Arab Stages
March, 2016
Despite the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and the coming to power of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi in 1914, the life style of the Cairo elite has not significantly changed, a situation that forms the basis of The Last Supper, by Egyptian director Ahmed El Attar and his organization, the Temple Independent Theatre Company, which […]
Arab Stages
November, 2015
The current (October 10 issue of Al-Hayat announces that the first theatrical text translated and published in Arabic in Egypt, Beautiful Helen (1868), by Sheikh Tahtawi (1801-1873) has been discovered by Syed Ali Ismail, a professor of theater criticism in Helwan University. Published by the Egyptian General Book Authority, the Tahtawi text was commissioned by […]
Arab Stages
November, 2015
The Dictator, written in 1969 by Lebanese playwright Issam Mahfouz, has been described as an absurdist classic, a minimalist mixture of Ionesco, Plautus and Beckett, with fierce and frequently hilarious jabs at despotism in the Arab world. A revolutionary work when it was written, it continues to speak to the revolutions and reversals unfolding in […]
European Stages
November, 2015
The National Theatre in Budapest has been troubled by political and cultural cross-currents for the past years, which have left temporary marks on its audience, repertoire, and stagings as well as long-term marks on its physical structure. Let us begin with these more long-term effects, at the center of which is the theatre building itself. […]
Arab Stages
March, 2015
Arab Stages is delighted to report that, thanks to the generosity of Golden Thread and its director Torange Yaghiazarian, we have the honor of publishing four plays in this issue from the most recent offering of its ReOrient Festival. In the words of founder Yeghiazarian: Golden Thread Productions’ ReOrient Festival of Short Plays was inaugurated […]
Arab Stages
November, 2014
The thirteenth-century Egyptian playwright Ibn Daniyal is slowly coming to Western attention as one of the most important dramatists of the middle ages. The fact that he wrote for the puppet theatre, a form often thought of as artistically inferior by both Arab and Western scholars, and the fact that he wrote in Arabic, a […]