As Richard Gilman observes in his 1995 study, Chekhov's Plays: An Opening to Eternity, the openings of the Russian writer's plays, especially the beginning of his final work, The Cherry Orchard, should be read, like those of other modern theatrical innovators, not so much as exposition but as embodiment in miniature of the aesthetic architecture of the ensuing work. ‘The early moments of every Chekhov play’, writes Gilman, ‘are little models of the way things are going to happen, microcosms of the subsequent dramaturgy’.Footnote ¹ Gilman points to, among other things, a thematic and structural preoccupation with time and social class, and for good reason, since, as a number of critics have observed, this final work by Chekhov may be read as a diagnosis of a feudal society in its death throes. There are brief glints at various points in the play, especially in the speeches of Trofimov, of the new society that will be born out of the old, harbingers of the cataclysmic changes lying just beyond the horizon. Chekhov did not live to see the transformations his summa eerily anticipates: the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power thirteen years after the first production of the play and Chekhov's premature death. The playwright obviously knew he would not live to see the changes portended in The Cherry Orchard since, as a physician, he recognized as he was writing it the symptoms of tuberculosis in his own body.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the last major work by one of Syria's, and the Arab world's, most significant twentieth-century playwrights, Sa'dallah Wannus, Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations), published in 1994, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and first produced in Beirut in 1996, is also infused from the beginning, both structurally and thematically, with motifs and dramaturgical manifestations of transformation. The play also literally and figuratively embodies a desire for freedom and self-determination that would, in part, be responsible for fracturing Syrian society thirteen years after Wannus's death in 1997. Not only does the title of the work impress upon its readers the centrality of the theme of transformation, also the play's prologue emphasizes that the playwright has sought to create, out of a historical incident in Damascus in the nineteenth century, fully wrought characters – not stilted allegorical figures or social types – who obviously also speak to the concerns of Syrian society in the 1990s.Footnote ² Like Shakespearean characters such as Lear and Hamlet, they also possess a highly evolved sense of the dissonance between their internal selves and their external appearance as they undergo what are often radical metamorphoses. As in so many of Shakespeare's plays, the plot of Tuqus is set in motion in the first scene by a powerful rupture in the social fabric, in this case between the private world of ‘ Abdallah, the Naqib of Damascus,Footnote ³ and thus a descendant of the Prophet, who is frolicking in an enclosed garden on his own property with his mistress, Warda, and the external world of the law and society, embodied by ‘Izzat, the police chief, who bursts into the premises unannounced and arrests the couple for immoral behaviour.

When the police chief arrives, ‘Abdallah – whose name, not coincidentally, means ‘slave of God’ – has given most of his clothing to Warda (‘Rose’), and she is riding on his back, wearing his green turban, the insignia of his high religious position. The police chief, who wishes to ingratiate himself with ‘Abdallah's rival, the Mufti,Footnote ⁴ by exposing the Naqib as a hypocrite, promptly forces the couple to ride on a mule through the streets of the city attired just as he has discovered them. However, when the Mufti's servants, ‘Abbas and ‘Afsa,Footnote ⁵ gleefully inform him of his rival's degradation, the Mufti expresses displeasure at this public debasement of another high religious official and concocts a scheme to replace Warda in prison with ‘Abdallah's wife, Mu'mina (‘Believer’), and jail the police chief for arresting ‘Abdallah and his spouse during their lovemaking in the privacy of the Naqib's property.

In a scene reminiscent of Measure for Measure, Mu'mina agrees to the Mufti's scheme in return for his promise to grant her a divorce from ‘Abdallah. However, this replacement of mistress by wife, followed by Mu'mina's divorce from ‘Abdallah, is but one of a series of radical transformations that the characters undergo in the course of the play. The mustachioed ‘Afsa, who is perceived in Damascus to be the manliest of men, is revealed in scene iii to prefer sex with men when an effeminate male streetwalker named Simsim (‘Sesame’, with the implication of a ‘swish’), approaches him and ‘Abbas and speaks suggestively about ‘Afsa. (Not surprisingly, the discussion begins with ‘Afsa's assertion to ‘Abbas that the Mufti has pretended to be angry at the arrest of the Naqib because, like all those in power, he engages in ‘theatrical’ machinations). The scene ends with ‘Abbas saying he now knows ‘Afsa as if the latter ‘were his own wife’ and ‘Afsa requesting that, although the two men will now become lovers, on the surface their relationship ‘will appear to remain the same’.Footnote ⁶ ‘Abbas, caressing his friend, responds that as such ‘we will have our appearance and our truth’.Footnote ⁷ Mu'mina also seeks liberation and self-realization via sexuality, choosing to become a prostitute, a choice that initially infuriates Warda, whose guidance she seeks in this new profession, since the latter, after being rejected by the humiliated ‘Abdallah, has been forced to return to her former life as a prostitute. Warda, enraged, tells Mu'mina, ‘Have you come here to mock me? To insult me . . . I was a servant in your house. It is your father, the venerable Sheikh, who showed me the steps down to debauchery before I had even entered puberty’.Footnote ⁸

She goes on to chastise Mu'mina by pointing out that women become prostitutes out of need, not out of choice, but Mu'mina convinces Warda that her only motive is ‘my will and my desire’, and Warda finally acquiesces and assists Mu'mina in her transformation, rebaptizing her Almasa (‘the Diamond’).Footnote ⁹ In this new incarnation as Almasa, she becomes the most desirable woman in Damascus, lending her name to perfumes, fine jewellery and silk clothing. She becomes so powerful that she provokes the enmity of the city's merchants, who enjoin the Mufti to bring her under control. Supposedly to satisfy them and to rescue Almasa from her life of dissolution, he proposes to her, but his actual motive is to possess her sexually since he too has fallen under her spell. She declines his offer, forcing him to degrade himself by becoming one more paying client as the only means to possess her.

Meanwhile, ‘Abdallah, who has been abandoned by his wife, becomes a Sufi devotee after he receives a Hamletesque visitation by the ghost of his father, a wali (Sufi saint), who exhorts him to become God's servant, i.e. to accept the fate implicit in his name. The Naqib's lofty social position, a result of his direct descent from the Prophet through his father, is questioned by ‘Abdallah's father, the wali, who asserts that true descent is spiritual.Footnote ¹⁰ This ghostly visitation, along with thematic and structural elements of the powerful laid low, mistaken identities, substitutions, relentless self-interrogation by the characters and complex subplots that inform the principal plot, all point to Shakespeare as one of the principal European sources of Wannus's summa. At the same time, the play's opening scene, with its episode of adultery and references to Mu'mina/Almasa's broad erudition and preoccupation with literature, point to one of the principal Eastern ones, the Thousand and One Nights. (Here, as elsewhere, however, Wannus inverts the sources from which he borrows: in Tuqus, unlike the Thousand and One Nights, the story begins with the nobleman, not his wife, caught in an act of adultery.) During their first encounter, Mu'mina tells the Mufti that she has ‘read every book in the library of my father and of the Naqib’, and that ‘while the wife was a prisoner in her own house, she would read a story of The 1001 Nights . . . her spirit roving among the clouds of spring’.Footnote ¹¹ Near the end of the play, as she is dying at the hands of her brother, Safwan, who, ironically, has decided to murder Almasa/Mu'mina to protect the honor of the family name (which, of course, she has changed), she tells him, ‘I am a story, Safwan. You can't kill a story. I am an obsession, a desire, a temptation.’Footnote ¹² A number of critics have pointed to this connection between Almasa and Shahrazad, and indeed the Thousand and One Nights, storytelling and the structure of the framed tale are formal and thematic preoccupations in a number of earlier plays by Wannus. The most notable example is Mughamarat Ra's al-Mamluk Jabir (Adventure of the Head of Mamluk Jabir), which features a hakawati (storyteller) telling stories to patrons in a café, who serve as both onstage audience and critics as the stories are enacted for them while they interrupt with snide remarks and comments on the quality of the coffee.

The broad erudition of Wannus, who was a theorist as well as a playwright, has also been commented upon by a number of critics. Born in 1941 near Tartus, in the north-west of Syria, he lived in Cairo as a young man, spent several years in Paris early in his career in the mid-1960s, and was eventually a critic for the Al-Safir newspaper in Beirut and arts and culture editor for the Syrian newspaper Al Ba'th. Roger Allen, for example, points to European sources as diverse as Molière, Beckett, Piscator and Peter Brook, and in the early 1970s Wannus conducted an extensive interview with Genet.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, as director of the Dramatic Institute in Damascus in the 1980s, he was at the centre of an important nexus of Russian and Soviet bloc culture in the Arab world, with a Marxist bent and numerous direct and indirect links to the traditions of the Moscow Art Theatre, Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Chekhov and others.

Almost from the beginning of Wannus's career as a playwright, the most significant European influence was Bertolt Brecht. Starting with his 1963 play Juththa ‘ala l-Rasif (Corpse on the Pavement), a fable of class warfare featuring two homeless friends, one of whom dies, and a bourgeois man who appears walking his dog nearby and asks the surviving one whether he can feed the corpse of the friend to the dog, Wannus sought, using Brechtian techniques, to politicize his audience and critique the ills of capitalism. These strategies, which he places under the rubric of masrah al-tasyis (theatre of politicization) in the 1970 introduction to the play Mughamarat Ra's al-Mamluk Jabir, first came to widespread attention in the Arab world with the groundbreaking 1971 production in Damascus of Haflat Samar min ajl Khamsa Huzayran (Evening's Entertainment for the Fifth of June). A ferocious critique of the failings of Arab leadership in the 1967 war, the work features the use of the entire theatre as performance space, a play-within-a-play that is never performed, a discussion by the director and the playwright of the unperformed play's intent, interjections from actors seated in the audience, the arrival of a ‘real’ group of peasants, a dabke (folk dance) to try to provide an upbeat ending, and the eventual arrest of the entire audience.Footnote ¹⁴ As the structure suggests and as Wannus makes clear in comments elsewhere, his focus is on the jumhur (public, or audience) and the theatre as a public forum for political discourse. This preoccupation with audience, which has clear roots in the theories of Brecht and Piscator, would extend to the end of Wannus's career. In his 1997 essay ‘Theater and the Thirst for Dialogue’, he writes,

Brecht's strategies of Verfremdung (estrangement), breaking the fourth wall, use of proletarian settings and popular entertainment like storytelling, and structure of multiple frames (the latter two also reminiscent, of course, of the Thousand and One Nights) are all employed in Mughamarat Ra's al-Mamluk Jabir. Intriguingly, one of the central threads of the play in which the mamluk (slave) Jabir delivers a secret message originally written on his shaved head, which he then hides by growing his hair, only to be killed when he successfully delivers it, is reminiscent of the subplot both of Hamlet and of Tom Stoppard's 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Wannus's 1982 play The King Is the King has, perhaps, the clearest links to the theatre of Brecht. The play is about the replacement of a king by a poor man who, once he takes the throne, assumes the role of monarch so completely that he disavows all connections to his previous identity and succeeds in usurping the position of the king. Although one critic, Ahmed Hamoud, points to parallels between the play and Brecht's Mann ist Mann (Man Is Man) – the similar titles, analogous plots and transformation of characters by the simple act of changing clothes – Wannus contended that the source for his play was the Sleeper and Waker's Tale from the Thousand and One Nights.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, as Nima convincingly shows, there are numerous other congruities between Wannus's play and Man Is Man, and with Brechtian aesthetics more generally. ‘In the Epilogue’, writes Nima, ‘the actors enter wearing their characters’ costumes and the alienation is enhanced when they take off their costumes on stage in front of the audience to reveal their own clothes underneath’.Footnote ¹⁷As in Brecht's didactic drama, the characters are not developed realistically but as representatives of social types.Footnote ¹⁸ This latter aspect of Wannus's earlier plays is particularly significant in relation to Tuqus because, although he does not altogether abandon Brechtian didacticism in the latter play, he explicitly states in the prologue to it that the characters’ ranks ‘are not intended for their own sake. Rather, they are relevant only to the extent to which they contribute to the cultural and psychological make-up of the characters’.Footnote ¹⁹

Thus Tuqus represents not only a diachronic rupture with The King Is the King, since Wannus abandoned playwriting after this latter work for more than a decade; it also – at least on the surface – represents an aesthetic rupture with his earlier Brechtian phase. In spite of this rupture, there are clear continuities with Wannus's earlier theatre, including a preoccupation with the audience; the belief in theatre as a transformational and didactic vehicle; and, paradoxically, a Brechtian recognition that a new social and historical context requires new forms. (In the intervening period, Soviet communism had collapsed, a clear historical rupture from the perspective of an avowed Marxist, and the historian Francis Fukayama had boldly predicted the ‘end of history’, to which Wannus in his 1997 essay offered a clear riposte: ‘Our lot is to hope, and what happens today cannot be the end of time.’Footnote ²⁰) Moreover, both Wannus's preoccupation with the audience and his description of the characters recall Brecht's observations on acting in his notes on Die Rundköpfe und Die Spitzköpfe (Round Heads and the Pointed Heads), which, ironically, is ‘the first instance of Brecht applying the theory’ (Verfremdung) to his own work. Brecht writes, ‘A considerable sacrifice of the spectator's empathy does not mean sacrificing all right to influence him . . . A creation that more or less renounces empathy need not by any means be an “unfeeling” creation.’Footnote ²¹

One hint that the new form that Wannus evolves in Tuqus – less overtly didactic and allegorical; devoid of titles, direct address and audience interventions; employing a structure of elaborate subplots that inform the principal plot; with characters struggling with the dissonance between their inner lives and the external roles forced upon them by society and about whom the audience itself inevitably has conflicted feelings – may derive in part from Shakespeare via Brecht is the fact that Die Rundköpfe ‘itself began life about 1931 as a proposed adaptation of Measure for Measure’.Footnote ²²Tuqus, as Joseph Massad has observed, ‘is reminiscent of, and perhaps inspired by, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in its use of multiple substitutions and disguises of characters and in terms of the centrality of desire and public sexual conduct (including prostitution) to the plot’.Footnote ²³ There are a number of other clear thematic connections between the two plays, including their shared preoccupation with the law, especially the potential for its corruption through the abuse of political and sexual power, manifested respectively in the figures of Angelo and the Mufti, and with licit marriage as a means to contain desired and actualized illicit coupling. However, it is not so much thematic concerns that point to the similarity of the two plays but their formal correspondences. As Bawcutt observes, in terms strongly reminiscent of Gilman's description of The Cherry Orchard, Measure for Measure

Tuqus opens not just with music, but with a song which is an invitation to love, sung by Warda to ‘Abdallah as she plays the lute, while the two servants, Harim and Basma, the only two characters in the play who do end up happily married, observe this musical performance within the play.

None of the foregoing analysis should be seen as suggesting that Tuqus is exclusively or primarily a Shakespearean, Brechtian or Western play within an Eastern or ‘Arabized’ setting. Wannus himself explicitly rejected the facile notion that art and theatre can be divided into Eastern and Western traditions. The play is also deeply inflected with what could be described as Eastern, Arab and specifically Syrian elements. For example, Mohja Kahf, in her article ‘The Silences of Contemporary Syrian Literature’, points to a cultural ‘posture of paranoia stemming from a realistic fear of a police state with a vast surveillance apparatus’, a preoccupation with the antinomy between the inside and outside, both of individuals and of physical spaces, and what she calls a ‘whole subgenre consisting of the literature of the sudden violent knock at the door’.Footnote ²⁵ And, indeed, Tuqus begins with an unannounced visit by the chief of police and the arrest on dubious charges and public humiliation of a very powerful religious figure. Although Wannus's play openly treats cross-dressing, homosexuality, prostitution, political and religious corruption and injustice toward women, it does so by displacing the action from Damascus in the 1990s to the 1880s, a strategy often employed by contemporary writers from societies with authoritarian regimes. As both Kamal Abu-Deeb and Sami Ofeish have pointed out, the figure of Mu'mina/Almasa provides both a complex critique of patriarchy in the Arab world and a theatrical embodiment of a latent societal desire for transformation. As Abu-Deeb writes, ‘the collective, political narrative . . . is soon subverted; the narrative is fragmented into a stream of tales . . . [O]f these . . . the narrative of the rising feminist heroine . . . dominates the course of the play and offers its explosive and complex closing scene’.Footnote ²⁶ Abu-Deeb is referring here, of course, to the murder, by her brother, of Almasa, who has become a prostitute supposedly to discover her true self. Here again, one sees an apparent inversion of Measure for Measure, in which a sister refuses to prostitute herself, even to save her brother's life. One other obvious Eastern source mentioned above is the Thousand and One Nights. Not only is the parallel between Almasa and Shahrazad clear in her assertion that she will live on through literature; the framed-tale structure of the play also lends itself to a staging in which the various strands of the play ‘exist contiguously, side by side’.Footnote ²⁷ In the 1996 Beirut production, Nidal al-Ashqar literally placed the parallel stories onstage beside one another, unfolding dialectically.

Wannus's adaptation of traditional Arabic literary forms is not novel to Tuqus; it had been a quintessential component of his writing since his first plays in the 1960s. In Tuqus, however, his creative appropriation of historical and literary traditions is more nuanced and subversive. Instead of actually placing characters or stories from the Thousand and One Nights in the play, as he had done in previous works, Wannus incorporates the framed-tale structure itself into the play. When asked whether this use of literary tradition was meant to authenticate his drama and give it an Arab identity, he replied that what authenticates theatre is what it says and how it says it. History and literary tradition must, he asserted, be part of the structural unity of the play, otherwise they remain mere adornments or additions.Footnote ²⁸

One very obvious Eastern source of the poetics Wannus employs in Tuqus that has not been adequately explored is Sufism. The language, motifs, symbols and inherent theatricality of Sufism pervade the play, beginning with the title, which is suggestive of Sufism's ceremonial celebration of spiritual and inner transformations. Sufism has evolved simultaneously as a literary and artistic movement, in the works of writers such as Ibn al-Farid, Ibn al-‘Arabi, Rumi, Hafez and others (including Western writers and artists),Footnote ²⁹ and as highly ritualized religious practice with political overtones. The tale of devotion, single-mindedness and sacrifice of Mansur al-Hallaj, an early Sufi martyr who was tortured and killed in 913, which is echoed by the story of Mu'mina/Almasa in Tuqus, continues to be an inspiration for many modern Arabic poetic and dramatic texts. Transformation, especially the quest for one's ‘true’ or latent, as opposed to manifest, self is a central tenet of Sufism and a persistent theme in Tuqus. Character development in the play is simultaneously analogous to Sufi notions of individual transformation and akin to Brecht's description of character development in Die Rundköpfe cited above. Moreover, Wannus's appropriation of Sufi motifs in the play is consistent with a general trend in modern Arab literary or intellectual production that perceives in Sufi characters inspiring guides for political consciousness and resistance

Another significant Sufi motif that Wannus appropriates in the play is the spiritual guide, manifested most clearly in the ghost of ‘ Abdallah's father, a wali (Sufi saint) who appears dressed in a white shroud, exhorting his son to return to the true path. Here, and elsewhere in the play, these guides serve as contrapuntal characters as well as spiritual counsellors. Although ‘Abdallah's transformation is religious, a number of ‘profane’ transformations also take place that mirror ‘Abdallah's journey towards self-fulfilment, most notably those of Almasa and ‘Afsa. Almasa, who follows a path of sexual liberation, finds a guide in Warda, who initiates her in a robing ceremony, dressing her in a garment of seduction, which is reminiscent of ceremonies by Sufi sheikhs who bestow a patched frock, the insignia of mystical initiation, upon their adepts. ‘Afsa attempts to reconcile his inner and outer selves by offering the symbol of his masculinity, his moustache, which he cuts off and gives as a gift to his lover, ‘Abbas. The latter is appalled that ‘Afsa, who has also depilated his hairy body, is offering up his latent or ‘true’ self – which in ‘Abbas's eyes transforms ‘Afsa into a feminine, passive figure indistinguishable from ‘Abbas's actual wife. As ‘Abbas informs his heartbroken lover, what he had desired sexually – but now no longer does – was precisely ‘Afsa's manifest, masculine appearance. ‘Abbas's rejection of ‘Afsa's transformation leads to the latter's suicide, one of a series of tragic ends that await almost everyone in the play who seeks to reconcile his or her internal and exterior selves.Footnote ³⁰

In addition to the focus on individual transformation, the necessity of spiritual guides and the reconciliation of latent and manifest selves, Wannus appropriates a wide range of Sufi motifs. These include the concept of tawba (repentance), which is the first step along the Sufi path and involves inaba (redirecting), turning one's focus toward one's true inner reality; stations of development through which Sufi devotees must pass; the explicit use of Sufi lexicon such as zahir and batin (outer and inner realities); self-obliteration or the shedding of self, itself a form of death; and the struggle, embodied in the dichotomy in medieval Sufism, between the literal sense of religion, its shari'a (law) and haqiqa (inner truth).

Two other Sufi elements intrinsically related to theatrical practice are employed: the use of clothing to accentuate the dissonance between latent and manifest selves and indicate radical changes in character, and the use of signs, which signal not only sharp character shifts but also radical twists in the plot. From the beginning of the play, Wannus encodes the significance of dress and role, when piece by piece ‘Abdallah removes his clothes and gives them to Warda in a clear portent of how one's sexual desire can bring the latent self to the fore and radically invert power relations. This process is manifested dramatically when, just before the police chief, ‘Izzat, arrives, Warda begins riding the Naqib as if he were an ass. Again, in scene iii, when the Mufti suggests that Mu'mina replace Warda in prison, she asks, ‘Is the difference between wife and prostitute so slight? . . . I will be the one who has debased herself . . . the one who has worn the Naqib's turban on her head . . . You want me to play the role of a prostitute?’Footnote ³¹ When the Mufti assures her he will get rid of the prostitute, Mu'mina replies, ‘ Spouse-prostitute, prostitute-spouse. It is as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice . . . Have you ever had the experience of standing at the edge of a precipice?’ The Mufti answers, ‘I pay attention not to fall.’Footnote ³² Shortly after, he says, ‘I thank God for having made my exterior appearance an exacting copy of my profound truth’.Footnote ³³ The irony of the Mufti's statement is, of course, that he is unable to recognize the signs of his own transformation, that by changing Mu'mina into the prostitute Almasa he will soon discover the profound disharmony between his appearance and his deepest sexual desires. These antinomies of dressing and undressing, appearance and reality, spouse and prostitute, are heightened in the scene in which Mu'mina arrives at the prison to take Warda's place:

Mu'mina visits Warda soon after and is changed by her guide into the prostitute Almasa, and thus she proceeds along a profane path to enlightenment, via the body. She wishes to rid herself not of the inclinations and desires of the base self, but of the moral codes of society which have been forced upon her and which have formed her identity as a woman. These label her an‘awra (deficient being), by virtue of her sex, which, in effect, should be hidden, or veiled.Footnote ³⁵ As such, the scheme which required that she replace Warda in prison and remove her veil may be seen as a sign pointing to her transformation, her entrance to a new path. When the Mufti later proposes to her, she refuses because, as she says, her maqam (‘place’, also a Sufi term) does not allow her to.Footnote ³⁶ ‘When I swing by the edge and the abyss calls me, I feel that at the moment of my fall coloured feathers will grow from my skin . . . and I will fly in the sky like birds.’Footnote ³⁷ It is noteworthy that as Almasa imagines sprouting her new avian garb and cutting ‘the harsh ropes that . . . subdue my body’,Footnote ³⁸ she describes her state, as Sufis so often describe mystical states, as ineffable.

Although, as its title suggests, the play is permeated with signs related to spiritual transformation, one sees their relation to dramaturgical structure most clearly in the case of ‘ Abdallah. When, for example, he is arrested and publicly humiliated, he is forced to appear without the insignia of his religious status. Later, when he encounters Mu'mina in prison, he explicitly says because of his shame that he wishes he could ‘disappear’.Footnote ³⁹ He tells her,

Mu'mina, who saves him, also rejects him, however, telling him, ‘We are all going through labour pains.’Footnote ⁴¹ But unlike Mu'mina, ‘Abdallah actually achieves a sort of enlightenment, obtained through a final act of self-abnegation when he visits ‘Izzat in prison to ask for his forgiveness. ‘Abdallah confirms that ‘Izzat is not insane, as the Mufti has insisted, for having refused to accept the ‘truth’ – i.e. the consensus opinion manufactured by the Mufti – that ‘Abdallah was arrested with his wife and not his mistress. (The irony, of course, is that the Mufti, crazy for love of Almasa, has himself gone insane.) ‘Izzat refuses ‘Abdallah's apology, however, beating him mercilessly, and in his self-abnegation the Sufi gains the victory of enlightenment that so many of the characters seek. The bitter irony of this single victory in the play is that it entails the absolute rejection of the world.

Wannus's play seems a prescient manifestation of the structure of feeling of Syrian and Arab societies just before the turn of the century – i.e. an ardent desire for transformation, liberation and political liberalization. In addition to the successful Beirut production, the play was performed in Cairo in 1997. More recently, in 2009, it was performed in Damascus, Hama and Aleppo. Ironically, after the first staging in Aleppo all subsequent performances there were cancelled because, in the opinion of the Mufti of the city, Ibrahim al-Salqini, it was offensive to religious values. But there are many signs that the play continues to speak to the ongoing transformations in the Arab world, including a 2011 production at the American University of Cairo, directed by ‘Iffat Yahya (Yahya chose not to have Almasa/Mu'mina killed by her brother at the end of the play); a forthcoming production in the spring of 2013 by the Comédie Française, directed by the Anglo-Kuwaiti Bassem Al-Sulayman, known for ferocious critiques of corrupt Arab regimes; and the first English-language version, translated and adapted by the authors of this article, for staged readings of the play in 2013 in Beirut and Chicago, produced by the Chicago-based theatre Silk Road Rising.

Praise for Tuqus has not been unanimous. Joseph Massad, for example, has criticized it as little more than a theatrical manifestation of imported Western clichés about individual self-actualization and essentialist identity politics that ignores, for example, the fluidity of sexuality in the Arab world. Massad describes Wannus's own transformation as one from ‘nationalist Marxism to Western-style neoliberalism and self-Orientalization’ and offers as proof an interview the playwright gave shortly before his death celebrating the Barthian jouissance of writing: ‘For the first time I feel that writing is pleasure. I used to feel that personal suffering or individual particularities are nonessential superficial “bourgeois” matters that can be set aside.’Footnote ⁴²

To Massad's critique of ‘his espousal of ready-made and uninterrogated Western formulae’,Footnote ⁴³ Wannus has already replied that he cannot be defined by civilizational boundaries. Moreover, although characters in Tuqus may assert that they are seeking their ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ selves, theatre by its nature, as Wannus clearly knew, undermines essentialist identities and celebrates malleability and play at every turn.

Both Brecht and Wannus employed theatre as a political tool, but as their theoretical writings and artistic trajectories make clear, they also understood that, although theatre may embody transformation, condense and dramatize individual and societal impulses, and point to the necessity for political change outside the theatre, transformation on the stage and on the street are radically different phenomena, and the political change that ultimately takes place in the wake of art may bear little resemblance to the impulses manifested on the stage that may have originally provoked it. The rhetorical antidotes that Wannus and Brecht employ in their most complex and compelling works to embody these contradictions between stage and life, art and politics – as well as within the characters who populate their plays – are the ones Shakespeare so often uses in his: paradox and irony.

There is perhaps no clearer example of the disjunction between a contemporary work of art from the Arab world that heralds change such as Wannus's Tuqus and the actual change wrought in the recent transformations of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ than events in the aftermath of the 2012 Libyan insurrection. Among those who opposed the Qaddafi government, who ostensibly yearned for freedom from a despotic regime, were Salafists who, shortly after the overthrow of the dictator, promptly destroyed several Sufi shrines in broad daylight, including a Sufi mosque in Tripoli.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such ironic disjunctions between transformation in the theatre and political transformation would certainly not be lost on the late Sa'dallah Wannus, who has fashioned a play that embodies the paradoxes that politics and ideology seem to preclude. The transformation Wannus sought was, above all, in the mind of his audience, and surely after seeing or reading Tuqus no one is likely to be able to think of contemporary Arab society in quite the same way.