In the book Of Kings and Clowns, Tiran Manucharyan situates major playwrights of the post-1967 war in the framework of Yusuf Idris’s theories on drama and society. Idris, an Egyptian writer equally famous for his short stories as his plays, also wrote an influential series of essays gathered as “Towards an Egyptian Theatre,” which Manucharyan uses to frame his discussion of playwrights such as Mohamed Abu-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-ʿAssal. Writing on Idris’s attempts to define what an Egyptian theatre might look like at a time when many were attempting to define what it meant to be Egyptian, Manucharyan states: “Idris declares that the main feature of a truly Egyptian national theatre should be what he calls tamasruh” (p. 22). While tamasruḥ would typically be translated as theatricalization, Manucharyan contends that Idris’s use of the term, which argues for dissolving the line between performers and audiences, is best understood through the lens of Bakhtin’s conception of carnivalization. Manucharyan summarizes this concept by arguing, “In theatre, the participants in the festivity are divided into actors and spectators, whereas in carnival, in the Bakhtinian sense of its absolute state, this division does not exist – there are only participants” (p. 22). The 1967 war, a common dividing line in Arab culture and literature, led to Israel capturing both Sinai and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, which, in turn, led both artists and the general population to broadly question Egyptian institutions and leaders. Manucharyan argues that the Idrisian framework can help explain the theatre of the period because it also explicates two ends of its crisis: “authoritarianism – over-theatricalized society – and uprising – over-carnivalized society” (p. 32).
In exploring this topic, Of Kings and Clowns is primarily comprised of chapters devoted to specific authors. However, across these chapters, three main themes emerge: sections on famous male playwrights, a focus on gender in plays by men and women writers, and a look at post-2011 Egyptian theatre and the tension between older and emerging playwrights.
The book’s strengths and weaknesses are both on display in the chapter on Lenin El-Ramly. Manucharyan situates El-Ramly as a playwright who “questions the nostalgic attachment to the past in Egyptian society,” and as someone who better adapts Idris’s idea of tamasruḥ (p. 107). This adaptation occurs through El-Ramly’s use of both the different registers of Arabic and metatheatrical techniques meant to “activate the spectators, rather than to treat them as passive viewers” (p. 124). At the same time, Manucharyan notes women’s limited agency in El-Ramly’s plays, paying special attention to the work You Are Free, noting that freedom is given to the character Aziza rather than taken by her. In part because he made himself available to many scholars, El-Ramly’s work has been written about extensively in English, including the “Art of Cunning” framing employed by Manucharyan. However, the attention to gender provides a welcome alternative to previous scholarship, displaying how El-Ramly’s confrontation with gender hierarchies is largely explored through male characters. Likewise, the comparisons to El-Ramly’s contemporaries show his more wary approach to incorporating folk and historical contexts into his plays.
Beyond the focus on major male writers, Of Kings and Clowns also presents Fathia El-ʿAssal as an alternative to her male counterparts, noting: “[t]he unifying feature of El-ʿAssal’s plays discussed is that they centralise women, while authentically representing their marginalised state within the patriarchy” (p. 195). Manucharyan notes that El-ʿAssal’s more fully developed depiction of women marks a departure from male playwrights’ focus on the struggles of intellectuals and artists within society, as she instead often explores how silence and the breaking of it works for her female protagonists.
The end of the book examines how theatre functioned in the context of the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath. Manucharyan notes that the initial revolutionary period saw an influx of younger writers exploring experimental forms in productions such as Tahrir Monologues, a testimonial work in which narrators shared their experiences of the protests and explored their hopes and fears for Egypt moving forward. Despite this initial rupture in the tradition, the more famous, aforementioned playwrights returned with their own plays and more traditional narrative structures. Writing on Mohamed Abu-ʿEla El-Salamouny, Manuchharyan argues that the playwright turned to structures from his previous work in order to engage the uprising, concluding: “It is a reminder for the Egyptian public that he has been dramatising revolutions, public uprisings and challenging the existing system of power on Egyptian stages throughout his career” (p. 224). The tension between young artists closer to the uprising and established artists filtering the events through the styles they built their careers implementing is an intriguing insight unique to this study. While many scholars have discussed the pre- and post-2011 generations of writers in isolation, comparing them sheds light on the competition for both theatrical space in Egypt and who would be allowed to define the uprising.
This book likely would have benefited from deeper engagement with Arabic-language Egyptian sources, whether by scholars or critics. To Manucharyan’s credit, he does pull from Egyptians who write in English, and it is not the author’s fault that one of the major chroniclers of contemporary Egyptian theatre, Nehad Selaiha, wrote for an English-language newspaper. At the same time, Of Kings and Clowns replicates a common tendency for English-language scholarship on Arab theatre to discuss plays written in Arabic primarily through the lens of theory and scholarship written in English. True, leaning on Idris’s theories does partially break this mold, and the author does acknowledge the challenges of comparing Egyptian theories to European theatre artists and theorists such as Brecht and Grotowski, but a more in-depth investigation into how Egyptian critics received these theories and plays would be useful, especially for those removed from conversations around theatre in Egypt.
Ultimately, for those new to Egyptian theatre, Of Kings and Clowns provides a solid overview of a number of major figures of post-1967 theatre, as well as an introduction to theatre following 2011. In this way, the book serves as a detailed introduction to contemporary Egyptian theatre. For those more familiar with Egyptian theatre, rehashing some major works may be frustrating, but Manucharyan does provide an alternative framework to preexisting scholarship and a lens on gender that is also absent in many studies.
