The intermingling of theatre and reality is almost always an important part of the dynamics of revolution, and was certainly to be seen in the 2011 Tunisian Revolution, which initiated the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. This paper will consider three significant examples of this process, involving two recent plays and a real-life performance that became theatricalized. The two plays were created by two of Tunisia's leading theatre artists, the playwright Jalila Baccar and her director husband Fadhel Jaïbi. The two plays are their Khamsūn (Fifty, written in 2006), and Yaḥia Yaïsh (Amnesia, written in 2010). Khamsūn is particularly significant in its confrontation of the repressive practices of the pre-revolutionary government. During the fifty years from Independence in 1956 to 2006, the Tunisian political system had only a single ruling party, and anyone who stood against the regime did so at great risk. Both Khamsūn and Yaḥia Yaïsh suggest that political repression can lead, among other things, to Islamic terrorism, as exemplified in Khamsūn, and to a subsequent fall of the Tunisian regime, as dramatized in Yaḥia Yaïsh. Unlike the Tunisian government, which had a simplistic view of Islamic terrorism, Khamsūn explains how this issue is more complex. By exerting repression under the pretext of protecting the Tunisian people from the danger of terrorism, the government establishes the conditions that will lead to its own downfall – an event that Yaḥia Yaïsh both represents and correctly predicts will soon come about. Human rights violations are central to this policy of repression, manifested through imprisoning, torturing, and silencing those who denounced the Tunisian repressive government and its incompetent institutions. Mohamed Talbi's Gulag & Democracy provides numerous examples of human rights violation in Tunisia.Footnote ¹ For instance, Talbi mentions Sihem Bensedrine, a Tunisian human rights activist and journalist, who had her passport ‘confiscated, . . . was imprisoned, [and] underwent brutal action and physical aggression by the Tunisian Police’.Footnote ² Bensedrine was subject to persecution for condemning the Tunisian government abuses, such as torture, lack of freedom of speech and the absence of an independent judiciary. In addition to Talbi, Robin Wright, a prolific foreign correspondent, also describes how the Tunisian Revolution exposed political rage against the authoritarian Tunisian state. In her work Rock the Casbah,Footnote ³ Wright explains that before the Revolution the Tunisian government was in control of all institutions, including media, finance and transport.

The theatre in particular suffered from this repressive control, and Khamsūn provides a particularly important and revealing example of this. Although the play was actually commissioned by the government to be presented at the National Theatre as part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of independence, its negative portrayal of specific Tunisian political figures and its sympathetic view of Islamic fundamentalism caused it first to be censored, and then to be banned. The play not only dared to represent Islamic terrorism onstage, but also depicted the manner in which the official ideology had attempted to eradicate Islamic terrorism. This project was carried out by condemning every Tunisian citizen, who was considered a potential Islamic terrorist, or anyone else who was thought to be connected to Islamists in even the slightest way. Moreover, the regime did not distinguish between political Islamists and generally spiritual people who, for example, frequent mosques, or wear the veil as part of their daily routine and dress code.

Banned in Tunisia, the play received its world premiere in 2006 at the French national theatre, the Odéon in Paris, and was so well received that the Tunisian government relented, and allowed it to be performed in Tunisia the following year. There, according to journalist Zoé Lamazou, the production opened a space for reflection and expression. Lamazou reports that the play ‘filled the auditorium’ with a public curious to see a work dealing with Islamic terrorism, daring to break the government silence on this subject.Footnote ⁴ The play also suggests that this repressive regime has led to the impoverishment of the media, among other things, stifling a full variety of intellectual and artistic expression.

Khamsūn tells of the events occurring after Juda, a secondary-school teacher feared to be an Islamic terrorist, dies in a suicide bombing next to the Tunisian flag, an event which sends tremors through the entire country. Baccar suggests in Khamsūn a connection between the revolt among educated Tunisian youth and the oppressive, archaic Tunisian political structure. Following the death of Juda, the police department interrogates those who had been connected with her before her suicide. Two veiled young women, Amal and Ḥanen, and Ahmed, a male pupil of Juda's, are all suspected of being accomplices in Juda's suicide. Khamsūn centres on the official suspicions that all of Juda's acquaintances are Islamic fundamentalists, and therefore carrying the germs of terrorism. The stories of these characters represent the conflicting ideological forces in Tunisian society, which include, among others, Sufism (mystical Islam), pan-Islamism and Islamic terrorism. Khamsūn raises questions about the national concern over suicide bombings and their impact on the image of Tunisia, in fact one of the safest countries in the region. The police want to know why someone like Juda would commit a suicide bombing after praying at school next to the Tunisian flag.

The shattered body of Juda mirrors the damaged flag, making the political critique more explicit. In 2012, contemplating Khamsūn's events in retrospect, Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson, two prominent theatre critics, pointed out that Khamsūn raises the question, ‘Has a dead-end been reached or, perhaps, a final break before a new start?’Footnote ⁵ It is not surprising that Juda's suicide next to the Tunisian flag should raise such an alarming question, warning the audience of a forthcoming disaster. The title Khamsūn, which is ‘fifty’ in Arabic, suggests the danger of longevity in government and reflects on the incompetence that has grown up in these fifty years in power. By choosing this title, Baccar, ironically, seems to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Tunisian Independence Day with Juda's launching her bomb attack next to the Tunisian flag.

This play also criticizes how archaic the police-state system is through the representation of Gaddour (Jamel Madani), the executioner. The system had not changed its practices for fifty years, including, most notoriously, its tradition of torture. Gaddour served the official political structure by ensuring control and conformity through the use of fear and humiliation. He has a central role in the play, for not only is he the driving force behind the play's action, but he also connects the younger and older generations; that is, those who have been oppressed for a brief period and those who have been subjugated for a long period. Because the executioner is himself controlled, he does not seem able to question the monotonous despotic functioning of the police system. For instance, in Act VIII of Section One, Maryam – Amal's mother (played by Jalila Baccar) – repeatedly reminds Gaddour of when he tortured her husband Youssef (Moez Mrabet) and points out that he is interrogating her for the fourth time.

By offering different perspectives on the term ‘fundamentalism’, Baccar challenges the established and reductionist Tunisian political view and offers other possible interpretations of what Islamic fundamentalism could mean and the reasons why it could spread, especially among the educated youth in post-colonial Tunisia. In this respect, the suicide of Juda serves to critique the Tunisian government for the possible role that it played in eradicating Islamic fundamentalism at the expense of protecting the people and their fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression, freedom of political affiliation and freedom of religious practice. Indeed, Khamsūn suggests subversively that another facet of terrorism was perpetuated during fifty years in Tunisia through political oppression as the Tunisian government itself took extremist measures against its own citizens. Moreover, unlike the repressive Tunisian police system, which, for example, equates veiling with religious extremism, Baccar points out that Islamic fundamentalism is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to such simple matters as the display of certain clothing.

Although little is said about Juda's former pupil, Ahmed, the police force is apparently right to consider him a terrorist because he confesses to collaborating with Juda, leading to his conviction. It is possible, however, to regard Ahmed's behaviour as a reaction to a repressive regime. The portrayal of Ahmed is fascinating because Baccar shifts back and forth between fiction and reality by employing indexical units that can be combined with certain events to reflect the political situation in Tunisia. For example, the playwright selects 15 November 1987 as the date of Ahmed's birth, which suggests that the Tunisian government of November 1987 (Ben Ali was in power from 7 November 1987 to 14 January 2011) is the target of the critique. This date then suggests that this is the government that actually produced terrorists, such as Ahmed and Juda, while aiming to completely eliminate Islamists from the political scene by brutally destroying their movement in every possible way. It appears that the play goes beyond condemning terrorism by inviting the reader to explore how both Ahmed and Juda are drawn to a fanatic religious discourse as a form of resistance against the repressive 1987 Tunisian government.

The stories of the three characters suspected of being accomplices in Juda's suicide are all different: Amal, Hanen and Ahmed each represent conflicting ideological forces in Tunisian society. However, Amal's story is more ambiguous than that of the others and therefore needs more consideration. The way in which Baccar constructs the character of Amal suggests a different form of resistance to the Tunisian political regime, which complicates any simple interpretation of the veil as a political icon. For example, upon returning to Tunisia, Amal was arrested because she had once been Juda's roommate. Amal was also detained for wearing the veil, especially since it was known that a previous boyfriend of hers had been identified as a terrorist suspect in France. Ironically, it was in the secular circles of Paris that Amal decided to abandon her parents and her leftist values, to wear the veil and to become a Sufi Muslim. In the second part of Khamsūn, Amal sends an email to her parents informing them of the spiritual path that she has embraced and how she has placed Islamic Sufism at the centre of her life: ‘Mom, Dad, I am a devotee and every drop of my blood turns to worship the One’.Footnote ⁶ By converting to Sufism, Amal was different, but accepted in the French milieu but she was despised in the Tunisian milieu. She is rejected by her father, Youssef, and labelled by the Tunisian police-state system an Islamic fundamentalist.

The depiction of Amal as a Sufi Muslim seems incompatible with the fact that she is drawn to political Islam based on her relationship either with Juda or with her previous boyfriend. Still, what the written text of Khamsūn fails to express is the importance and meaning of choreography in the performance, which bears on this question. Amal's whirling on the stage and reciting supplications, for example, contain significant cues about her as a Sufi, rather than as a fundamentalist. Moreover, despite the performance of Sufi dancing on stage, it is perplexing that both Tunisian and French media interpret Amal as being drawn to Islamic fundamentalism in the same way. It is important to resist the assumptions that associate a veiled, or Sufi, woman with Islamic fundamentalism. Like Juda's act, Amal's ideological change is reduced by the Tunisian political regime to a simple, straightforward indication of Islamic fundamentalism.

The reception of Khamsūn in France shows that this emphasis on the image of radical Islam was perpetuated there as well, for example in the Odéon's brochure which advertised the performance in 2006. Amal was also portrayed as a radical Muslim in French newspapers and magazines. In Libération, the journalist Maïa Bouteillet wrote, ‘Amal, a young lady from a wealthy family whose education is secular, is recently drawn to fundamentalism. She was detained the day after a suicide bombing was committed by one of her friends’.Footnote ⁷ Viewing Amal as a radical Muslim shows the power of a discourse that operates widely, not only in France, but also in Tunisia (as well as in other parts of the world). There is little evidence to suggest that Amal's veiling is to be seen by the public the way it is seen by the authorities in the play – as an indication of an association with Islamic fundamentalism.

It is crucial to note that the police force and Maryam differ in their attempts to deal with Islamic fundamentalism. Baccar argues that in Tunisia there is no place for any difference from the practices dictated by the Tunisian official regime. For this regime, silencing whoever is thought to hold an extremist position, like Islamic fundamentalism, is the easiest way to avoid a serious political crisis. Unlike the authorities, Maryam attempts to politically contextualize Juda's act and Amal's ideological shift considering the events of the past fifty years. Maryam's concern with the causes of terrorism leads to an exploration of the conflict that emerged from the relationship between the determination of the Tunisian government to eradicate both terrorism and the practice of veiling the female body.

After the Tunisian Revolution, Khamsūn may be interpreted as a prophetic statement, certainly if one compares its main concerns to those of the Tunisian Revolution and its aftermath. Thus Khamsūn's concern with Islamic fundamentalism among desperate youth like Juda and Ahmed can be compared with the extreme political protest committed through self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2011. Ahmed, Juda and Bouazizi are involved in similar acts of suicide or attempted suicide in protest against the Tunisian government. Ahmed specifically justifies his attempt to commit suicide in order to express his struggle against unjust leaders in his country and against injustices in other countries such as Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.Footnote ⁸ Bouazizi's act of suicide was also a reaction against a municipal official, who confiscated the fruit cart on which he depended to make a living. The difference between the two main suicidal people, however, is that Juda's death in the play leads one to observe how the Tunisian regime further accuses all the acquaintances of Juda without making any effort to explore the complexity of Islamic fundamentalism. The self-immolation of Bouazizi, on the other hand, incited demonstrations that extended throughout Tunisia against the president and his regime, resulting in the Tunisian Revolution, the stepping down of the president and the fall of the Tunisian police-state system.

It must be said that Khamsūn's expression of fear of Islamic fundamentalism was not misplaced. Indeed, after the Revolution, a Salafist movement emerged in line with the ascendance of many new political movements that had not been present during the previous sixty years of Tunisian history. According to Talbi, ‘Salafist Islam is a totalitarian obscurantist of the worst kind, worse than all dictatorships. Think of the Taliban!’Footnote ⁹ Talbi considers the Salafist movement to be a form of dictatorship because it is based on a set of strict rules adhering to orthodox interpretations of Islamic laws. These Salafists are at war with those who do not believe in their own interpretation of Islam. Some of the Salafists also believe in jihad, which literally means ‘struggle’. Their belief in jihad encourages them to sacrifice themselves in order to fight against their enemies. This ideology maintains that those who are not Muslims, or those who are thought to deviate from Islam as those Salafists understand it, are subject to punishment, including death. It must be said, however, that most Salafists are not violent or even strongly politically engaged.Footnote ¹⁰

Although only a minority of Salafist groups pursue terrorism, it may be reasonable to claim that Khamsūn deals in part with the rising Salafist movement because the play specifically discusses the overall concept of Islamic fundamentalism in relation to a specific type of terrorism associated with the Salafists – suicide bombing. The play remains, however, more concerned with the corrosive effects, including terrorism, of living under a long dictatorship. Unfortunately, extremist groups arising under these conditions usually become dictatorial in their turn. Today, Salafist groups often represent a threat to non-Muslims, artists, lawyers, women and more. For example, in November 2011 Salafist students were able to delay examinations at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and the Humanities, Manouba University, in Tunis. By imposing sit-ins, these Salafists prevented thousands of students from taking examinations under the pretext that female Salafist students should be allowed to wear the burka (the veil that covers the face except for the eyes; sometimes this veil looks like a net that covers the eyes as well) as they please.

Suzanne Daley, a foreign correspondant for the New York Times, states,

Daley's report shows that after the Revolution occurred in Tunisia, the political scene changed in that it incorporated plurality, thus allowing room for the Salafists, a group of people that includes an extreme Islamic minority, to be active. Of course, the danger lies in the inability of the current government to handle extreme groups like the Salafists, who disrupt the social order to meet their ideological purposes.

The next production of Baccar and Jaibi, Yaḥia Yaїsh (Amnesia), in 2010, provided a striking example of the close relationship between theatre and reality. This work was remarkably prophetic of the revolutionary events of the following year, the dismissal of Ben Ali, and the collapse of his regime in 2011. From the start, Yaḥia Yaїsh announces a power shift: Yaḥia (Ramzi Azaiez), the prime minister, is mocked in a television newscast on his birthday, and an announcement of his dismissal is made due to abuse of power. Following the news, Yaḥia is accused of burning his private library during his confinement in his residence. As a result, he is committed to a mental institution. Yaḥia's paralysis is an analogy for his distress, beginning when he lost all his power. In his depiction as paralysed and mentally ill, Yaḥia stands as a metaphor for a diseased Tunisian political regime. Indeed, perhaps a premonition of the fall of Ben Ali's regime can be specifically seen in the representation of Yaḥia's disintegrating body at the end of the performance. Yaḥia describes himself as follows: ‘A body / A head / Completely dismembered / Dispersed / Scattered to the four winds’. In this dramatic monologue Baccar and Jaïbi stage a defeated individual and, by extension, a collective state of defeat that signals the end of Ben Ali's political regime in their country.

By briefly comparing Khamsūn to Yahia Yaïsh, one may observe a radical shift with regard to the relationship between Jaïbi's theatre and Tunisian political reality. For example, repression and torture are pointed out in a more straightforward manner in Khamsūn than in Yahia Yaïsh. As a result, unlike the direct and official disapproval of the committee of censorship toward Khamsūn, Yaḥia Yaïsh was not censored. Instead, it was subject to only minor changes, as the theatre director and the playwright admitted in an interview conducted by two French radio reporters, Caroline Broué and Hervé Gardette (2011). In this interview, Baccar noted that although Yaḥia Yaїsh was not censured, the Theatre Orientation [Censorship] Committee detained the play for two months. Baccar also declared that following a discussion with the minister of culture ‘a few compromises’ were made. In her article on Yaḥia Yaїsh, Odile Quirot, a journalist and theatre critic in the Nouvel observateur, also remarks, ‘Under Ben Ali's regime, Fadhel Jaïbi has clearly been obligated to get around censorship’.Footnote ¹² With this statement Quirot uses Yaḥia Yaїsh to demonstrate how it is possible to convey political criticism of the Tunisian regime in a veiled way. By staging Yaḥia Yaïsh as an extended metaphor, Jaïbi and Baccar mocked the power holders in post-colonial Tunisia, and thus succeeded in limiting the censor's role. Amine and Carlson argue, ‘This 2010 production is a call for power-holders to revise their relations with citizens’.Footnote ¹³ Sensitizing those who hold political power to reconsider their relation to society was indeed one of the major goals of Jaïbi's theatre. Warning them that power would not last forever, that the result of oppression may lead to running away from one's country in order to escape being brought to justice, and the subsequent fall of the regime – these make this performance the most visionary of Jaïbi and Baccar's production.

When Yaḥia is about to be brought to justice, he flees abroad from the mental institution, one of the most striking events in Yaḥia Yaïsh since it anticipates the flight of Ben Ali, the deposed Tunisian president, and several members of his family to Saudi Arabia. While this trope is fairly common in narratives – that is, proposing the death, or the end, of a dictatorship – it is reasonable to claim that Yaḥia Yaïsh is different from other narratives. This performance not only hints at the fall and the flight of Ben Ali, but it also occurred concurrently with the Revolution, since the performance played for more than a year continuously starting in 2010. The interrelation between the performance's events and the Tunisian uprising may be observed in many details in the play, resulting in a convergence of fiction and reality.

Yaḥia and Ben Ali have many things in common. Both abuse their power, which leads in both cases to flight outside the country with several members of their families. During the Tunisian Revolution, another instance of overlap between theatre and real life culminates in the music played inside the Municipal Theatre in Tunis during the opening of Yaḥia Yaïsh and the tear gas that was used outside the theatre by the police in order to control the protesting crowd. The music of the play, written by Gérard Hourbette, contains sound effects relating to war, such as sounds of battles, guns firing and explosions.Footnote ¹⁴ This music overlapped with the atmosphere of the Revolution outside the theatre as the protests were going on. It is worth noting how the authorities attempted to blind the crowd with tear gas at the same time as the theatre practitioners – Baccar and Jaïbi – were attempting through the story of Yaḥia to open the audience's eyes to reveal the despotism of the Tunisian government.

The production of this play during the Revolution itself, where the stage and the streets mirrored each other, provides us with an occasion to move from the theatre to the streets themselves, which at this time, as is often the case in revolutionary moments, became metaphorically and sometimes actually a stage of their own. In modern times this dynamic has been much facilitated by the ubiquity of recording devices and the ease of circulating the images thus obtained. As news of Ben Ali's flight circulated through Tunis, one Tunisian citizen, Abd-En-Nasser Laouini,Footnote ¹⁵ expressed his jubilation, and that of most of his countrymen, in a spontaneous outpouring not unlike a theatrical monologue in the main street of Tunis, Habib Bourguiba Avenue. Since the avenue was almost deserted due to a nighttime curfew imposed during the Revolution, Laouini appears on it alone to celebrate the fact that Ben Ali has fled. The setting, which is the street, becomes a reflection of a virtual stage. The video clip, made without Laouini's awareness by observers in an apartment overlooking the street, reveals Laouini's excitement for the future of Tunisians without Ben Ali, and also his raging against the dark years of an oppressive leadership. Laouini's words are powerful in a dramatic sense:

Beyond the obvious fact that Laouini's message is political, it is also highly theatrical, following the form of an unusual dramatic monologue even though the speaker had no intention of addressing an actual audience. Laouini himself was unaware of being filmed until the video clip was repetitively broadcast on both national and international television channels, and downloaded through other social-networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Nevertheless, his ‘performance’ was analysed not only in terms of its linguistic content but as an expression of the performer's defiance of the the restrictions of the Tunisian authorities. In addition to breaking the law by being in the street after curfew, Laouini's movements across the avenue were accompanied by his enthusiastic call for Tunisians to awaken, his hands waving up and down as if he were awakening their collective consciousness, alerting them to remember the Tunisian political history condensed in this performed monologue. The uprising in Tunisia was, to a large degree, shaped by real-life performances. Laouini's video represents a political moment that turned into a theatrical reality by virtue of having been filmed. This video illustrates how reality becomes theatrical through fulfilling one's ideas in addition to expressing them.

Thus the concern with the proximity between art and life illuminates the reading of Khamsūn (Fifty) and Yaḥia Yaïsh (Amnesia), as well as the creation and circulation of the video clip (‘Ben Ali Fled!’). The events in Khamsūn fill gaps that are missing in Tunisian politics, such as political plurality, and correctly forecast that extreme minority groups might surface after a long era of political repression. Yaḥia Yaïsh not only shows the figure of a government leader who abuses his power, but also foretells the imminent fall of this leader, followed by an attempt to run away from being brought to justice, remarkably predicting the real-life events that soon materialized during the Tunisian Revolution. ‘Ben Ali Fled!’ marked a historic moment in the politics of Tunisia and emphasized in a very different way the close ties between theatrical and social performance.

After the Revolution it is clear to see how Khamsūn addressed the incompetent political reality in Tunisia and how Yaḥia Yaïsh both represented and predicted the fall of the Tunisian regime. Since the Revolution, the Tunisian government has granted permission to many groups to form political parties and to be active. Yet this government still lacks the strength to manage the challenges of plurality effectively. It is to be hoped that imaginative and inspired performers, in the theatres and perhaps on the streets as well, will provide the models necessary for the development of the effective civil society in whose name the Revolution was launched.