In today's day and age, one cannot help but look at the television and often pass judgment upon the Arab world. Extremists, some call them. Fanatics. What many do not realize is that even within the heart of the Middle East lay visions of the same culture and art, the same expressions of sociopolitical turmoil, the same struggle for man's life and happiness. In the times following the establishment of Israel, following the ascent Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Arab socialism in Egypt, the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the removal of foreign powers in return for tyrants so wholly their own that the artists and dreamers of these nations could not stay silent.
What is perhaps most interesting is the form in which pieces of political theater and demonstration emerged in these nations. Dramatic minds and intelligentsia turned toward the West for inspiration, a way to speak out and effect change in society. In Israel, May, 1948, a mere two days after its birth, the groundbreaking “He Walked in the Fields”, a play about a kibbutz member who dies in the fight for statehood presented in a collage of flashback vignettes, is directed in Brechtian form by Yosef Milo at the new Cameri Theater. A few years later, the Zirah Theater began to introduce the actual works of writers such as Brecht and Beckett. “The first performance of "Waiting for Godot," after the legendary Paris production, was shown in a tiny auditorium in Tel Aviv,” (“The Development of Israeli Theater”) wrote Shimon Levy, scholar, director, and chairman of the theater department at Tel-Aviv University. “In later productions, Godot was clearly identifiable as an Israeli cultural hero… Modern classics such as Beckett on the one hand and Brecht on the other, in the many Hebrew productions that were staged, played [a] crucial role in Israeli theater… It is often through foreign eyes that Israeli artistic directors show the Israelis their own image, since the alienation necessarily involved in a foreign play creates an otherwise impossible to achieve distance from the socio-artistic mirror of theater” (“Beckett Criticism in Israel”, Levy).
Similarly Saad Ardash brought back these conceptions to Egypt after a scholarship in Italy in 1961. On Brecht, he said, “I felt I had stumbled upon a treasure… his theatre seemed perfectly suited to the needs of the moment and the national goals of the "52 Revolution” (Al-Ahram, No. 381). With the establishment of his Pocket Theater, he directed productions of Beckett"s “Endgame” and Eugene Ionesco's “The Chairs.” It was a means of opening the floodgates towards a new era of Middle Eastern political theater.
When speaking of absurdist works such as “The Chairs”, it becomes important to explore works with similar themes and constructions. In particular, “Strangers Don't Drink Coffee” by Mahmud Diyab shares a great degree of congruity in its message that we lack the ability to communicate meaningful ideas to one another, and that we are caught up in the universe of our own misconceptions which can often deny actual reality. We are offered the picture of an unnamed character called, “Man,” who is apparently the owner of the home where the action takes place. He rants and raves to himself about mundane things, horoscopes, days long gone, and speaks to his wife whom we never see or hear from. Eventually another man appears called, “Stranger,” who begins to examine the house and seemingly stake out the property.
He flashes a yellow card which denotes some kind of ambiguous government-mandated authority that Man cannot quite make out. Man makes repeated attempts to offer Stranger coffee, but he is turned down every time with the same mantric phrase: “I don't drink coffee” (“Modern Arabic Drama”, 392). Stranger says very little compared to Man's running monologue of dreamlike musings that twist in and out of past, present, and future; his words are limited to asking for or processing information about the house and property, making requests that Man stop talking, and turning down the aforementioned coffee. The original Stranger leaves, only to be replaced by more and more clones of the dubious original, poking, prodding, and deconstructing Man's sense of self, of home, and identity. One sees similarities in another absurdist work of Diyab's, “Men Have Heads” (“Short Arabic Plays”, 114). A man and wife receive a beheaded corpse in a box. Their struggle to conceal the body leads them into all sorts of explorations of their relationship, society, abuse, and more, until at the end another box is received with the severed head, a head which happens to be the husband's head.
