military. With today's eyes (as I write in December 2012), that Friday also ironically foreshadows the Brotherhood's own constitution-passing shenanigans, poor handling of renewed protests, and loss of prestige a year later. But at the time the mood was celebratory, and even wry. Chants were tried out, a protest repertoire in perpetual rehearsal.Footnote ¹² Some couplets stuck and were taken up and repeated; others were allowed to die out, whether because they were not catchy or because their demands – for instance calling on the military to hand over power before the then-agreed April 2012 deadline – did not strike a chord.

Many young playgoers at the Rawabet Center seemed to have come straight from the square to that night's performance of The Tahrir Monologues. The Rawabet is hip and inexpensive, one of a handful of newer arts spaces beholden neither to the Ministry of Culture nor to pro-Islamist business interests. The front row sat on the floor as, supported by minimal sets, amateur actors retold stories collected from actual participants, starting with the first decisions to go down to Tahrir or stay home – the boy who put on four layers of clothes so he could ‘withstand police beatings and keep going’, the girl who felt mildly guilty because she went home to sleep each night instead of camping out in the square – and building to a climax with President Hosni Mubarak's removal.Footnote ¹³ Audience members, recognizing their own experiences of the previous winter, nodded, laughed quietly (‘yes, it was just like that’). Many, including the friend I came with, wept with pride.

The incongruity with the then political situation, it turned out, was part of the point. Another Cairo-based theatre director, Dalia Basiouny, whose similarly monologue-based documentary play Tahrir Stories was first staged on 23 February 2011 (just twelve days after some of the events it commemorated), has written that her piece ‘attempted to register the history of the revolution as it was unfolding, so we had to prepare and present the performance as efficiently as possible’. (However, Basiouny also noted, in a nice turn of phrase, that ‘the revolution disrupts plays about the revolution’, for instance complicating the logistics of theatre production, or rerouting a potential campus audience into a midday protest against their university rector.)Footnote ¹⁴

By contrast, Tahrir Monologues director Sondos Shabayek eschewed efficiency. She has said that her impulse was to preserve and protect the memories of the Eighteen Days: ‘I wanted to save them up in a box, because they were stories of the best moments of the lives of entire generations.’Footnote ¹⁵ When the show opened in May 2011, just three and a half months after Mubarak's ouster, reviewers already described it as ‘a trip back in time’ to the Eighteen Days.Footnote ¹⁶ The twenty-five-year-old Shabayek was explicitly motivated by nostalgia, which she hoped also to mobilize.

Preserving the Edenic stories of the Eighteen Days was meant to create an inner reservoir against cynicism as Egypt's promised spring – as the vernacular poet Abdel Rahman al-Abnudi had written, ‘Is this my blood or is it the spring? Both are green’Footnote ¹⁷ – started burning away to an arid and bitter summer. The play not only thematized the uprising itself, then, but also modelled the interpersonal community-cementing process of exchanging revolution stories, of bonding over the Eighteen Days. Shabayek told interviewers that she was inspired both by the ritual quality of the retellings – ‘Storytelling was happening naturally throughout the country, at coffee shops. People would repeat the same stories with the same passion’ – and, more tentatively, by a quasi-magic effect she hoped this ritual might produce:

The play even included, as if to extend a hand of reconciliation, a testimonial from a young man who had participated as a soldier in the regime's effort to quell the uprising.

In different ways, Basiouny and Shabayek's testimonial-based performances aimed to ‘register’, ‘save up’ or ‘bring back’ the events and emotions of the Egyptian uprising. However, they did not offer any resources to help Egyptians or Egypt-watchers get philosophical perspective on the serial disappointments that have followed. Shabayek, for example, eventually grew dissatisfied with the happy closure of the ‘nostalgia box’ model: in the fall of 2012 she produced a follow-up play, integrating audience members’ stories of Egypt's post-Mubarak sufferings.

Other artists seeking to get a grip on fast-changing events have turned to a perhaps unexpected resource: scripted quasi-historical drama. Here the documentary or preservationist impulse gives way to a different impulse that I will take the liberty of labelling prophetic. What matters is not what happened yesterday or two years ago but what will happen in the future, what always happens. Because it casts a sceptical though sympathetic eye on human aspirations to progress, this prophetic view is inclined to pessimism.

Perhaps the most illuminating theatrical perspective on the Arab uprisings belongs to a writer who died fourteen years before they began: Syrian playwright Sa'adallāh Wannūs (1941–97).Footnote ¹⁹ For this reason Wannūs has been among the most frequently invoked. ‘Of all the Syrian writers, he has been the most present since the outbreak of the revolution’, writes novelist Elias Khoury in his foreword to a new volume of essays on Arab theatre dedicated to the spirit of Wannūs and titled, in his memory, Doomed by Hope. Of Wannūs's 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations, Khoury writes, ‘Wannous's ability to reconcile layers of narrative with the dramaturgical devices of epic theatre enabled him to explore the human experience at the core of social struggle.’Footnote ²⁰

I saw a production of Rituals of Signs and Transformations at the American University in Cairo (AUC) in October 2011, directed by Effat Yehia, who chose it to be AUC's one Arabic-language production of that year. It was also her first experience directing a play originally written in Arabic. Meanwhile, and quite independently, Kuwait-based director Sulayman Al-Bassam is preparing to direct the same play with a French cast at the Comédie Française – the first-ever play by an Arab author to be performed there.Footnote ²¹ And two Beirut-based scholars, Robert Myers and Nada Saab, have received a MacArthur grant to translate the play into English for production at Silk Road Rising in Chicago and in Beirut.Footnote ²²

Why this play now? The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion and, ultimately, I believe, its spectacular pessimism. Tuqūs begins with a revolt against patriarchy. In a fairly abstracted early modern Damascus, a young aristocratic wife named Mu'mina – ‘the Believer’ – is stuck in the middle of a conspiracy stemming from rivalry between the city's self-serving but perhaps sincere religious elite, personified by the Mufti, and its corrupt political elites, the Governor and the Provost of the Notables. The Mufti ensnares her cheating husband Abdallah, the head of the Notables, sending soldiers to catch him with a prostitute and arrest him for fornication. He then calls on Mu'mina to participate in a ‘bed trick’ to spring Abdallah from prison and save his reputation.

Mu'mina attempts to change the rules of this cynical power game. She jumps to replace the prostitute but demands a price: her freedom. The Mufti, already falling for her, agrees to make Abdallah divorce her. Mu'mina receives her divorce, apprentices herself to the same prostitute her husband was cheating with, changes her name to Almassa (‘diamond’), and sets up shop as a high-class prostitute herself. Here everything starts to unravel.

Rituals of Signs presents religious hypocrisy, political domination and gender domination as complexly entwined facets – and pillars – of the same oppressive patriarchal political order. Almassa's rebellion challenges that order and inspires other characters to pursue liberation and personal authenticity by various roads. Yet the release of these tightly written social rules/codes leads only to anarchy, not to dignity. The city's power centres flail wildly. The Mufti – no allegorical caricature but a man with feelings, in love with Almassa – is tortured by lust and conscience. Meanwhile a police officer, likewise seeking to express his soul's deepest desires, takes the risk of performatively disclosing his homosexual love for his colleague; he is spurned, and eventually kills himself.

Almassa, too, is ultimately consumed in the fire she has ignited: when the regime can no longer discipine, it begins ferociously to punish. After she bravely confronts her father over his sexual depredations in her childhood, she is murdered by her brother. ‘I've killed her!’ he boasts. ‘I've killed her! With this dagger! Look, father! I'm a man!’ In fact, not one of the characters finds happiness, except the Notable-turned-Sufi Abdallah, who divorces himself from the social world and dissolves his ego in service to God. This extreme liberation through submission is the only example of lasting happiness shown in the play – a fact that cannot help but look ominous to today's mainly secularist theatre audiences, be they in Cairo, Beirut, Paris or Chicago.

Yehia's adaptation abridged and simplified the play for student actors; only Mu'mina/Almassa was played by a professional, Dalia El-Guindi. She dulled the horror of the ending (as the director at the Comédie Française also plans to do). She translated Wannūs's Syrian-tinged Modern Standard into Egyptian colloquial Arabic, keeping only the tight and intensely lyrical monologues in MSA (producing a neatly late Wannūsian dichotomy between characters’ independently eloquent inner lives and their socially dictated interpersonal lives).

More controversially, Yehia also lightly Egyptianized the play's world. She updated some (but not all) of the cultural and political references, playfully letting the remnants of early modern setting bump up against their contemporary Egyptian counterparts. (For instance, the currency in which market women hawked their wares morphed from dinar to Egyptian pounds.) She worked in a song from ‘Ali Badrakhān's famous 1978 movie Shafīqa wa-Matwallī.Footnote ²³ Some viewers found the juxtaposition incongruous.

Yehia's adaptation Egyptianized and perhaps softened Wannūs's play. It muted the play's prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when traditional political, religious and gender structures of authority are suddenly undermined in a society previously deformed by a long experience of despotism. But that warning came through nonetheless. Although he did not live to see the uprisings, Wannūs arguably foresaw how they would unfold. The word translated as ‘transformations’ – taḥawwulāt – suggests that the play's dominant metaphor is the turn: the reversal of political power dependencies, the upending of human relationships, and the Sufi's turning (about himself) as he turns toward God. As Syria and also maybe Egypt are going, it is a timely metaphor: the widening gyre. Tuqūs thus functions in today's Middle East as an exquisitely crafted statement of a foreboding that perhaps no contemporary documentary play about the Arab uprisings has been able to express – at least not yet.