Analysis
Although Tawfiq al-Hakim’s dramatic imagination ranged across at least three millennia of human experience, touching down at particularly evocative points along the way, some generalizations may be made about common features in much of his work. Characterization has been important, but something less than a vital issue in his efforts; for that matter some leading personages have been typecast as abstract categories, such as war and peace, while others have been significant not for their intrinsic qualities but as participants in seemingly irrational situations. Characters in the plays based on medieval themes might possibly be interchanged with others from similar works. The domestic dramas also feature some stock types who seem to appear under various names in works of this kind. The author never claimed to have developed a florid, polished style—indeed, he purposely avoided such tendencies—and his dialogue has a crisp, staccato ring that often serves to heighten dramatic tension. There are, in many of his works, series of exclamations and interjections that, particularly in the absurdist dramas, merge with scenes taken up mainly with the exchange of questions. Even the most carefully constructed plays have been meant as much for the reader as for the theater audience. Although some works have enjoyed considerably more success on the stage than others, the structure of al-Hakim’s major dramatic efforts has been determined more by his thematic concerns than by the requirements of actual production. Many plays have long sequences of brief scenes, or sometimes present lengthy acts alternating with short, abrupt transitional passages. On another level, regardless of whether, during his classical or his absurdist phases, al-Hakim resolved the perennial questions of love, art, guilt, and social division, his works have posed these issues in unusual and distinctively original variations. Although at times he complained that during thirty years he attempted to accomplish for the Arab theater what it had taken Western civilization two thousand years to achieve, the freshness of his works, and the extent to which he has realized the conjunction of diverse aesthetic and moral concerns, should signify the magnitude of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s efforts within and indeed beyond the limits of the drama as he had found them.
The drama of al-Hakim displays a remarkable diversity of outlook, and his breadth of vision inspires respect mingled slightly with awe. His cosmopolitan standpoint, coupled with his relentless quest for the new and untried, was in evidence across the span of his career. He was extraordinarily prolific; one recent count yielded eighty-four titles of dramatic works that he has composed, quite apart from his writings in other genres. His plays have been set in historical periods from the times of King Solomon of the Old Testament, through the age of classical Greek drama, across early and medieval periods of Islamic history, on to modern times in Egypt, and beyond, into the space age. He depicted the rustic peasant landscapes of his native country, the courts of great monarchs from the past, and the cosmic scenery of new worlds to come. It may well be argued that his work is uneven, both in its technical execution and where depth of characterization is involved. It would seem that his penchant for the unexpected and the unusual at times may have affected the direction of his dramatic efforts; any facile attempt to devise categories for his works is doomed to frustration. Nevertheless, although even a chronological approach would be subject to anomalies and overlapping impulses may be observed in many areas, there are some broad elements of thematic continuity that may be discerned in the development of al-Hakim’s repertory.
The People of...
(This entire section contains 2976 words.)
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the Cave
The historical contexts for major early works were derived from Islamic religious and literary traditions. The People of the Cave, the work that in 1933 was hailed as heralding the onset of a new era in Arab drama and that elicited stormy protests on the part of subsequent audiences, deals with the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, which is also cited in the Qur՚an. In this play, visions of the miraculous, hope, and despair are presented in a light that is broadly consonant with the convictions of Muslim believers, but without prejudice to the Christian values that are also affirmed by Islam.
Shahrazad
Shahrazad was al-Hakim’s effort to supply a continuation of Alf layla wa-layla (15 c.e.; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, 1706-1708); when the fabled storyteller survives and marries the monarch from the tale, some poignant and revealing reflections on nature, beauty, and mortality are recorded.
Muhammad
Muhammad, which serves as a sort of Muslim Passion play, is a sweeping pageant that was meant to demonstrate al-Hakim’s belief that suitable dramatic forms could be found to evoke themes from the life of the Prophet. This play may also point to the author’s contention that the drama is meant to be read as much as it is meant to be viewed: In one edition there are a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue, comprising, in all, ninety-five scenes.
The River of Madness
Absolute power and helplessness are treated in plays taken from past epochs of Oriental despotism. In The River of Madness, a one-act production, a monarch’s subjects drink mystical waters that render them impervious to his commands. At the end, the unnamed ruler also seeks wisdom in this form of supposed madness. It is not clear who is sane and who is not, or whence real authority springs.
The Wisdom of Solomon
For all of his powers, the biblical King Solomon is unable to win the favor of a beautiful woman, in one of al-Hakim’s longer works, The Wisdom of Solomon. This effort, which draws on characters depicted in one of the author’s earliest plays, Khatim Sulayman, opens when a jinni appears to a humble fisherman and informs him of his quarrel with the king. He hopes for reinstatement into Solomon’s good graces. When the Queen of Sheba, the most beautiful of all women, is brought before the mighty monarch, Solomon in all of his glory is unable to win her favor. He is tempted to enlist the spirit, but is reluctant to summon unearthly powers. The queen remains demure as ever, and for all of his countless treasures and innumerable wives, the great ruler falls prey to the frailties of the flesh; he becomes old and dies. At the end, the jinni warns that love and power will provoke struggle on this earth for centuries and ages to come.
The Sultan’s Dilemma
Themes of punishment and justice converge with concerns about past politics in some of the author’s later plays. In The Sultan’s Dilemma, which is set in late medieval Egypt, a man is sentenced to death for maintaining that the sultan is a slave; a lady intervenes on his behalf, demonstrates that the condemned man is indeed correct, and in the end the ruler’s place before the people must be redeemed by a complicated process of manumission. By emphasizing the absurdities of a bygone political system (where in fact under the Mamluk Dynasty the loftiest as well as the lowliest positions were occupied by those who in a technical legal sense were held in bonded servitude), al-Hakim implies that authority and official dignity are transitory attributes that are real only to the extent that society accepts them.
Princess Sunshine
Princess Sunshine has an unspecified medieval setting, during the reign of a certain Sultan Nuՙman. He rules over an odd kingdom: Princes from all around are flogged to deter them from courting the princess; executions must be halted because the gallows rope has been stolen. Harmony is achieved, however, when the princess agrees to marry one of her suitors, even after she learns that he is actually a commoner and his real name is the unprepossessing Dindan.
Piraksa
Works that are borrowed from Western traditions exhibit another facet of al-Hakim’s conception of the drama. Aristophanes was the original source for Piraksa: Aw, Mushkilat al-hukm (Praxagora: or, the difficulties of government). The Egyptian playwright’s version turns out to be an exercise in political discourse. Some ludicrous problems arise when the protagonist of the title subjects ancient Athens to a form of feminist communism.
Pygmalion
Pygmalion, though suggested by George Bernard Shaw’s work, also takes up classical concerns. A Cypriot Greek artist calls on the goddess Venus to endow one of his statues with life; when he falls in love with his creation, Pygmalion, the title character, fears that he will have to abandon sculpture. This work, published in 1942, highlights the conflicting demands of life, love, and art in a felicitous union of several disparate approaches to the drama.
King Oedipus
A major work in al-Hakim’s canon is King Oedipus, which is an adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715). In this version, the tragic denouement takes place when the monarch learns that he is not of royal birth. He is driven by a zealous pursuit of the truth even beyond the doors that should not be opened. Curiosity is Oedipus’s tragic flaw; when he learns that he was adopted, he is blinded. It is noteworthy here that, without introducing overt references to Islam, the pantheon of Greek gods from the original tragedy is replaced with suggestions of a monotheistic purpose. Countervailing concerns with predestination and free will arise when al-Hakim points to problems of divine intentions in this world.
Tender Hands
Contemporary social issues figure in many of al-Hakim’s plays, sometimes in a bizarre, mocking sense; but a more straightforward presentation of these themes may be found in Tender Hands, which concerns the place in society of university graduates who have more formal learning than practical training. Whether grammatical usage has any relevance to the management of an oil company is a problem that is no more readily resolved than the just division of household tasks for a prospective couple. Nevertheless, all ends happily when a marriage uniting two leading characters is secured.
Himari qala li
Whimsical and broadly comic themes have been pursued in several of al-Hakim’s works; this is the case with Himari qala li (my donkey said to me). In this group of dramatic sketches, the author’s donkey asks him questions about life’s predicaments; in some sequences the roles of human and animal almost seem to be reversed, as ordinary logic appears inadequate to explain the anomalies of humankind’s condition.
The Tree Climber
In some of his works, al-Hakim acknowledged the examples of European playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco; in 1962 he announced that his most recent play had an irrationalist inspiration, and some affinities with the Theater of the Absurd, in the introduction to one of his best-known works. The Tree Climber opens as a retired railway inspector is perplexed by the simultaneous disappearance of his wife and a female lizard that had lived under their orange tree. After police interrogation, and with the testimony of a bizarre dervish who appears at the train station, the old railwayman confesses to murder and claims that by burying his wife’s body under the tree he had hoped to increase its yield of fruit. The lawmen begin digging, but they uncover nothing; the wife reappears later, and, when her husband questions her about her absence, he becomes enraged by her evasive answers. He strangles her, puts the body in the hole the police have left under the tree, and then is distracted by the mysterious dervish. During their conversation, the wife’s body vanishes; in its place they find the body of the lizard, the man’s talisman of good fortune.
The Fate of a Cockroach and Not a Thing Out of Place
Another notable effort in the same vein is Fate of a Cockroach, which commences with a satirical view of order and legitimacy in the insect world. The cockroach king takes precedence over the queen because his whiskers are longer, but the female talks of mobilizing her sex for a war against predatory ants. The two seem to agree, however, that their species is the most advanced on the planet. Unknown to them, a married couple is arguing about the equitable disbursement of household funds. The wife asks the husband to kill a cockroach in their bathtub; when first the man and then the woman begin instead to contemplate the insect in admiration, a doctor is called in. He cannot understand either one of them because he has never been married. For a certain time, the husband and the wife quarrel about rank and obedience in a way that recalls the argument between the cockroach king and queen; relations seem more strained than ever after the maid, in the course of her cleaning routine, drowns the insect without a second thought.
Not a Thing Out of Place is a brisk one-act piece that has villagers talking of melons that resemble human heads and a philosophically inclined donkey when they go off to join a local dance.
The Song of Death and Incrimination
Themes of violence and guilt—notably those that elude any judicial resolution—are taken up in certain works. The one-act play The Song of Death deals with a blood vendetta between peasant families in Upper Egypt. A young university graduate is unable to persuade them that they would be better concerned with technological means to improve their living standards.
Although power, punishment, and the political order have been considered in plays set in earlier periods, an absurdist treatment of crime during modern times is presented in Incrimination. Here a law professor who has written learned treatises on criminal psychology, but has never met any lawbreakers, is introduced to some local gang members. When a policeman is shot to death during a jewel theft, the scholar agrees to defend his acquaintance from the underworld in court. By a strange transposition of the clues, however, the evidence in the end points to the professor. It would seem, then, that in the author’s view guilt and innocence have no more fixed constancy than visual illusions.
Voyage to Tomorrow
Voyage to Tomorrow begins with a crime story and ends with some of the ironic, futuristic twists that are notable in al-Hakim’s later drama. A man who perpetrated murder while in the throes of romantic infatuation is allowed to participate in an experimental, and extremely hazardous, space flight; his companion is a fellow convict who had committed four murders for personal gain. Against all the odds they survive and return to Earth during a future age when all material wants are provided for and people routinely live several hundred years. This state, however, is actually a despotism wherein love and romance are regarded as unwanted, somehow subversive relics of the past. The first convict, after a brief flirtation with a sympathetic brunette, threatens to kill a security guard who tries to separate them. He comes close to committing murder again for the sake of a woman. Here the great themes of conscience and emotional commitment are interwoven with the author’s visionary and speculative concerns.
Angels’ Prayer
A final grouping of al-Hakim’s works might include those that deal with global issues. Here a question that is frequently posed is whether science will benefit humanity or assist in its mass destruction; this issue was taken up at intervals across much of al-Hakim’s career. In his attitude toward World War II, and in his considerations on the advent of nuclear weapons and rivalries in space exploration, al-Hakim dealt with important developments in advance of many other Arab authors. The short play Angels’ Prayer depicts an angel who comes to Earth. He finds a monk and a scientist quarreling over responsibility for the wayward path of the human race. The angel is later captured, tried, and executed at the behest of two tyrants who resemble Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. When he returns to Heaven, still holding his apple of peace, which the dictators have vainly tried to take from him, he urges the other angels to pray for the inhabitants of Earth.
Between War and Peace and Food for the Millions
The one-act play Between War and Peace has an odd bit of personification: Characters named War and Peace meet in the boudoir of a lady named Diplomacy, where their deliberations resemble the intrigues of a lovers’ triangle.
Human issues in the nuclear age are examined in Food for the Millions. A scientific prodigy claims to have made a discovery more important than the atom bomb: Food can be produced at an infinitesimal fraction of its original cost, and families everywhere will be able to have it in abundance. Others compare this project to the fond dreams of science fiction, and it falls by the wayside when the youth and other family members learn that their mother, before remarrying, may have acted to hasten the death of their seriously ill father. Toward the end of the drama there are some homely but portentous musings on water stains that repeatedly appear on their apartment walls; these may be symbolic of guilt in the household that has not yet been expunged.
Poet on the Moon
In one of his last plays, Poet on the Moon, al-Hakim describes a flight to the moon on which, in spite of some misgivings from the authorities, a poet is allowed to accompany two astronauts. When they arrive, the poet is the only one who can hear the voices of moon creatures, who warn against any attempt to remove precious or hitherto unknown minerals from their domain. On the return of the spacecraft to Earth, the creatures effect the mysterious transmutation of moon rocks into ordinary vitreous earth, thus averting any premature or unprincipled exploitation of outer space.