The changing cultural and social landscape in Egypt paved the way for the 25 January 2011 revolution and also produced a political theatre very different from the one that followed the 23 July 1952 revolution. Such post-revolution initiatives included Muhammad ‘Azīz's play Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place (February 2011), which did not associate itself with any nationalist or political party or trend, but dedicated itself to the broader exploration of the identity of the emerging Egyptian nation. The play foregrounds how Egyptian youth organized the revolution through social media networking and, during the battle at Tahrir Square, through live human networking. The angry masses at Tahrir Square understood Egypt as a richly multicultural space, a polyphony of different dialects, religions, social classes and outlooks. This exploration illuminates the internal differences and complexities of Egyptians against a regime that homogenizes them through the lens of oppression. The play captures the dynamics of space and resistance as multiple selves move from individualistic alienated spaces towards connection through the space of resistance and shared political activity. This allows the play to construct its social and historical grounding as a fabulous mix of the real, the fictional and the virtual. The analysis reflects the aesthetic opportunities for political theatre in Egypt and, more specifically, demonstrates how the playwright reimagines the possibilities of political theatre in the context of postmodern virtuality. Such work forces realism to incorporate other worlds as a way of rethinking theatre and politics in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Egyptian theatre between 1952 and 2011
The 1952 revolution marked a critical moment when the country stood at the crossroads of past and present and created a crucial turning point for theatre. Playwrights wrote realistic plays that reflected optimism and enthusiasm about the revolutionary changes and the new calls for social reform. Tawfīq-al-Hakīm's Soft Hands (1954) and two plays by Nu‘man ‘Ashūr: The Trick Cyclist (1955) and The People Who Live Downstairs (1956) represent the beginning of this critical realistic drama. The shifting social realities following the 1952 revolution were also reflected in the plays of Lotfī al-Kholī and Sa‘ad Iddin Wahba, who focused on Egyptian culture and current social conditions through a central character who advocated reform.
Playwrights of this period appropriated a traditionally realist form for political objectives. They left unchallenged the accepted relationship between the stage and an audience concerned with the fate of the characters who responded within the framework of empathy and identification. The fundamental principle was to persuade the audience and make them accept the truthfulness of what was onstage. Early realistic plays in Egypt enabled the audience to identify with the central character. This mode of representation was more reformist than revolutionary.
Egyptian plays between 1960 and 1967, the year of the Egyptian defeat in the war against Israel, did not simply portray reality but tried to catch up with modern European currents by mixing realism with symbolism and expressionism. Mingling different dramatic styles, the plays tried to express covertly their growing disillusionment with the revolution. Despite its aspirations towards freedom and justice, the revolution failed to sustain an apolitical system outside army control, repressive measures, secret police and press censorship. Playwrights of the 1960s like Mahmūd Taymūr, Yūsuf Idrīs, Alfred Farag and Rashad Rushdī embraced the new theatre practices, replacing those that condoned the revolution with others that denounced repression and tyranny and advocated social freedom and democracy. They resorted to non-traditional forms as they probed reality and tried to evade restrictions imposed by censorship.
In the 1960s Tawfīq-al-Hakīm wrote plays in which his initial hope, generated by the 1952 revolution and given expression in the 1954 play Soft Hands, had begun to fade. His plays were still political, yet the politics were now expressed indirectly through the Theatre of the Absurd. He questioned the certitudes of President Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime by drawing on non-realistic techniques. In his play The Tree Climber (1962), a detective investigates a murder that has not taken place, and Fate of a Cockroach (1966) explores a cockroach society that parallels human religious, political and domestic arguments. Surprising the Arab world with his absurdist play The Tree Climber, al-Hakīm ‘paved the way for other playwrights in the Arab world to follow him in the same direction like Salah ‘Abdel Sabūr and Yūsuf Idrīs’.Footnote 1The Flip-flap (1964) by Idrīs depicted the character of a poor layman from the popular tradition of Egyptian comedy to express the serious issue of how people should govern themselves.
Playwrights of this period experimented with a variety of non-realistic styles to disguise their subversive intentions. What unified these works was a desire to speak indirectly against oppression. These endeavours, however, did not establish a solid artistic tradition or a radical change in audience consciousness. In this respect, critic Fatma Yūsuf explains the role played by the state in directing theatre, suggesting,
It is clear that the role of the state in the sixties to effect a theatrical development was crucial. This confirms the subordination of the Egyptian theatre to the social and political changes that might use it to serve propagandist or entertaining objectives. Theatre artists, in this respect, became tools for the authority in its strategy to direct and move audiences to achieve the visible or invisible goals set by the regime.Footnote 2
In spite of the individual attempts by playwrights to measure up to international artistic and aesthetic standards, they failed to confront authority. They experimented with various styles to avoid direct political expression. Governed by their social and political contexts, these playwrights did not manage to stimulate the expected audience response of criticism, reflection and debate. ‘Ali al-Ra‘ai, an Egyptian writer, writes, ‘audience interaction was not possible at that time as the whole theatrical atmosphere had to be changed’.Footnote 3 In the context of developing a revolutionary theatre, these modern Egyptian plays did not engage with the wider tradition of the modern European theatre that promotes questioning rather than persuading. Similarly, Samīr Sarhan writes, ‘the Egyptian drama had to cross the narrow circle of realism by transcending the limits of the problem play and social realism towards a broader and more comprehensive vision, yet this was still within the conventional formula of exposition, climax, and an unravelling’.Footnote 4 This deterministic approach excludes all other points of view, most importantly the possibility that the world depicted onstage is open to political change.
After 1967 theatrical activities decreased due to defeat in the war against Israel and the resulting depression and sense of despair. Theorist Fatma Yūsuf explains, ‘The year 1966/1967 marks the beginning of the deterioration of the theatre not only in quantity but also in quality as it started to rely mainly on the lowered standards of the commercial theatre, borrowed works and sensuality’.Footnote 5 In the 1970s, President Anwar Sadat's open-door policy led to the domination of consumer values over artistic ones. In these circumstances, theatre scholar Dina Amīn stresses that ‘the 1970s was a particularly difficult decade for theatre in Egypt. The government took a hostile stand against art and artists; consequently, many were silenced or emigrated. This political coercion resulted in a cultural void in Egypt that allowed commercial theatre to thrive’.Footnote 6 This attitude persisted in the 1980s and 1990s under President Hosni Mubarak's rule, which witnessed low theatrical productivity because of censorship, bureaucracy and a growing emphasis on film and television.Footnote 7
By the end of Mubarak's regime, commercial theatre had ‘a sweeping popularity among an immense chunk of Egyptian audiences’, whereas ‘serious theatre was in a way trying to imitate standards imposed by commercial productions’.Footnote 8 Hanaa’ ‘Abdel Fattah, a theatre director and critic, also explains that ‘prior to the 25 January Revolution, Egyptian theatre productions were totally isolated and distanced from the social and political situation in the country. Theatre did not hear the social voices calling for democracy’.Footnote 9 Immediately after the 25 January 2011 revolution, theatre artists expressed their desire to assert their presence. Charged with the spirit of and enthusiasm for the revolution, they have produced performances that can stand on the threshold of a period of unprecedented political consciousness and activism in Egypt.
Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place
Among those enchanted by the revolution is Muhammad ‘Azīz (1955–), a cinema director, scenarist and short-story writer who wrote a three-act play entitled Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place. The play attempts to devise a new form of political theatre that reflects the radically altered social and cultural space of the 2011 revolution. The playtext, though yet unstaged, provides a source of information about the current performance situation in Egypt. In his preface to the play, ‘Azīz explains why the text has been held back from production. He ascribes the reasons that the text has been held back from production to the current cultural and political atmosphere in Egypt and to the producer's desire not to stage a play about revolution which might lead to disturbances and riots. He chooses rather to postpone production until the situation improves.Footnote 10
Accordingly, the exploration of the spatial function in the play is mainly based on the information contained in the playtext. The setting of Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place suggests a technologized stage space of Facebook where a group of Egyptian youths spanning a range of identities – male/female, urban/rural, religious/secular, as well as local/global – connect through this expanding social networking. Members of the group reflect a wide variety of an increasingly educated yet unemployed youth population. The play resists a homogeneous representation of Egyptian culture by extending identity from the realm of the national to that of the transnational. The inclusion of Marīam, an Egyptian German and a new member among the Facebook group, represents an expansion of the multicultural vantage point of the characters in the play. The portrayal of Egyptians as possessing a wide variety of affiliations, inclinations and class interests challenges the pre-revolutionary depiction that was directed and dictated by the authorities to serve their repressive objectives.
As the play opens, the stage directions indicate a four-level stage set, in which every level is divided into multiple playing areas that function as separate rooms. Every member of the group is allowed a computer with monitor or a laptop and headphones. At the top of the first level, an LCD screen is set to display clips exchanged among the network. When all the rooms are lit, the whole group of digital activists are connected and the stage, with its multiple levels, becomes the technological space of Facebook. For the young users, it is also a space for venting their outrage resulting from years of repression, economic instability and frustration. In this respect, the stage directions make it clear that the young Egyptians of this group ‘are separated physically, yet connected spiritually and intellectually’.Footnote 11 Nothing interrupts them except the intrusion of Ibrahim, a thirty-five-year-old Jewish man who is a telecommunications expert from Tel Aviv. Unexpectedly, he directs a laser beam at the group from his room, causing a great deal of confusion expressed through sudden shifts of lighting and sound effects. Within this surrealistic frame, the Jewish figure stands in opposition to the bounded spaces of the Egyptian group. In his attempt to create chaos and engage in deliberate mischief, Ibrahim embodies subversive power. His presence unsettles the condition of wholeness and connectedness that the opening scene poses to the rest of the play.
The end of Act I, scene i evokes the brutality and torture that characterized Mubarak's regime. Lighting fades out as the LCD screen displays a clip for Khalid Sa‘īd, the twenty-eight-year old Alexandrian, who, several months before the revolution, was tortured to death at the hands of some police guards. The group members express their growing detestation of the unjustified violence and their desire to seek justice. The death of Sa‘īd, therefore, is stressed as the event that sparked the nationwide explosion in January 2011. His tragedy becomes linked with the regime's oppression and injustice, and also with resistance and revolution.
This blending of electronic social media and the theatre is an occasion of hybridity between the technological and the human, the virtual and the real. Theatre stands out as the medium that has opened its boundaries to such technologies. In this respect, theatre historian Christopher Balme notes, ‘Theatre could serve as a model for designing virtual space, since, in both media, one has to deal with concepts of characters and dramatic sequences of action, space and time’.Footnote 12 It is through the element of liveness that digital technology intersects most closely with theatre. Theorist Philip Auslander ascribes this to ‘the emerging definition of liveness’, in which the ‘spatial co-presence has become less and less important to be defined as live, while temporal simultaneity has remained an important characteristic, to the point that technologies that enable us to maintain real-time contact with others across distances are thought to provide experiences of liveness’.Footnote 13 The interaction between theatre and digital technology blurs the boundaries between them and may result in more fluid audience responses than have long been supposed. Digital technology draws from the subversive strategies of theatre as it attempts to disrupt structures of consent within its audiences who actively participate in defining meanings and messages. Auslander tends ‘to see the relationship between live and technologically mediated forms of performance as fluid rather than bounded by binary opposition’.Footnote 14 Hence this dialogic relation between theatre and digital media can create awareness among marginalized groups and promote a sense of community and collective identity. Their interactive and transformative potentials stand in opposition to other ideologically conditioned modes of seeing, like television, which has long served the interest of the ruling regime.Footnote 15 Accordingly, the superimposition of digital technology in ‘Azīz's play stresses the Internet-based social network's ability to mobilize and provoke non-violent protests like those which accelerated the January 2011 revolution.
From the virtual reality of Facebook and the interaction of its users, the play moves, in the second scene, to the reality of Tahrir Square before the outbreak of the revolution. The square figures as a multicultural melting pot of Egyptians from different sects – including the social media activists like Gàda, Sherif and Magid – and others like ‘Attyia (a fifty-year-old Egyptian peasant in a galabyia), a newspaper salesman, and Saīyd (an upper-class Egyptian shoeshine man). The presence of ‘Izzat and Radī, in civilian clothes, at Tahrir Square reveals that Mubarak's regime relied on State Security officers and guards to sustain control and discipline. As the play unfolds, it becomes more concerned with disclosing these various voices than with following the logical sequence of the events.
The following scenes in Act I waver between Tahrir Square and the State Security Office, unravelling the conditions that motivated Egyptians to start the revolution. The different stories and accounts of ‘Attīya, Shehata (a fifty-five-year-old employer), and many others reflect their dissatisfaction with the prevailing pattern of existence as reproduced by their sociocultural system and guided by a shared image of hopelessness and powerlessness to beat the regime. They were arrested by State Security and subjected to unjust interrogations and torture for daring to speak out about their grievances. The attempt here is to give voice to these unprivileged and disadvantaged Egyptians, enabling them to speak and be heard. The play, however, transgresses the simplistic division of victim/oppressor through the character of Saīyd, the shoeshine man. He prefigures as a double agent, who has sold himself to the regime by reporting his fellow Egyptians who dare vent their oppressed conditions to the State Security Office. In supporting the regime and refusing to resist, Saīyd's behaviour foregrounds how Egyptians have come to play a role in their own victimization. Theatre critic Nehad Selaiha confirms, in this regard,
In the best, pre-and-post-25 January theatre in Egypt no such facile, black-and-white division of the people into oppressors and oppressed, guilty and innocent is condoned. However harsh the condemnation of the regime's crimes is presented, one always detects, in varying degrees, an honest, guilty admission of collusion in these crimes, if only by silence and passive patience.Footnote 16
The mobility of the divide between victim and oppressor in ‘Azīz's play is also meant to reveal the amount of contradiction located at the heart of Egyptian identity.
The Facebook group has expanded to include new users in Act II. The playwright fragments its first scene by deploying lighting to spot events taking place simultaneously at different locales. Through the use of fading lights, darkness and direct spotlights, the focus shifts from the Facebook group at the back of the stage to the front as Magid recounts to the rest the story of how he and Gàda were arrested, held blindfolded and humiliated. The overlapping sequences offer multiple playing areas. Sherīf is beaten in a series of flashing lights, whereas Gàda appears under direct spotlights in a different locale severely tortured. The effect of such changes is cinematic as the events are displayed less as a theatrical sequencing and more like shots in a film. The rapid shifts of unreal light give the scene a dreamlike atmosphere despite the realities of violence and political repression.
The play extends its stylistic experimentation in the next scene, as it accommodates historical memory. Sherif recalls prominent Arab historical figures from the past in an attempt to find the seeds and roots from which a vision of a just world might reconstitute itself in the present:
Your history is loaded with many examples of brave men who sacrificed a lot for the sake of your dignity. These were men who said no to injustices, from ’Ahmed ‘Orabī, Mostafa Kamil, Sa‘ad Zag'loul, to Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser and before them ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakībī and others who stood up to tyranny and said no.Footnote 17
The play brings the past to the present by alluding to these authentic revolutionary voices who fought for freedom and dignity. In its evocation of the past, the play reflects both engagement and deconstruction. The engagement with the past is through the recovery of the revolutionary culture of social change. The play works to reclaim and enlarge in contemporary consciousness the revolutionary spirit as it simultaneously deconstructs hegemonic history and ideologies. To counter such hegemonic orders, stress is laid on hybridity and difference and a past that refuses to centralize one particular struggle or ideology to the exclusion of others. The play's reference to Gamal ‘Abdel Nasser, who overthrew the monarchy in 1952 and celebrated a new period of modernization and socialist reform, is not meant to idealize the socialist past or to centralize the class issue. Though the account seems to put revolution back on the socialist table, the play is concerned with deep, difficult questions relating to the nature and implementation of revolutionary change rather than with any ideological inclination.
By bringing attention to different historical figures who were organizers and agents of resistance and social change, ‘Azīz's play stresses the presence of human agency at Tahrir Square more than ideology. By the end of the act, the events shift back to the square just before the outbreak of the revolution. It becomes clear that social media networking and advanced technologies alone are not causative of the massive protests on 25 January. The individual – and their connection to the collective – is at the ethical and political centre of the play. The connection is sustained as a sharing of knowledge, historical insights and political thinking between the young activists and other dispirited Egyptians, including old/young, labourers/intellectuals, Cairenes/Nubians, as well as liberals/conservatives.Footnote 18 ‘Azīz stages their interweaving moments as a dialogic activity in which all participants can engage on relatively equal terms. The disclosure of this wide range of variety among Egyptian voices decentres any ideological interest or agitation.
Act III captures the revolution at Tahrir Square as the protestors, with their multiple affiliations, backgrounds and agendas, have reached a consensus (Fig. 1). They raised the ceiling of their demands following the oppressive regime's decision to cut off Internet connections and smartphone services. They are all united as their cries reverberate harmoniously across the stage: ‘The people want the downfall of the regime’.Footnote 19 It is in these creative moments of connectedness between self and others, the individual and the communal, that the play finds political empowerment.
Tahrir Square in the 25 January 2011 revolution. Photograph by Osama Monaze from Al Akhbar daily independent Egyptian newspaper.
To evoke the revolution at Tahrir Square with visceral immediacy, the play deploys diverse visual and aural stage devices. Tear gas bombs, gunshots, screams of grief, cries of pain, intense smoke, demonstrators holding banners, and others holding the bloody shirts of the martyrs are all reminiscent of the vicious circular dynamics between the protestors and the regime. The square is filled with various overlapping sounds of protest. Everyone is highly emotional – calling for change, freedom, social justice and the downfall of Mubarak.
Some of the live scenes in the square are reflected on a television screen set at one side of the stage to feature the angry crowds. The screen portrayal of the angry Egyptian mob in demonstrations conflates Egyptians into a homogenized, inaccurately conceived identity. The reflexive presence of the television screen onstage moves audiences to critically compare the two scenes. The television scene that is directed towards certain political targets of the ruling power focuses on the collective identity of the mob, preferring to see them as ‘intruders who have foreign agendas’.Footnote 20 The implication is that democracy does not exist and that the will of the people is still replaced by that of the regime, which owns the media and names the villains. On the other hand, the live scenes on the stage stress the differences and individual identities of the demonstrators who can analyse such media messages and respond to them differently.
The confrontation between the peaceful protestors and the powers of repression is highlighted in the Camel Battle scene.Footnote 21 The stage directions indicate blazing fires falling to the ground, the sound of breaking glass, and the noise of potential disruption. Voices of the protestors are heard fighting against thugs and provocateurs on horses and camels who are ordered to counter the demonstrations. As the protestors decide to march to the presidential palace to demand Mubarak's immediate stepping down, it is announced that the ‘presidency has been vacated and the army council will run the country’.Footnote 22
The end of the play searches for the grounds of hope and the opportunity for new beginnings through the protestors’ cheers, popular music, patriotic songs and poetic monologues that intercut the colloquial dialogues. The play, however, refuses to resolve itself in this harmonious image, which may risk romanticizing 25 January revolutionary activism in terms of nostalgic nationalism. The implied unity of the closing scene and the vision of social reconciliation that it attempts to materialize during the eighteen days of the revolution exist only in dreams or imagined possibilities, not in reality. Nehad Selaiha draws attention to the difficulty involved as she gives her view on the Egyptian theatre scene in 2011, suggesting that ‘Mubarak's ouster only marked the end of the first phase of the revolution’.Footnote 23 The early theatrical response to the president's ouster was rather optimistic and idealistic. In the same regard, Selaiha adds,
By July, the summer heat seemed to evaporate the dewy dreams of utopia, and in the performances that still looked back in anger and celebrated the revolution one could clearly detect a note of forced cheerfulness, so hungry and eager, so fierce in its determination to be hopeful, to turn a blind eye to the present and cling to the Utopian image of Tahrir Square in the early days of the revolution, and yet so painfully conscious of being unsustainable. How easy it is to look back in anger and theatrically rehash and trot out grievances on which all agree; how much more difficult to confront a painfully confused and confusing reality and peer into a future hitherto dim and foggy.Footnote 24
Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place, though written during the first phase, captures the complications involved in the revolutionary experience. Regardless of the rhetoric of hope, the obstacles that confront the play's politics cannot be ignored. While the play retains its grounding in the real social and historical conditions of the revolution, it unsettles the realist field and challenges its political and representational potential. Tahrir Square reflects not only on the nature of revolutionary experience but also on the incapacity of realism as an aesthetic for representing this experience.
The playwright intensifies his experimentation with the representational principles governing his play to the point where his work begins to enter a post-realist phase. The dramatic use of the stage as the technologized space of the Internet and Facebook, the reflexive presence of television and LCD screens, and the deployment of unnatural lighting all destabilize the play's realistic representation. The dreamlike juxtaposition of sequences, the mixing of past and present, the weaving of different stories of the disremembered and unaccounted for, the indeterminacy and double movement of history, as well as the emphasis on difference and heterogeneity of voices and identities, all draw the play into postmodern territories with a deconstructive political project.
The blending of the real, the fictional and the virtual in ‘Azīz's play represents a rethinking of the representational assumptions of the political theatre in post-revolutionary Egypt. Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place decentres realism by disclosing the multiple voices, challenges and contradictions that characterize the present historical moment. The opening of the category of realism thus defines the dynamics of space and resistance that act against the homogenizing power and the earlier traditional forms of representation of political persuasion. This process, through which the play challanges its representational adequacy, liberates audiences from conventions which were used by the regime and the ruling authority to divert people's attention from their deteriorating social and political realities.
In blurring the boundaries between theatre and reality, Tahrir Square: The Revolution of the People and the Genius of the Place aims at creating audience responses more sophisticated than were their previous subordinating and consenting positions. The play empowers its audiences by decentralizing its representational authority and sharing it with them. The emerging diversity and difference promote a collective work in an attempt to articulate different positions and explore multiple solutions. By bringing different people, spaces and ideas together, the play proposes a performance practice that can sustain a link between the individual and the collective and hence create the awareness necessary for revolutionary struggle like that generated by the 25 January revolution. Though the revolution failed to realize the demonstrators’ hopes and dreams of freedom and justice under the Islamists’ rule, it empowered Egyptians to intervene in the historical process, to become agents of their destiny and not to follow predetermined plans. A second wave, larger than its predecessor in 2011, was sparked on 30 June 2013 against a more oppressive political power that worked against art, culture and history. By virtue of the dialogic space it has come to occupy, ‘Azīz's play aspires to a future where a deeper transformational possibility could be initiated by the theatre. As it intervenes to blur boundaries and disrupt hegemonic orders, theatre in Egypt can play a crucial role in bringing leaders and people to mutually integrate a real democratic agenda and create together the vision for a better future.
