Political Theatre Between Wars Staging an Alternative Middle East Sahar Assaf What makes a play political in Lebanon? What does it mean to engage in political theatre? n Lebanon, between 2013 and 2015, I directed six plays. The plays’ general themes were religious and political corruption, patriarchy, prostitution, homo- Isexuality, manual laborers in a private university, and rape as an interrogation technique in armed conflicts. Other subjects included the Lebanese civil war and Lebanon’s collective amnesia as a result of the absence of a serious reconciliation process, dictatorship and megalomaniac leaders, and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plays had different styles. While some plays were text-based and presented in traditional proscenium theatres, others were research-based and presented in found spaces. They were in Arabic or English. What the plays have in common is a clear political dimension. Reflecting on some of my recent work led me to contemplate a seemingly simple question: Why do we do political theatre and for whom? In order to provide an example of what Michael Kirby calls “the archetypal example of political theatre” in his essay “On Political Theatre,” he turns to Alexander Tairov, who wrote in Notes of a Director: In 1830, at the Theatre Monnaie in Brussels, the play La Muette [The Mute] was being performed. In the middle of the performance, when the words “Love for the Fatherland is holy” rang out on the stage, the revolution- ary enthusiasm . was communicated to the auditorium. The whole theatre was united in such powerful transport that all the spectators and actors left their places, grabbing chairs, benches—everything that came to hand—and, bursting from the theatre, rushed into the streets of Brussels. Thus, began the Belgian revolution.1 © 2017 Sahar Assaf PAJ 117 (2017), pp. 65–76. 65 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00382 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 This is undeniably an ideal scenario. As a theatre director myself, I cannot imag- ine that anything would be more satisfying than witnessing audiences bursting from my theatre (or any theatre) into the streets of Beirut to start a long overdue revolution. But to reduce political theatre to one that aspires to start a revolu- tion, topple a regime, or change the status quo is deficient. How many examples could we draw from the history of world theatre? It was not the great theatre of playwright Jalila Baccar and director Fadhel Jaïbi that ignited the Jasmine revo- lution in Tunisia in 2010, but the act of self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi. However, Baccar and Jaïbi’s theatre remains political par excellence. In a seminal essay titled “Writing for a Political Theatre” that first appeared in PAJ in 1985 and was published again from the archive in 2016 to celebrate PAJ’s fortieth anniversary and the critic’s one hundredth birthday, Eric Bentley states, “People speak of political theatre as very special. But in the theatre anything can become political by a sudden turn of events outside the theatre.”2 In a simi- lar vein, Maria Shevtsova claims that “‘Political Theatre’ is only ‘political’ in a particular society in time-space and place and its resonance as ‘political’ varies according to socially defined groups of people. Nothing is absolute, universal, or essentialist about political theatre.”3 When Baccar and Jaïbi planned to present Khamsoun in Tunisia in 2006, the censorship office, officially known as lajnat iltawjeeh al-masrahi (the steering com- mittee for the theatre), wanted to delete 286 words form the play. The author and director refused. The play tells the story of Amal, the daughter of leftist parents who was raised as a Marxist and sent to France to study, only to return to Tunisia as a dedicated Muslim. In Tunisia, she gets involved in the mysterious suicide of her friend, a young teacher, who blows herself up in the courtyard of the school where she works. The play opened in France at the Odeon theatre, but as a result of the pressure exerted on the authorities by artists and intellectuals, Jaïbi was summoned to a meeting with the Minister of Culture who asked him to cut six sentences (instead of 286 words). Jaïbi refused again. Finally, the authorities permitted a staged reading of the play on the occasion of World Theatre Day in 2007. This time, the government asked only that Jaïbi remove the word “flag.” In the original script of the play, the young woman blows herself up under the flag; however, in the censored version, she blows herself up under a carnation plant. Clearly, the play’s ideas are political. The Arabic title Khamsoun means “fifty,” and it refers to the contemporary history of the country. Jaïbi refused to comply with the proposed censorship that would have him remove names and dates from the play since it speaks for the past fifty years of Tunisian history, making dates, events, and places important to contextualize the play in a specific time and place. In line with Shevtsova and Bentley’s reflections 66 PAJ 117 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 on political theatre, this contextualization of the play in the current time and place is what ultimately makes it political. Although the play harshly criticizes the extreme right and left, Baccar and Jaïbi’s original point was not making a political statement per se. As Jaïbi told Syrian Journalist Rashid Issa in 2008, Baccar wanted to honor the communists who passed away and who are forgot- ten, namely Ahmed bin Osman, who died in a car accident in Morocco after he was expelled from Tunisia, and Noureddine Ben Khader, who died of cancer. Jaïbi said, “They left as if they’ve never existed. The two men shared [former president Habib] Bourguiba’s prisons and the torture that ruined their bodies. This was the first spark [for the play]. Jalila said she will not accept that the two great men should disappear, and others after them, without telling their stories. The story of the left in Tunisia is not taught in history books.” This was the first idea that led Baccar and Jaïbi to talk about the contemporary history of Tunisia after independence. Jaïbi continues: We wanted to talk about the living memory, the modern history of Tunisia and the history of the left, about repression, torture, and the current reality. Why our ideas of democracy became replaced by Islamic extremism? Why Tunisian women wore the head veil? Why extremist Tunisian men are blowing themselves up in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why the current system is pushing the Islamists into prisons? For all these reasons we wrote a text saturated with what’s happening around us, of course, because we do not write in solitude in our offices.4 This intention resonates deeply with the concept of a “theatre of politicization” as articulated by Saadallah Wannous, the late Syrian playwright. In an interview with the Syrian journalist Sifian Jabr in 1989, Wannous explains how this concept differs from Political Theatre. He argues that the theatre of politicization is not an agit-prop theatre nor does it intend to preach or to make political statements in support of a particular ideology. Instead, “it is the possibility of awakening the consciousness of a spectator to ask questions and to try to find answers, theoretically but also practically, meaning to try and change their destiny.”5 Exactly one year before the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, Jaïbi presented Yahia Yaïch, a play that tells the story of a man named Yahia Yaïch, who receives the news of being deposed from power, is arrested, and then tries to commit suicide. The play speaks about his hospitalization and the difficulties encountered in collecting the documents for his prosecution. Jaïbi wrote and directed the play before the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. After the revolution, many critics read the play as a fulfilled prophecy. Despite its clear political statement, the censorship authorities allowed the play to be performed in Tunisia. When it was first presented, many drew parallels between the main character in the play and the previous president, Habib Bourguiba, who was impeached by then Prime ASSAF / Political Theatre Between Wars 67 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00382 by guest on 03 October 2021 Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, based on a doctor’s report claiming Bourguiba was mentally incapable to rule. Whether the play had any effect on the succeed- ing political events is not important; what matters most is that it became part of the cultural discourse. In Lebanon, I do not see theatre leading to serious political action. In fact, the problems that the Lebanese people have faced since the end of the civil war in 1990—political corruption, deprivation of civil rights, underdeveloped infrastruc- ture, and, most recently, a shameful garbage crisis—have culminated in public responses no more dramatic than a few street protests, which did not ultimately trigger a larger political movement or revolution. I cannot conceive of theatre starting a revolution in Lebanon. In the last twenty years or so, the only time an artistic event provoked people to burst into the streets to express their anger was when Hezbollah supporters engaged in civil disobedience to express their condemnation of a satiric TV show that caricatured their leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Although theatre may not be able to start a revolution, that does not constitute sufficient reason to deter us from doing political theatre. As Bentley strikingly notes, it is the “little effect on someone somewhere sometime” that we are after; this “little effect,” when discovered, is what makes my experience of any play I am working on complete.6 When I directed Saadallah Wannous’s Rituals of Signs and Transformations at Babel Theatre in Beirut in 2013, I was thrilled at the opportunity to do a play that exposes religious hypocrisy.