Studies in International Performance

Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton

Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define
nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and
among nations and cultures as well as genres, identities and imaginations.

Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International
Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to
the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces
‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and
treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural
within nations.

Titles include:

Khalid Amine and Marvin Carlson

THE THEATRES OF MOROCCO, ALGERIA AND TUNISIA
Performance Traditions of the Maghreb

Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (editors)

VIOLENCE PERFORMED
Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict
Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case
STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS

Christopher Balme
PACIFIC PERFORMANCES
Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas

Matthew Isaac Cohen

PERFORMING OTHERNESS
Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952

Susan Leigh Foster (editor)

r
WORLDING DANCE

Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo

PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS
Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia

Helena Grehan
PERFORMANCE, ETHICS AND SPECTATORSHIP IN A GLOBAL AGE

Judith Hamera
DANCING COMMUNITIES
Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City
James Harding and Cindy Rosenthal (editors)
THE RISE OF PERFORMANCE STUDIES
Rethinking Richard Schechner’s Broad Spectrum
Silvija Jestrovic and Yana Meerzon (editors)
PERFORMANCE, EXILE AND ‘AMERICA’

Ola Johansson
COMMUNITY THEATRE AND AIDS

Ketu Katrak
CONTEMPORARY INDIAN DANCE
Creative Choreography Towards a New Language of Dance in India and the
Diaspora

Sonja Arsham Kuftinec

THEATRE, FACILITATION, AND NATION FORMATION IN THE BALKANS AND
MIDDLE EAST

Daphne P. Lei
ALTERNATIVE CHINESE OPERA IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Performing Zero

Carol Martin (editor)

r
THE DRAMATURGY OF THE REAL ON THE WORLD STAGE

Alan Read
THEATRE, INTIMACY & ENGAGEMENT
The Last Human Venue

Shannon Steen
RACIAL GEOMETRIES OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC, ASIAN PACIFIC AND AMERICAN
THEATRE

Joanne Tompkins
UNSETTLING SPACE
Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre

S. E. Wilmer
NATIONAL THEATRES IN A CHANGING EUROPE

Evan Darwin Winet

INDONESIAN POSTCOLONIAL THEATRE
Spectral Genealogies and Absent Faces

Forthcoming titles:
Adrian Kear
THEATRE AND EVENT

Studies in International Performance

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The Theatres of Morocco,
Algeria and Tunisia
Performance Traditions of the Maghreb

Khalid Amine
Professor of Theatre, Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Morocco

and
Marvin Carlson
Distinguished Professor of Theatre,
The Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
© Khalid Amine & Marvin Carlson 2012
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2012 by
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-32657-0 ISBN 978-0-230-35851-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230358515
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21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents

List of Illustrations vi
Series Editors’ Preface viii
Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1
Part I The Pre-Colonial Maghreb
1 The Roman Maghreb 9
2 Orature 16
3 The Halqa 28
4 Shadow Plays and Costumed Performers 38
5 Carnival and Ritual Performance 44
Part II Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb
6 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 57
7 The First Arab Performances 71
8 The Developing Maghreb Stage 82
9 The Theatre of Resistance 94
10 Islam and the Colonial Stage 102
11 From World War II to Independence 113
Part III Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb
12 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 131
13 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 150
14 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 176
Conclusion 217

Notes 222
Bibliography 240
Index 247

v
List of Illustrations

1 Al-halqa in Jemma-el-Fna, Marrakesh, Morocco (photo courtesy

of Association Jemma-el-Fna) 31
2 Al-halqa in Assila, Morocco (photo from Khalid Amine’s
collection) 37
3 The Municipal Theatre in Tunis, 1921 (photo courtesy of the
Municipal Theatre, Tunis) 68
4 Teatro Cervantes, Tangier, Morocco (photo courtesy of
Abdelaziz Khalili) 84
5 The National Theatre of Algeria, 2010 (photo from Khalid
Amine’s collection) 126
6 Mamoura’s production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
(photo courtesy of the Moroccan Ministry for Youth Archives) 136
7 Mamoura’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlett (photo courtesy
of the Moroccan Ministry for Youth Archives) 138
8 Al-Majdub, by Tayeb Saddiki (photo from Tayeb Saddiki’s
personal archive) 140
9 Kateb Yacine, Mohammed, prends ta valise (photo courtesy of
Rajae Alloula) 152
10 Abdelkader Alloula, Al-Agouwâl, 1985, Performers: Alloula
and Haïmour (photo courtesy of Rajae Alloula) 162
11 Abdelkader Alloula, Al-Agouwâl, 1985, Performers: Alloula,
Haïmour and Belkaid (photo courtesy of Rajae Alloula) 163
12 Mohammed Driss and Tawfiq Jebali, L’Héritage, at the Tunisian
National Theatre, 1976 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National
Theatre Archive) 174
13 Mohammed Benguettaf, Le Cri, 1989 (photo courtesy of the
Tunisian National Theatre Archive) 178
14 Medjoubi memorial plaque next to the entrance of the Algerian
National Theatre (photo from Khalid Amine’s collection) 179
15 Sonia in Mohammed Benguettaf’s Fatma (photo courtesy of
the Algerian National Theatre) 191
16 Tayeb Saddiki, Al-fil wa sarawil (photo courtesy of the Center
for Performance Studies Archive, Tangier, Morocco) 194

vi
 List of Illustrations vii

17 Kidtu Arah by Abdelhaq Zerouali (photo from Khalid Amine’s

collection) 198
18 Zober Benbouchta, Lalla J’mila (photo courtesy of the Center
for Performance Studies Archive, Tangier, Morocco) 200
19 A scene from Rajel Wa Mra, written and directed by
Mohammed Driss, 1995 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian
National Theatre Archive) 214
20 A scene from Rajel Wa Mra, written and directed by Mohammed
Driss, 1995 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National Theatre
Archive) 215
Series Editors’ Preface

The “Studies in International Performance” series was initiated in 2004

on behalf of the International Federation for Theatre Research, by Janelle
Reinelt and Brian Singleton, successive Presidents of the Federation. Their
aim was, and still is, to call on performance scholars to expand their disci-
plinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across
national, cultural, social, and political borders. This is necessary not only
in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency of national paradigms in
performance scholarship, but also in order to engage in creating new per-
formance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities
of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and
social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expres-
sion. Comparative studies (especially when conceived across more than
two terms) can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived
global forms of performance practices, histories, and social formations.
Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of national orthodoxies
of art criticism and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of
the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship this
Series aims to make a significant contribution to an ever-changing project
of knowledge creation.

Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton

International Federation for Theatre Research
Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

viii
Acknowledgements

The present book is a collaborative project that addresses the history and
politics of Arab theatre and performance cultures with a particular focus on
the countries of the Maghreb. As such, it is part of the research trajectory
of the Arabic Theatre Working Group at FIRT (Fédération Internationale
pour la Recherche). We would like to acknowledge the support of all the
wonderful members of our working group. Erika Fischer-Lichte, Director
of the Interweaving Performance Cultures International Institute at the
Free University of Berlin, has been absolutely unflagging in her encourage-
ment. Khalid Amine also benefited from a one-year research fellowship at
the Interweaving Performance Cultures Institute; and most of his input in
this book was developed during his stay in Berlin. Janelle Reinelt and Brian
Singleton, Series Editors of Studies in International Performance at Palgrave
Macmillan, have been very supportive throughout the journey leading
to the present undertaking. We also offer our warmest thanks to Edward
Ziter, Christopher Balme, Paula Kennedy and Ben Doyle. Last but not least,
many people helped us with illustrations and permissions; among them are:
Rajae Alloula, Mohammed Driss, Mohammed Benguettaf, Hafedh Djedidi,
Abdelaziz Khalili, and The International Center of Performance Studies in
Tangier.

ix
Introduction

During the first century of its development, modern theatre studies concerned
itself almost exclusively with the theatre traditions of Europe and the United
States, with only a nod to a few classic theatres of Eastern Asia. Toward the
end of the twentieth century, however, a growing awareness of an interest in
global concerns encouraged research into other, hitherto neglected theatre
and performance traditions elsewhere in the world – in Latin America, in
Africa, and in Asia beyond the traditional areas of classic India, China, and
Japan. The last major area of global theatre to gain the attention of scholars
was the Arab world, long ignored by Western theatre scholars working under
the mistaken assumption that there existed a monolithic Islamic opposition
to representations of the human body and so anything resembling theatre
was systematically rejected within the Arab world.
Fortunately this simplistic and misguided assumption, while still widely
held, is gradually fading, and the rich theatre and performance traditions
within the highly diverse Arab world are at last receiving significant atten-
tion from scholars, even though few of the many admirable plays from that
world have yet to become visible in the international performance repertory.
An important indication of the growing acknowledgement of the contribu-
tions of the Arab world to modern drama is the devotion to this area of an
entire volume of the recent Routledge World Encyclopedia of Contemporary
Drama.1
Although the Routledge volume is commendable in its attempt to provide
an overview of the range of theatre and drama in the modern Arab world,
the reader who wishes to pursue this subject further, especially in English,
will find the range of material available still quite thin. The half-dozen or
so book-length studies, mostly by the two British scholars M. M. Badawi
and Philip Sadgrove, even when they claim to be general considerations of
Arabic drama, in fact tend to speak almost exclusively of Egypt, with some
reference to Syria.2
There is no disputing the central role played by Egypt and Syria in the
development of modern Arabic theatre, nor of the continuing dominance
1
2 Introduction

of Egypt within the Arab theatre world, but the almost exclusive attention
to Egypt among the few English-language studies of Arab theatre constitutes
almost as serious a misrepresentation of this subject as the long-practiced
total exclusion of Arab theatre from so-called world theatre histories.
Of the many Arab countries whose modern theatre traditions have been
eclipsed by the focus of Western scholars on Egypt, a particularly unfortunate
omission has been the countries of Western North Africa, the region known
to Arabs as the Maghreb. In Arabic, Maghreb means “the place where the sun
sets,” and is opposed to the much less commonly encountered term Mashriq,
“the place where the sun rises.” The Mashriq refers to what Westerners call
the Middle East and sometimes the Orient as well, while the Maghreb, in its
narrowest sense, includes the three Northwest African countries bordered by
the Atlas Mountains: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
Although all three countries have a significant modern drama tradition,
more significant in recent years, many would argue, than the more widely
known theatres of Syria and Egypt, they remain largely unrepresented or
under-represented in both histories and anthologies. Significantly, of the 37
plays currently available in the three English-language collections of drama
from the Arab world,3 only one play, Tunisian, comes from the Maghreb,
with none from Algeria and Morocco. Egypt, on the other hand, is represented
by a total of 17 plays.
This virtual exclusion is doubtless due in part to geography and in part
to language. The Maghreb is geographically the area in the Arabic-speaking
world most remote from Egypt and Syria, the centers of modern Arabic theatre.
Linguistically they experience the tensions felt by dramatists throughout
the Arab world, but in a form that adds to their marginalization in the inter-
national study of drama. In all three countries Arabic is the official language
and is spoken by the vast majority of the population, with various Berber
languages taking a distinct second place. French is a distant third, but it
remains in all three countries basic to much economic, political, and cultural
activity.
From the beginning of the modern era, Maghreb dramatists, like those
elsewhere in the Arab world, have wrestled with a linguistic tension within
the language itself. Traditional Arabic poetic expression remained close to the
classical Arabic of the Koran, but this generally seemed stilted and artificial
in the theatre, and today most Arabic dramatists write in a style much closer
to the Arabic spoken in their own communities, even when this means that
their plays may be difficult for Arabic speakers in other countries to under-
stand. Playwrights from the Berber populations, the oldest known cultural
group in the Maghreb, have another, more serious problem. Although there
is a small but growing amount of Berber drama and words or passages in
various Berber languages often find their way into basically Arabic plays in
the Maghreb, a dramatist whose native language is Berber can only hope to
gain a reputation by writing in one or two foreign languages: Arabic or French.
 Introduction 3

Often they choose French, as do many Maghreb Arabic dramatists, like

Algeria’s Kateb Yacine.
This phenomenon has been addressed by a number of Maghreb authors,
and one of the most comprehensive analyses of it has been provided by
the Tunisian poet Tahar Bekri in an essay entitled “Ecrire en Française au
Maghreb” (Writing in French in the Maghreb).4 He begins by noting that
the colonial tradition remains powerful, especially in Algeria, where from
1830 to 1962 only French was taught in the schools and for more than a
century the literary tradition was essentially a French one. This domination
was far less complete in Tunisia and Morocco, both only French protectorates
and for shorter periods of time (Tunisia from 1881 to 1956 and Morocco
from 1912 to 1956). Both French and Arabic were taught in the protectorate
schools, but students seeking a successful career in most professions, including
the arts, found French a more useful entry.
Bekri notes a number of other reasons for a special attention to French in
the Maghreb, however. First, unlike Francophone or mixed-languages writers
in, for example, Belgium or Quebec, the Maghreb author using French is
not resisting a dominant language but utilizing the “language of the Other”
to achieve certain cultural or literary effects. The range of linguistic expres-
sion offered by choosing or mixing local Arabic, literary Arabic, Berber, and
French gives the Maghreb writer a challenging palette of linguistic possibili-
ties. The different if complementary literary traditions also allow a Maghreb
dramatist to decide to present a love story, for example, in the very different
tonalities of French or Arabic literature. On a less positive note, the possibility
of political, or more recently religious censorship has sometimes encour-
aged Maghreb dramatists to publish possibly troubling works in French,
and indeed in France. Finally, and particularly importantly in the case of
theatre, writing in French offers to the Maghreb author the possibility of
an international reputation that would not be possible for works written in
Arabic. Nor is this only a matter of one’s international reputation. There is
enough post-colonial residue even in the United States that many young
American dramatists or experimental companies have not attracted serious
critical attention until they have been presented in Europe, and especially in
London, and the relationship of the Maghreb theatre to Paris is even more
powerful. Indeed, Bekri concludes: “It is no exaggeration to say that Paris has
become, whether one wished this or not, the necessary way to get oneself
read and to make contacts among those from the Maghreb.”5 In fact, many
of the leading dramatists of the Maghreb write and publish both French and
Arabic versions of their plays, but even then it is as Francophone writers that
they are usually best known. This is totally different from the situation, for
example, in Egypt. Although most of Egypt’s leading dramatists have some
fluency in English and the leading Egyptian dramatist of the late twentieth
century, Alfred Farag, in fact lived in London, an Egyptian dramatist would
scarcely think of writing a play in English.
4 Introduction

The result of this bilingual approach has been to remove Maghreb

dramatists from the attention of scholars of Arabic drama even in more
standard histories and reference works. A striking example is the section on
“Arabic Drama Since the Thirties” in the recently published (2006) Modern
Arabic Literature volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. The
essay is written by M. M. Badawi, also editor of the volume and unquestionably
the leading modern authority on Arabic drama writing in English. Badawi’s
45-page essay devotes only two pages to Tunisian theatre, one paragraph
to Algeria, and two short paragraphs to Morocco. The treatment of Algeria,
which boasts a substantial dramatic repertoire in both Arabic and French,
is particularly troubling. From the beginning, Badawi asserts, “Algerian intel-
lectuals were too much taken up with French culture” to give Arabic drama
any encouragement, while the general public “did not much like the literary
drama,” preferring “the Algerian national dramatic entertainment, which was
a mixture of song, laughter, and improvised scenes.” He cites two dramatists
as, in his opinion, the onlyy Algerian “men of the theatre,” Kateb Yacine and
Kaki Wil Abd Al-Rahman, both of whom “had to bow to popular demand”
and give up writing “well-constructed plays.” The “younger generation”
of (unnamed) dramatists, have, according to Badawi, given up playwriting
altogether in favor of collective authorship and improvisation.6 In fact,
Kaki’s departure from traditional forms was of tremendous importance and
influenced a whole generation of Maghreb playwrights, while Yacine, like
Abdelkader Alloula, whom Badawi does not even mention, has an interna-
tional reputation as one of the leading dramatists from the Arab world in the
late twentieth century.
This marginalization of a significant part of modern drama from the
Arab world, even by traditional Arabic scholars, is all the more unfortunate
because the Francophone theatre of the Maghreb has been similarly ignored
or marginalized by English-language scholars interested in French-language
drama. Only in very recent years has the study of Francophone literature,
French literature produced outside of France, become an important part
of French studies in England and America, and although Francophone plays
from Canada, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa have been translated
into English with some of them achieving a considerable reputation, the
Francophone drama of the Maghreb still remains almost completely neglected
by both English-language scholars and translators.7 The study of Francophone
theatre in Africa has been essentially restricted to sub-Saharan examples, the
Maghreb cultures not fitting easily into the totalizing Western idea of “African
theatre.” Thus, John Conteh-Morgan’s 1994 Theatre and Drama in Francophone
Africa, still the basic English work on this subject, is devoid, despite its title,
of any discussion whatsoever of the rich Francophone traditions off Algeria,
Tunisia, or Morocco. Oddly enough, French scholarship has been only mar-
ginally better. M. Flangon Rogo Koffi’s even more recent (2002), Le Théâtre
Africain Francophone 8 discusses the work of more than one hundred African
 Introduction 5

dramatists, but only five of these are from the Maghreb (three from Algeria
and two from Morocco). Indeed, there are more dramatists discussed from
Madagascar than from the whole of the Maghreb.
The present volume is an attempt to respond, at least in a preliminary
way, to this serious lacuna in the current scholarship in English concerning
non-European or American theatre. It presents, for the first time, a history
of theatre and performance in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco from classic
times to the first decade of the twenty-first century. As in most parts of the
Arab world, theatre in the normal Western sense – a narrative enacted on a
proscenium stage before an audience in a purpose-built structure – was not
an indigenous form, but was brought into the region as part of the colonial
projects of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that there did not exist
in much of the Maghreb other performance activities both within and out-
side the Islamic tradition long before the arrival of Western-style theatre and
alongside it after its arrival. Indeed, the negotiations culturally, politically,
and artistically between these local performance forms and the dramatic
models introduced by colonialism has been, and remains today, one of the
central characteristics of the complex and fascinating theatre of this region.
The arrangement of this study reflects this basic dynamic, being divided
into three sections: the first dealing with the history of theatre and perform-
ance in the Maghreb before the colonial period; the second with the colonial
years, during which European drama, dramaturgical methods, and physical
theatres in the European style were introduced to these countries; and the
third, and most extensive section, dealing with the period since Independence,
during which time each of the three countries has confronted the problem
of how to build a modern theatrical tradition that will take account of both
European and local influences as well as address the artistic and social needs
of a contemporary public. Already, the Maghreb has produced a number of
dramatists and companies with international reputations and certainly more
will follow. This book hopes to provide a useful and informed introduction to
the rich and complex theatrical background that has produced them.
Part I
The Pre-Colonial Maghreb
1
The Roman Maghreb

The history of the Maghreb is largely a history of successive invasions and

colonizations. The earliest known inhabitants of this area, later called Berbers by
the Romans, have been in this region since Neolithic times and are first men-
tioned in Egyptian records around 3000 BCE. Their homeland, Tamazgha,
covered the Maghreb and the Canary Islands. Some 2000 years later the
first of a series of colonizers appeared, the Phoenicians, who came ffirst as
traders and gradually assumed a ruling position, especially in the coastal areas.
Carthage, a Phoenician city founded, according to Roman sources, in 814 BC
by Queen Dido, was located in modern Tunisia and grew to international
power, fighting both Greece and Rome before its definitive defeat by Rome
in the Punic Wars (264–202 BCE). By the third century Carthage was a full-
fledged empire covering much of today’s Tunisia and western Algeria. The P Punic
impact had started already with the introduction of the alphabet as a writing
system, the emergence of the Panathenaic games, and most importantly on
the political front, the appearance of kingdoms in North Africa. By the end
of the third century the Amazigh (Berber) people, called Numidians by the
Phoenicians, had divided themselves into three kingdoms: Mauri, in northern
Morocco, Masaesyli, the largest, in the northern half of modern Algeria, and
Massyli, running down the Tunisian coast.
After Rome’s defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Rome expanded its
dominion in North Africa for another seven centuries. Berber tribal society
was thus located at the margins of two centers: Carthage and Rome. In both
empires, Berbers were relegated into subservient classes of slaves, peasant
soldiers fighting for Rome, and elite Romanized aristocrats and client kings
devoted to Rome and Roman culture. Among the Romanized Berbers was
Terence (Pullius Terentius Afer) (195–159 BCE), one of the three foremost Roman
playwrights along with Plautus and Seneca. Terence was a native North African,
brought to Rome as a slave, then freed to become a distinguished comic play-
wright. The client King Juba II is perhaps the best model of Romanized Berbers.
He was the son of Juba I of Numidia who was defeated by Julius Caesar. Juba II
was brought to Rome by Caesar where he became a distinguished Romanized
9
10 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

citizen, highly cultivated in the arts and natural history. The Emperor Augustus
restored Juba II as king of Numidia between 29 BCE and 27 BCE and married
him off to Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony.
Numidia thus became a client state of Rome.
As the Romans consolidated their power in Northwest Africa, they divided
this region into four client provinces. The furthest west, Mauretania, con-
sisted of a fertile coastal plain with scattered Phoenician settlements and
a predominantly Berber area stretching south to the Atlas Mountains. This
later was divided into Mauritania Caesariensis (mostly in today’s northwestern
Algeria) and Mauritania Tingitana (today’s northern Morocco). To the east of
Mauritania was Numidia (today’s northeastern Algeria). On the east of Numidia
was the largest African province, Africa Proconsularis, which included the
territory of Carthage (modern Tunisia) and stretched eastward into present-
day Libya. New Roman cities were built throughout this area, in many of
which the theatre was among the most prominent structures.
One of the most important of these new cities was Caesaria (today’s
Cherchell, Algeria), built by Juba II to be the new capital of Mauritania when
Augustus made him client king of that country in 25 BCE. This new capital
included, as was becoming standard in Roman cities, a large theatre for civic
festivals and games. It seems to have been modeled on the recently built
Theatre of Pompey in Rome and had a similar temple at the top of the rows
of audience seating. There had been earlier theatres built in Greek colonies
on the coasts of Egypt and Libya, but the only likely theatre in this style
before Juba’s in Caesaria seems to have been at Utica, near Carthage, which
is thought to have had such a structure as early as the second century BCE.
The Roman presence in the Maghreb remained concentrated in the cities.
Here were found Romanized citizens and kings, but on the whole kingdoms
like Juba’s Mauritania lacked any reference to the indigenous cultures. They
were simply artificial monarchies imposed by Rome. Thus Tamazgha continued
to produce not only Romanized kings and citizens, but also “an ever-renewable
crop of rebellious tribes, whose religion and culture remained only partially
influenced by the hegemony of Rome.”1 Amazigh traditional practices
were left intact while the Romans used the cities as the principal means of
extracting taxes and co-opting tribal leaders in order to control the rebellious
spirit of the tribes. To have full control of their cities and trade routes, the
Romans had to permanently negotiate with the Imazighen people through
their chiefs.
Only a few theatres were built during the first century, most notably those
at Lixus, near what is now Larache in northern Morocco, at Calama (today
Guelma, Algeria) and at Timgad, in Algeria, a site which rivals Pompeii in
the preservation of its Roman ruins. That at Lixus, an ancient coastal town,
was originally built on the Greek model, with horseshoe seating and a free-
standing stage building, but was later transformed into an amphitheatre, the
lowest rows of seats and stage removed to create a larger arena. Clearly circus
 The Roman Maghreb 11

games featuring wild beasts were an important part of the entertainment,

since 13-foot walls were built to protect audience members from the animals
in the arena. The historian Herodotus referred to Mauritania as “wild-beast
Country,” for it was from there that the Romans obtained many of their
circus-animals.2 Calama originally possessed one of the most impressive
Roman theatres of the region, but this had almost totally disappeared
by the early twentieth century, when it was reconstructed by the French
archeologist Joly.
The major expansion of Roman theatre in the Maghreb, as elsewhere in
the Empire, came during the second century, when dozens of these monu-
mental structures were erected across the region. By far the largest concen-
tration of Roman theatres in North Africa was in Africa Proconsularis, whose
capital, Carthage, grew to be the largest city in Africa after Alexandria. The
other provinces were less favored, with only six Roman theatres known in
all of Mauritania and only five in Numidia, but each province had signifi-
cant examples, whose ruins are still major attractions for visitors to the area
and in some cases the venue for modern performances as well. In Africa
Proconsularis, however, substantial parts of 35 such structures remain, with
more than 50 historically documented. The best preserved of these is that
at Dougga, built in CE 168–9, which could accommodate some 3500 spec-
tators. The leading theatre of the province was of course that in Carthage,
built as a part of a major beautification of the city undertaken under the
reign of the Emperor Antonin (CE 136–61) and accommodating some 10,000
people. It presented a wide variety of Roman theatrical entertainment, as a
contemporary document by one of the most famous of the Roman African
authors, Apulieus, witnesses. Apulieus is primarily remembered today as
the author of the only completely preserved Roman novel, the satiric The
Golden Ass, but in his own time he was equally famous as a traveler and ora-
tor, and a fragment of one of his orations, actually delivered in the theatre
at Carthage around AD 160–70, opens with an evocation of that theatre and
the dramatic fare offered in it, a unique contemporary report on the Roman
theatre in North Africa. In this passage the orator urges his listeners not to
be distracted by the impressive physical surroundings, or by memories of
other entertainments offered there, but to focus their attention on the skill
of the orator. Fortunately he provided a useful listing of the distractions he
is warning against:

In an auditorium like this one, you should not pay attention to the
marble flooring, the architecture of the proscenium, the colonnade
of the stage, nor to the projecting ledges, the brilliant painting of the
walls, the half circle of seating. Nor should you pay heed to the fact
that at other times one may see in this place a mime presenting his
burlesque roles, a comedian delivering his lines, a tragedian declaiming,
a rope dancer risking his life, a juggler performing his sleight of hand, a
12 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

pantomime performer making mimic gestures, in short, all those types of

performers who appear in public, each one following his craft.3

In addition to the physical details mentioned about the theatre, this pas-
sage is even more important as providing a picture of the entertainment
offered in a large Roman provincial theatre in the mid-second century.
In addition to the literary genres of comedy and tragedy, there were acro-
bats and the mimes and pantomimes that gradually in later years replaced
more literary drama in popularity and importance. The more spectacular
entertainments most associated with the Roman Empire, the gladiato-
rial combats, the shows involving wild beasts, the chariot races and the
naumachiae (mock naval battles with flooded stages) are not mentioned by
Apuleius, and indeed would not have been seen in a theatre of this type.
For them, the usual performance space was the oval amphitheatre, in the
style of the great Coliseum in Rome. For these spectacles new amphitheatres
were built or older theatres in the Hellenistic or early Roman style, like that
at Lixus, were rebuilt as arenas. In these spectacles the Moors of Mauritania
Tingitania, if they appeared at all, appeared as stereotypical inscriptions of
a deliberately ambiguous Other.
The Romans’ obsession with bloody contests made theatre less than an
art form and more of a lavish spectacle taking the whole city as their backdrop.
Even closet tragedies that evolved for elite audience performances couldn’t
escape the representation of violence as a spectacle onstage, which in Greek
tragedy almost invariably took place offstage. Racial violence was also insti-
tutionalized through the grammar of spectacle as a language, for there is
“no racism without a language,” as Derrida observes. The point is “not that
acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a
word. Racism institutes, declares, writes, inscribes, prescribes.” The language
of racism, then, “outlines space in order to assign forced residence or to close
off borders.” The Moors of Mauritania Tingitania, thus became the stereo-
typical inscriptions of that deliberately ambiguous Other; the alien from the
southern shore of the Mediterranean space, on the borderlines between
the Roman dominion and barbary, were seen from within the Empire only as
an Other. Roman spectacles of course inscribed many Others from within
and without, from Christians to slaves and war prisoners from annexed
provinces. Between 27 BCE and CE 576 Roman mimes and pantomimes
incriminated the early Christians, attacked Christian morals, and ridiculed
the sacred sacraments of baptism and communion. The violent massacre of
Christians as entertainment was a common attraction in the Roman arenas.
“Soon, the government and society used Christians rather than actors to
supply theatrical entertainment… . And the Roman idea of entertainment
became partly to watch Christians die in the arena. At times the Romans
were creative. The Emperor Nero once dipped Christians in tar and then lit
them to serve as torches to light an evening chariot race.”4
 The Roman Maghreb 13

The first implication of these brief historical notes on Roman performance

is that although some form of drama was clearly presented, spectacle, more
than drama as such, was made integral to the lives of Romans and Romanized
Imazighen during the seven centuries of Roman presence in present-day
Maghreb. Second, Greco-Roman theatre was never adapted directly by the
Berbers of this region as a tradition before modern times, but was woven
together with existing performance cultures. Well before the advent of Islam
in the seventh century, the pervasive Roman culture of spectacle had been
put on the defensive by Christian orthodoxy. Thus the belief that the
Islamic conquest put an end to theatre practice in Mauritania Tingitania is
a mistaken one.5
When Apuleius gave his oration at the theatre in Carthage, Roman theatre
in Africa was near its high point, and the region was a major supplier of
agricultural exports, so much so that it was often called the “granary of the
Empire.” The Roman troops were never wholly successful in subduing the
native population, however, and by the middle of the third century civil
unrest and tribal revolts had brought building activity almost to a halt and
changed the focus in Roman cities from the development of an urban society
to the defense of fortress enclaves. Nevertheless, theatre-going remained as
an important part of the cultural life in at least the major cities for another
century. Saint Augustine, a Romanized Berber, tells in his Confessions of
his coming to Carthage in 371 and of his life during the next several years
among the more dissipated section of that city, which he describes, in the
famous opening to Book III, as “a hissing cauldron of lust.” Among his favorite
entertainments there were theatrical performances, and although he gives
few details, it is clear that what he was seeing were not gladiatorial combats
or displays with wild beasts, but fully developed plays “which reflected my
own unhappy plight and were tinder to my fire.” He speaks of seeing the
suffering in tragedies and considers why audiences enjoy “imaginary scenes”
of suffering such as they might undergo themselves. He also reports that he
would “share the joy of stage lovers and their sinful pleasure in each other
even though it was all done in make-believe for the sake of entertainment.”6
As emphasis in the Roman urban centers shifted from such pastimes to
defending the cities from attack, the theatres were deserted, and some were
officially closed by Imperial decree, like the theatre of Rusicada (today Skikda,
Algeria), closed by the Emperor in 391. Even so, a passage in Augustine’s
The City of Godd provides information that even after the sack of Rome by Alaric
in 410, daily theatrical activity apparently continued in Carthage, still attracted
a considerable devoted audience, and perhaps most strikingly, still included
not only the popular games but also more conventional theatre. In fact, the
converted Augustine considers this latter, because of its emotional appeal, a
greater threat to morals than the bloody circuses. Modern theatre historians
have almost universally viewed the games as a degenerate late form of the
Roman theatre, developed when a debased public was no longer interested
14 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

in the more refined and literary entertainments offered by conventional

drama. Interestingly enough, Augustine, who actually lived in the final
years of the Empire and attended its theatre, offered quite the opposite view
of the situation, at least in Carthage, where

A warlike people, hitherto accustomed only to the circus games, was now
introduced to the effeminate hysteria of stage plays. The astuteness of
evil spirits is such that, foreseeing the approaching end of the physical
plague to be imminent, they provided another far more grievous, which
delighted them hugely, this time not physical but affecting the whole
range of conduct. This plague blinded the minds of all its victims with
such darkness, it defiled them with such foulness, that (incredible as it
will seem if posterity ever hears of it) when the city of Rome had been
laid waste, those who were infected with that plague and were able to
escape to Carthage went mad in their struggles to frequent such spectacles
there every day.7

Attacked by enemies from without and within, the Roman Empire was now
in full decline, and with it the Roman theatrical tradition faded away.
Significantly and symbolically, the great theatre at Timgad was extensively
quarried in 539 by the Emperor Justinian’s soldiers to build a fortress
nearby for protection against the threats from Berber tribes. Clearly by that
time its use as a theatre had ceased. Although the imposing ruins remained
here and elsewhere, their purpose was forgotten, as we can see in a senti-
mental poem by Tunisian poet Muhriz Ibn Halaf (d. 1022) on the ruins of
the Roman theatre in Carthage, which makes no mention of its original
use. Not until the colonial period were these structures again put to use
as theatres. A notable (and highly incongruous) example was the staging
by the Comédie Française of Corneille’s Polyeucte in the Roman theatre
at Cherchell, 27 May 1954, to entertain the troops of the French military
school located there from 1942 to 1962.
Many of the Maghreb’s classical theatres have in modern times been
restored to performance use, partly to celebrate the national patrimony and
partly to attract tourists to festival productions. The pioneer in such activi-
ties was the International Festival in Carthage, established in 1964 and held
since that date in the ruins of the Roman amphitheatre in Carthage, originally
built in the first century. Almost as long a career has been enjoyed by the
Festival of Timgad, organized in 1967 by the local population to encourage
tourism and interest in the national patrimony and located from the begin-
ning in the Roman theatre which is one of the outstanding features in
these spectacular ruins. In Dougga, a well-preserved small Roman city west
of Tunis, the Roman theatre mentioned earlier, built in CE 168 and seating
3500, is utilized in July and August for floodlit performances of classical
 The Roman Maghreb 15

drama. In the restored theatre at Guelma, Algeria, an annual Festival of

Contemporary Music has been celebrated since 2005.
There were a variety of reasons for the abandonment of the great Roman
theatres of the Maghreb between classical and modern times. It was not only
the struggle against local opposition which drained the Roman cities of the
Maghreb of their civic energy and their support of such activities. Scarcely
more than a century after Roman influence reached its height in this
region came another wave of conquest. In 429 an army of Vandals crossed
the Straits of Gibraltar and moved across North Africa in their march on
Rome. By 440 they had conquered Carthage, probably extinguishing the
last remnants of the Roman theatre there, and they remained as rulers in
North Africa until they were driven out a hundred years later by Byzantine
conquerors. The region then became a part of the Roman Empire again,
though for only a century, since the Byzantine rulers were in turn replaced
by the Umayyad Arabs in 648.
2
Orature

Since the Byzantine rulers shared the Roman interest in theatre or at least in
theatricalized spectacle, it is quite possible that the century of their somewhat
tenuous control over the Maghreb encouraged some revival of such activity,
at least in the coastal cities, but the historical record does not provide clear
evidence of this. Certainly with the arrival of the new conquerors, the Arabs,
little was preserved of the first Western-style theatre in the region beyond
the monumental remains of its performance spaces. Traditional European-
oriented theatre history regarded the next millennium of this region’s history
as a blank, until European-style theatre returned in the form of French
colonial dramatic activity. The advent of Franco-Hispanic colonialism in the
twentieth century confronted Moroccan consciousness with the necessity
of writing drama, among other Western genres. As colonial anthropology
and cultural ethnography erected a hegemonic reading and interpretation
of Moroccan cultural history, “it would become increasingly difficult for
Moroccans themselves to avoid the need to define themselves and thus to
interpret themselves as against the inchoate, unwritten and uninterpretable
reality of existence.”1 Theatre practice in Morocco, then, was informed by
the desire for self-definition, and subject to an ambiguous compromise, “at
least linguistic – between Semitism and Latinity.”2 It was in effect a transfer
from formulaic artistic expression, unwritten yet transcribed as a collective
artistic imaginary that transcends the bounds of individual author’s signa-
ture (theses), to written dramatic and theatrical models borrowed from the
West (anti-theses), into a genuine hybridization based on the diffusion and
transmission of formulaic artistic space from basic orality to literacy and
textual practice (syntheses).
More recent theatre scholarship, however, recognizing that performative
activity exists in many forms beyond the specific European tradition, has
come to realize that in the Maghreb, as elsewhere in the Arab world, a wide
variety of performance activity existed here long before the introduction of
European-style theatre in the nineteenth century. If they did not continue
the specifically European theatre techniques of the Greeks and Romans, like
16
 Orature 17

all cultures they developed devices for performing themselves to themselves,

many of them surely well established before the European invaders appeared
and developed with little relationship to them until modern times. As Kamal
Salhi comments in the collection A History of Theatre in Africa, an excellent
overview of contemporary scholarship in this field, “In reality, the societies
of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia have long traditions of the performing
arts. These traditions have been dismissed because they do not comply with
Western norms.”3
Throughout the history of the Maghreb, from Neolithic times until the
present, significant performance cultures lurked in the expressive behavior
of collective festivities and quasi-sacred ritualistic formulae. These perform-
ances were by no means theatre practices by Western standards; but still,
they were collective acts of representation imbued with theatricality, even
though they possessed no written script that would exercise an aura of
literary authority over the performance. Until the recent rise of perform-
ance studies, scholarly research into performance activity in the Maghreb
was characterized by a general tendency to disparage or disregard traditional
performance cultures, proposing to base its so-called scientific approach
solely on the theatrical documentation which has become available through
the Europeanization of the counties in this region. Ironically, however, it
is impossible to understand or appreciate some of the most innovative the-
atrical performances of the contemporary Maghreb without considering
these neglected genealogies of regional performance cultures developed long
before the colonial era. While it is true that these performative activities
never developed into a theatre in the Western style, their impact has been
extremely strong on contemporary Moroccan theatre and its longing for
the authentic. Indeed folk orality and imagination have deeply impacted
Moroccan theatre, both directly through the latter’s borrowing of charac-
ters, fables, acting strategies, and images from the rich repertoire of oral
traditions and, more pervasively, through its inheritance of the imaginative
world of collections of tales like The Thousand and One Nights. The potential
efficacy of traditional outdoor rehearsed activities has been explored by vari-
ous artists of the Maghreb in their ever-lasting quest for an “original” theatre
tradition. After all and despite the illusion of boundedness, theatre evolves
historically through appropriations and cultural exchanges even within the
same culture. There is no theatre in and of itself. Western theatre(s) are
themselves hybrid models. More than that, theatrical art is a hybrid medium
that necessitates a transformation of something written on a script into an
acoustic and visual world called the mise-en-scène. One can thus only begin
to understand and appreciate the theatre of the Maghreb today by giving
equal attention to its European and its African roots.
One of the most basic differences in these two performance traditions is
that while the European theatrical tradition from the Greeks onward has
been dominated by the written text, oral performance as an expressive
18 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

behavior in the form of orature was the dominant form of performance in

the Maghreb long before the arrival of Islam. This orality then co-existed
alongside the Arabo-Islamic emphasis on literacy since the seventh-century
Arabo-Islamic conquest of the area, producing a mosaic of linguistic and
cultural diglossia.4 Relationships between orality and literacy in the pre-
colonial Maghreb were subject to an incessant power struggle, with the
former’s “multi-layered” and fertile fluctuations that resisted the almost
reductionist categorizations imposed by scriptocentrism. Unlike Moroccan
Arabo-Islamic literacy that is determined by a “logocentric” self-referential
center – that is, the Qu’ran as a written text and the sacred book that spells
out the word of Allah, besides the Sunna as its outward concretization –
oral performance’s fluidity and indirection constituted a lucid body that
escaped fixity through its receptive formulaic repertoire. This was well
established before the Arabo-Islamic conquest and it perpetuated itself con-
tinually through custom and tradition as a free and liberating site of social
license. Deborah A. Kapchan identifies the relationship between the sacred
and the profane in modern Morocco as characterized by an oscillation
that is fueled by tension yet resolved within performance. She argues that
“Morocco is a sacred society where the official discourses of Islam provide
both counterpoint and drone to the languages of license and commodifica-
tion that symbolize the marketplace; indeed because ‘official order and ...
ideology’ are perpetually present, the profane and the untrustworthy come
into relief.”5
Two major sorts of oral performance can be traced far back in Maghreb
culture, at least to the earliest days of the Arab-Islamic conquest of the region
and probably beyond, a public orature by men and a more private family
orature by women. Seasonal celebrations and political and social events
were often marked by music, dance, and particularly public storytelling.
The dramatic storyteller has been given a variety of names, but among the
most common are the gouwâl, the meddah, or, following common Middle
Eastern usage, the hakawati. The story-teller is a figure who can be traced
far back in North African history, where such performers have long been
well-known, well-respected and influential members of their society. They
were usually itinerant performers, wandering on foot from city to city,
selecting public places to present their tales, with a strong theatrical ele-
ment including improvised dramatic action, impersonation of a variety of
characters, singing, and dancing, usually accompanied by a tambourine and
flute. The one, two, or three narrators would normally perform within a circle
of spectators (the highly important halqa, about which more will be said
presently), standing or seated public assemblies, normally out of doors in a
public space, a market, or square. The performances were highly interactive,
as audiences were encouraged to comment upon or even participate in the
presentation of the story, which was interrupted from time to time in order
for the performers to collect donations (obole) from the spectators.
 Orature 19

The material in such performances was highly varied, from legends, folktales,
history, or popular anecdotes, often with a humorous edge in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, or an obscene one in the twelfth and thirteenth.6 In his
study of Arab oral narration as “theatre,” Youssef Rachid Haddad points
out that the individual personality of the traditional Arab narrator is “pro-
foundly linked to the substance of the narration, much more so than is the
personality of the classical [Western] actor to the role he plays.”7 The storyteller
makes use of improvisation, voice, body, posture, flows, tensions, and release
of energy to create an intricate rhythmic relationship between movement
and text so as to explore beyond her/his everyday self without fully disap-
pearing. Performance space is genuinely shaped and characters are erected
through voice and body movement, intuition and imagination.
Le Tourneau, in his description of Fez in Morocco around 1900, reports
that the storytellers of that city:

intoned to the rhythm of a square tambourine the deeds of Arabs of

former times; the majority of the listeners (about fifty in winter, up to two
hundred in summer) knew the stories already and rebuked the narrator or
prompted him if by chance his memory failed him, but they took great
pleasure in hearing for the hundredth time the story of journeys, of single
combats, of deeds of treachery and daring, and allowed themselves to
be lulled or moved by the endless repetition of stereotyped formulas. Le
Tourneau mentions that a shoemaker famous for his talent as a storyteller
would take up his place between prayers “reciting day after day a long story
which he was able to make lively and sometimes poignant.” His repertoire
consisted of only three stories, “Antara Bnu Chaddad,” which lasted a
year, the story of the Fatimids, which lasted six months, and the romance
of Siirat Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan, which lasted four months. At the end of each
session, a collection was taken up and given to the performer.8

Varied as the public halqa performance was, a quite different tradition was
to be found in the private sphere, within the home, where the storyteller
or storytellers were invariably female. Their presentations, though private,
were as carefully structured and performatively presented as the more public
offerings of the gouwâl. Lacost-Dujardin, in his ethnographic study of the
folk tales of the Berber kabyle people of Algeria, suggests that the performance
of these stories traditionally has a “sacred” character:

It unquestionably suggests, in many respects, a magic ritual: the recita-

tion can only occur at night ... It takes place in the vestibule, one of the
magic centers of the home. The storyteller is an old woman or a group
of old women, very often settutt (sorceress) or at least familiar with magic
practices. The recitation itself is preceded and followed by sacred formulas,
truly rituals of entry and departure.9
20 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

Pellat in his study of the hikaya provides more details of such performances
and records a number of ritual formulae. One elaborate opening formula
provides a religious framework: “there was and there was Allah in every
place; no earth and no place is empty of Him; and there was basil and lily
in the lap of the Prophet – upon him be prayer and greeting; and there was.”
Similarly, the closing formula would often repel the forces of evil, perhaps
as in the Berber regions of Algeria, sending them into the body of an animal.
Often in modern time these formulae are reduced to a few key words, their
original meaning only suggested, as in the common Berber ending to
an oral narrative: “Our tale is finished, but the wheat and barley are not
finished.”10
Orature has been defined as a “social interaction via the art media” that
“differs from other modes of speaking and gesturing.”11 This artistic social
interaction is delivered as an unwritten piece, yet it clearly has permanence in
the minds of its performers, and it contains almost all of the normal features
of drama; role-playing, epic narrativity, body language, interplay between
illusion and reality, high/low rhythms, songs as instruments of blockage
and structural fragmentation, and most importantly a committed audience
that takes part in the performance event. Such devices, as Ruth Fennegan
observes, “are not merely embellishments superadded to the already exist-
ent literary work – as we think of them in regard to written literature – but
an integral as well as flexible part of its full realization as a work of art.”12
Fennegan’s definition illuminates those aspects of theatricality that function
as constitutive parts of an oral performance. Obviously, such oral perform-
ance amounts to a theatrical event; due to the theatricalized reciprocity
that holds show-makers and onlookers in both the public recitations of the
gouwâl and the private recitations of the family matriarch. It is a productive
reciprocity wherein the performance is inscribed as a process, insofar as the
performer and audience are present altogether on site. As W Walter Ong remarks
in Orality and Literacy, “The divorce between poem and context would be
difficult to imagine in an oral culture … the narrator typically identifies with
the characters he treats, and interacts freely with his real audience, who
by their responses in turn help determine what he says – the length and
style of his narrative.”13 The interaction with the audience is of course much
different than the passive convention of the Western theatre, and develops
a sense that the story is the responsibility of both narrator and audience.
Sabra Webber, who has studied the oral narrative in Tunisia, notes that
this shared responsibility creates a sense of personal communicative
control over historical events and narratives as they become part of the
community’s own history.14 Part of the dynamics of telling as performance,
notes Marie Maclean, is an “agreed relationship of the seer and seen, of the
hearer and the heard, a relationship both of inclusion and exclusion.”15 It
can clearly be seen as a festive drama in miniature, wherein specific roles
are played and intertextualized with others.
 Orature 21

In a key article covering both the history and the contemporary dramatic
use of the hakawati,16 German scholar Friederike Pannewick provides a useful
summary of the narrative characteristics of such performance, which clarifies
both its similarity to and difference from standard Western theatre practice:

The special situation of the narrator as single entertainer in a public place

demands a specific communicative strategy. In the lively atmosphere of
such a place, he requires a great theatrical presence in order to attract
attention.
1. His performance therefore has an animating quality, as, much more
so than within an institutional framework of a conventional theatre
building, he has to take into account that his clientele will desert him
if his performance does not meet their expectations. His success will
only be guaranteed if he is able to turn his narration into an event;
something has to happen between him and the audience.
2. In order to comply with the demands of this situation, he will demon-
strate a great deal of flexibility: his narrative performance is designed
in such a way that he can shift from the mode of straight-forward
narration to addressing the audience directly at any time. This way,
he can prevent his audience from losing interest by increasing the
dramatic tension whenever necessary.17

The triangular interactive relationship between the storyteller, the audience,

and the material being presented made this oral tradition particularly impor-
tant in the development of an engaged national literature during the colonial
period. As Frantz Fanon wrote, speaking particularly of the oral tradition in
colonial Algeria: “It is a literature of combat, because it moulds the national
consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new
and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes respon-
sibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and
space.”18 In the colonial situation, the performance of the storytellers takes on
a new role, but one totally in keeping with the traditional dynamic of their
occupation. Says Fanon:

The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive
and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly funda-
mental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize
the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names
of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and
more widely used. The formula “This all happened long ago” is substi-
tuted by that of “What we are going to speak of happened somewhere
else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen
tomorrow.” One thinks, in this context, of the political parables of
Brecht. In Algeria itself, from 1952–3 on, the storytellers, who were before
22 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their
traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their
public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with
its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of enter-
tainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made
no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers
systematically.19

Fanon perhaps overstates his case in arguing that the art of storytelling had
become essentially tedious and moribund by the 1950s, then to be revitalized
by political engagement. Anyone who has had the good fortune to witness the
performance of a traditional storyteller in the Arab world, which is an experi-
ence still possible even today, has almost certainly felt the theatrical power of
their work whatever the subject matter, and it is difficult to believe that this
power had somehow completely disappeared into tedium and routine in the
early twentieth century. In any case, however, Fanon clearly understands the
potential dramatic power of storytelling performance, and how, though it
differs fundamentally from traditional Western theatre, it draws equally pow-
erfully, and arguably more democratically, upon the same human interest in
dramatic action. His analysis of this dynamic is worth quoting almost in full:

Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides
over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to
the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out
for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagina-
tion; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens
that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation –
highway robbers or more or less anti-social vagabonds – are taken up and
remodeled.

This dynamic, says Fanon, is especially worthy of study in a colonized country

like Algeria, where:

The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approxima-

tions, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his
public, toward the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national
patterns. Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for
dramatization, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellec-
tual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristic of despair
and revolt the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and
forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress.20

Given traditional storytelling’s magical capacity to implicate “Others,” it

negotiates the differing relationships among its participants, and in the
 Orature 23

process it reformulates social legitimation and cultural values. The role of

the spectators in the fulfillment of such performance is mandatory, as they
are active participants and co-subjects rather than passive recipients. In Fischer-
Lichte’s terms, the gouwâl’s presentation is an ideal self-generating performance
paradigm with an interminably operating feedback loop.21
To present, as some critics have done, Maghreb traditional performance as
a diglossia between indigenous orality and the essentially literary tradition
of Islam is far too simple a model. Orality is in fact also a central part of the
Islamic faith and its practice, due to the injunction to recite the words of
the Qur’an, giving rise to an ongoing tension, sometimes mild, sometimes
severe, between orality and literacy within Islam itself. Vocal ability in Q
Qur’anic
recitation was always a mark of honor and distinction in Islam and many of
the pioneer figures in establishing the modern Western-oriented theatre in
the Maghreb first gained public attention by this sort of religious perform-
ance. Orature itself was thus not a problem when the followers of Islam
conquered the Maghreb, but the subversive potential of orature and its tra-
dition of exploring alternative narrations unfettered by an authorial voice
were always matters of major concern. Typical is the uneasiness expressed by
Ibn Al-Jawzi, a scholar who died in Baghdad in 1200:

The narrator of the Qur’an sings, he transforms the psalmodies into songs.
The preacher declaims, accompanied by music in verse from Majnun Layla.
So someone applauds, someone else tears his clothes, and all believe that
this is an act of piety! This although we know very well that these psal-
modies, like the music itself, provoke emotional upheaval and ecstasy
in the soul. We also know that it is a grave mistake to expose oneself to
anything that could cause disorder.22

The history of oral performance in Islamic culture is a complex and

contested one, but a few of the concepts and terms most relevant to per-
formance in the Maghreb need to be discussed. In addition to the Qur’anic
text itself, there grew up, after the death of the prophet, a body of related
material, anecdotes, fragments of history, reported deeds and sayings of the
prophet. During the seventh century this material was passed down orally
under a variety of names, hàditha (discourse), mathal (proverb or tale), naba
(instructive story), hikma (wise saying), nadira (anecdote), risala (essay),
and others. Four such genres were especially influenced by the pre-Islamic
tradition of popular storytelling, involving music and impersonation, the
sira, the qissa, the hikaya, and the maqama.
The sira (chronicle) is generally thought to have been developed well
before the coming of Islam, both in the Middle East and in the Maghreb,
in the form of early legends and chronicles of pre-Islamic events. With the
development of Islamic narrative it came to mean a biographical story,
in particular the often lengthy narrated accounts or stories concerning
24 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

the Prophet Mohammed and the early Islamic community.23 As the Empire
stretched into the Maghreb and elsewhere, the siras expanded as well, to
include the exploits and conquests of the early caliphates. This popular genre
usually combined both historical and fictitious frames of reference, as can be
seen in the comparative studies that have been done on the variations of a
single sira in various parts of the Islamic world.24
In the first centuries of Islam, a form of official storytelling, the qissa,
was sanctioned by the leaders of the faith to provide religious and moral
guidance to the illiterate majority, and these were widely circulated and
presented, often to enormous crowds, in streets, markets, and public spaces,
the same areas that had already provided a performance space for the public
storyteller, and often the sacred and secular performers utilized the same
space.25 The popularity of the qissa in regions like the Maghreb provides
a significant refutation to the claim sometimes made by recent champions of
the Amazight theatre that this culture had a strong pre-colonial performance
tradition that was stamped out by the coming of Islam. The truth is much
more complex, as can be seen in the case of public storytelling. Both the
Amazigh (Berbers) and early Islam had a strong tradition of orature, never
completely forgotten by either. The fact that the Amazight public storytellers
and the Islamic performers of the qissa and other narrative genres were
creating highly similar performances in the same spaces and doubtless with
overlapping audiences means that inevitably the two forms would bor-
row material and techniques from each other at least during the first two
centuries of Islamic domination, the greatest flourishing of the qissas, and
probably longer.
Specific evidence of this overlap can be seen in the terminology utilized
in speaking of such performers, Some modern scholars, like Haddad, prefer
to use the term qissa in a general sense, specifying two kinds of qassas: those cre-
ated as “instruments of official religious propaganda” (the original meaning
of the word) and those operating in a much more open field of narration,
including “religious epics,” “religious events,” “tribal epics,” and various
combinations of these. Haddad proposes a chronology wherein the presenters
of the qassas, dedicated to the transmission of religious material, drew upon
many of the techniques of the popular storyteller such as song, mimicry, acces-
sories, and character interpretation, and in time the two essentially converged
to create a figure like the Middle Eastern hakawati. Haddad argues that the
terms for this figure and this art converged as well in the histories of Arab-
Islamic and Islamized societies, resulting in the present diverse choices in
such nomenclature by various scholars.26
Ibn Al-Jawzi, at the end of the thirteenth century, himself a famous
preacher in Baghdad, divides Islamic oral performers into three categories, the
qass, who presented the qassas, edifying tales and stories of the prophets,
the mudhakkir, r or preacher, and the waiz, or admonishing preacher. Al-Jawzi
shared the general Sunni distrust of the first of these, who, especially in
 Orature 25

Shi’ite circles, often became associated with employing distinctly theatrical

means to arouse the emotions of their audiences, and also to be more inter-
ested in creating an effective display than in enforcing religious sentiment.
Such misgivings had real justification, according to Sammoun in his study
of Islam and the Arab theatre, who suggests that “in our opinion, the qass,
the performer of secular religious tales, in opposition to the mudhakkir, r who
remained faithful to the law and words of the Prophet, is the only ‘actor’ in
the Arabic tradition.” Later he notes that the emotional Shi’ite performers
“had as their mission making the audience weep in exchange for a sum of
money.”27
The term hakawati, less familiar in the Maghreb than in the Middle East, is
derived from hikaya (“story” or “tale”), a form developed alongside the early
hàditha (eighth-ninth century).28 This word originally meant “imitation,” and
was specifically associated with the sections of parody and mimicry within
the tradition of the hàditha. It is discussed in a number of early Islamic liter-
ary studies and one extant eleventh-century work, bearing the title Hikayat
Abi’l-Qasim al-Baghdadi, presents a series of lively scenes set in Baghdad and
mocking Shi’ite piety. Moreh notes that the whole might be considered
“a repertoire of theatrical scenes played in tenth-century Baghdad,” attrib-
uted to Mohammed ben Ahmad Abu’l-Mutahhar Al-Azdi.29 Some scholars
have used the term hikaya to refer to the whole range of narrated performance,
especially in the Middle East, where the term is more common and the most
familiar term for the professional storyteller is the hakawati, the performer
of hikaya.
Neither term is as widely heard in the Maghreb, although the hikaya has
been discussed as a significant part of the oral Tunisian tradition by Majid
El Houssi, whose 1982 book Pour une histoire du théâtre tunisien provides the
most comprehensive study to date of that tradition in terms of its theatri-
cality. El Houssi notes that hikaya has often been used in Tunisia to refer to
siratt from the medieval Arabic epics of A’ntarr and Bani Hilal, the first dealing
with a pre-Islamic Arabia-Abyssinian warrior and poet and the second with
an eleventh-century conquest of what is now Tunisia by the Bani Hilal, a
Bedouin tribe from upper Egypt. He also notes that these Tunisian hikayat, t
despite their warrior themes, placed special emphasis on female characters,
in particular Zazia, whom, El Houssi suggests, represented the “Tunisian female
archetype.” The introduction of elements of local circumstance and custom
into the framework provided by the historical or legendary epic helped
distinguish in Tunisia the hikayatt from the more classical qissa, based more
directly on Qur’anic stories, more heavily didactic, and more resistant to
alteration.30
Although the term hikayatt is not unknown, the much more common term
in both Tunisia and Algeria for the storyteller who draws upon legendary
sources like A’ntarr or Bani Hilal, which both the narrator and audience are
free to alter, is the meddah (panegyrist).31 Lufti Faizo has argued that the
26 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

original difference between meddeh and hakawati in the Ottoman Turkish

Empire was based on the content of their performances: the hakawati pre-
sented the adventures of legendary and historical heroes, while the meddah
recounted tales of “pious Muslims.”32 Although gradually these two orienta-
tions merged in the work of both performers, this would suggest that the
meddah originally inherited much of the functions of the qissa, but without
the specific encouragement of the leaders of the faith. This inheritance is
specifically argued by Reinhardt Dozy, who calls the North African meddah
“the heir of the qissa,” a kind of “religious minstrel who goes to festivals to
sing the praises of saints and of God and holy war, and who is accompanied
on the tambourine and flute.”33 Faizo essentially supported this genealogy,
saying that at some point during their travels the meddah moved away from
predominantly religious material to more secular stories.34 In addition they
frequently developed a special interest in less noble protagonists, the rogues
and rascals who often opposed or parodied the hitherto favored rulers and
heroes. Among the most important of the performed narrative modes,
the maqama in many parts of the Ottoman Empire and the nadira in the
Maghreb became particularly associated with this sort of story.
The maqama was developed during the tenth century, after the sari and
qissa, but related to both.35 Traditionally, each maqama contains a narrator
(often called a rawi) whose traditional name is Isa Ibn Hisham. The classic
maqama begins with the set phrase “haddathana ’Isa Ibn Hisham, qala ...
(’Isa Ibn Hisham narrated to us, saying …), which suggests a parody of pre-
vious and more elevated genres like the hàdith, which often began by citing
the Islamic authorities upon which their narrative was based. The maqama
recounts the adventures of a rogue trickster, like that found in folk narra-
tives around the world. His traditional name is Abu’l-Fath Al-Iskandari, and
he generally appears as a disguised beggar, surviving by his wits, his linguistic
virtuosity and rhetorical talent. Traditionally the maqama ends with the
narrator penetrating the disguise and recognizing that the protagonist is
really the rogue Al-Iskandari, familiar from many similar tales.
Before the nineteenth century, the maqama was traditionally written in
rhymed prose (saj ), composed in dialogue form and based on impersonation.
Its favoring of morally questionable characters offered social commentary
and, presumably through negative examples, moral improvement. The two
most famous creators of maqamatt are Al-Hamadhani (967–1007) and the
better known Mohammed Al-Qasim Al-Hariri (1054–1122). Al-Hariri was
said to have created parodies of the sira and, according to Moreh (Live (
Theatre, 107), Al-Hariri had to defend his maqamatt “against the accusation
that they were false stories forbidden by Islamic law.”36 Both of these
popular maqama creators were widely imitated throughout the Islamized
world, including the Maghreb and Spanish Andalusia.
Closely related to the maqama is the popular Maghreb form, the nadira
(anecdote), particularly in Algeria and Tunisia.37 The nadira is traditionally
 Orature 27

grouped in cycles based on the vulgar, cunning scoundrel and trickster

Djeha ( Jha, Goha), surely related to the similar rogue protagonist Abu’l-Fath
Al-Iskandari, the traditional protagonist of the maqamat, t and quite possibly
to other rogue and trickster figures featured in so many of the world’s folk
stories.38 Appearing in colloquial Algerian and Tunisian as well as Berber
narratives, Djeha represented popular wisdom and humor, his wit often used
to expose the unrecognized comicality of a situation, and more often still to
outmaneuver the diverse authority figures and structures of power in society.
He responded to the vital need to laugh both individually and collectively
at oneself and at one’s surroundings. As we shall see, the character of Djeha
provides one of the most important links between the oral tradition of the
Maghreb and the new Western-style literary theatre of the modern era.
This dynamic provides a good example of the interweaving of perform-
ance cultures that has occurred throughout the history of the Maghreb.
Here pre-existing performance practice co-existed along with Arabo-Islamic
autocratic literacy, though in a state of tension whereby the latter has
ever sought to intervene in the process of artistic expression in the name of
“Islamic political correctness” and the eradication of profane and non-Islamic
practices.39 However, it has never succeeded in silencing and containing this
multi-layered diglossic body of performance phenomena, for its embedded
agency and subaltern insurgency and resistance are mapped by practices of
collective identity. The culture becomes a mosaic of inscriptions composed
of hybridized yet diasporic cultures: pre-Islamic Amazight cultures, Middle-
Eastern Arab settlers, Andalusian Jews and Muslim “Moorish” refugees, besides
other influences from Sub-Saharan territories and the northern Mediterranean
coast. The Maghreb has been receptive of a multitude of cultural variations
throughout history, as it stands midway between Europe and Africa. This
diversity constitutes this space as a container of multiple identities; a sedi-
mental layering of performance cultures past and present, in permanent
exchange though some times in flux between moments of crisis and tragic
sublimity. The age-old controversies between Arab and Amazight (Berber)
Moroccans over cultural and territorial memory illustrate the intense over-
lapping of different identities rooted in “deep Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia”
against the official discourse of convivencia and happy hybridity as forms
of performing cultural diversity.
3
The Halqa

Although our emphasis so far has been upon the contributions of the
storyteller as a key manifestation of a complex and interwoven performance
culture in the Maghreb long before the advent of modern colonialism and
its introduction of Western forms, we need now to turn our attention to
a closely related phenomenon, the space in which the public storytellers
performed. This traditional space, most commonly called al-halqa (the
circle) is as central to the non-Western performance tradition as the storyteller
himself, and similarly layered with cultural echoes and references. We have
already mentioned the appropriation of such public spaces as markets and
streets for their performances by both the Islamic and Tamazight storytellers.
Joachim Fiebach, a pioneer scholar in the modern study of theatre in Africa,
has noted the close connection between the performance and how it utilizes
these appropriated spaces:

In oral societies, full-fledged theatre occurs when a single body’s facial

expressions, gestures, and movements perform storytelling or praise sing-
ing, demarcating and creating a particular space and a specific physical
relationship with onlookers; the creative cooperation of several bodies is
at the core of more complex theatre forms.1

Al-halqa is a term used both for the performance space created when audi-
ences cluster in the form of a circle around a performer(s) (hlayqi/hlayqia)
and also for the performance created there. It is the most overtly theatrical
amongst artistic spaces in traditional market-places and fairs, as well as in
other public spheres such as the gates of ancient medinas. As a site of a
community’s subjunctive mood and performative agency, al-halqa hovers
between high culture and low or mass culture, sacred and profane, literacy
and orality. Its varied repertoire combines fantastic, mythical, and historical
narratives from A Thousand and One Nights and Sirat Bani Hilal, stories
from the holy Qu’ran and the Sunna of the prophet Mohammed (Peace
be upon him), and witty peasant narratives. The techniques employed in
28
 The Halqa 29

al-halqa also vary: from storytelling to acrobatic dancing, snake charming,

fortunetelling, boxing, herbal vending, healing, and singing in different
languages. Al-halqa still remains today the most significant cadre for perform-
ance behavior throughout the Maghreb; an array of other artistic practices are
in fact framed within a circle of al-halqa. In the middle-Eastern parts of the
Arab world, the storyteller, generally known as al-hakawati, may perform
in both circular and semi-circular arrangements in open public places and
coffee houses, the Maghreb halqa is almost invariably a floating ring.
In its highly diverse forms, al-halqa serves both as a source of artistic delight
and entertainment, and as a means of spacing cultural identity. In other words,
besides its aesthetic aspects as a performance event, it is a medium of infor-
mation and circulation of social energy, a social drama, and a subsidiary school
whose syllabus is as fluid as its rich repertoire. Al-halqa also contributes to
the representation of historical consciousness and cultural identity, through
its formulaic artistic expression. As Philip Schuyler reports: “The itinerant
entertainers acted as journalists, carrying news from one market to the
next. Public preachers offered moral guidance and explanations of religious
texts to a largely illiterate public. Comedians provided political and social
commentary. Storytellers gave lessons in history. Musicians put all these
messages into song.”2 Seen from a Bakhtinian perspective, these stories and
narrative utterances are strongly affiliated with individual and communal
lives, and have been repeated often enough to become artful narrative per-
formances that bear clear traces of how the community performs itself to
itself. Artistically, al-halqa functions both as a “hybridized space of social
license in the Moroccan imagination”3 and as a performance tradition that
is fueled by festive theatricality. This aesthetically marked space is a con-
stantly rehearsed oral text that is (re)written time and again under erasure
(sous rasure) through artistic expression ranging from narrative folktales and
storytelling to ritualistic dancing, theatrical pantomime, and improvisation.
Al-halqa is an inclusive category; it genuinely encompasses all other artistic
genres and performance practices in a single performance spectrum that is
dialogical through and through since it is constructed as patterns of infi-
nitely self-erasing traces. Al-halqa’s texture transcends the boundaries of the
written word as a scriptocentric closure, for it is a dynamic network of inter-
related codes that are not necessarily linguistic.
In al-halqa performances, “the aesthetic dimension comes to the fore as
performers accept responsibility not only for what they do, but also for how
they do it. The audience of a performance maintains a dual focus, attend-
ing to what is said and done, and how it is accomplished.”4 Al-halqa, in this
sense, has a managed environment that is strictly opposed to the proscenium
tradition. Its audience is called upon “to drift” spontaneously into an arc
surrounding the performance from all sides. How is it possible to create and
maintain a living circle that breathes, listens, and participates in the pleasures
of storytelling? And how does the hlayqi (the maker of the spectacle) engage
30 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

in the process of constructing the circular structure of al-halqa? The space

required by the hlayqi is not a specific space, and the timing of the perform-
ance is any time. No fourth wall with hypnotic fields is erected between
stage and auditorium, for such binary opposition does not exist in al-halqa.
All the market-place or medina gates can be transformed into a stage; and
the entire circle is a playing area, as open as its repertoire of narratives
and dances. “The spectators … may be recruited as actors or as a chorus
commenting on the events … each spectator is a potential contributor”5
in the performance event. The storyteller emerges in a given place raising
his voice and clapping his hands to attract attention. Then, a few minutes
later the place is transformed into a performance space. Usually, her/his
props involve a little carpet as a marker of the magic of storytelling, a
book of a Thousand and One Nights or Syrat bani hilal among others, and
sometimes a miraculous stick whereby she/he draws the magic demarcat-
ing line of her/his captivating circle. Every hlayqi/ya has a unique way of
starting her/his performance, but the most common among storytellers
goes thus: “once upon a time and a long time it was ….”
The circle is also a sine qua non paradigm in the fashioning of Moroccan
medieval urban centers as well as the social imaginary of people. In opposi-
tion to the grid-based plans of the Roman camps and cities, the morphology
of the Arabo-Islamic city, in general, as manifested in most of the ancient
medinas of the Maghreb (Fez, Marrakesh, Taroudant, Tangier, and Sale) is
devised in the form of inner circles within outer circles. The ancient medina
of Fes is an excellent example. The city was founded in 789 as his capital
by Idriss I, who was also founder of Morocco’s first medieval Arabo-Islamic
dynasty. At the heart of the ancient city is a genuine labyrinth of circles
surrounded by many gates wherein Al-Qarawiyin Mosque and University
is situated at the center as a spiritual inception, as well as a panoptic reli-
gious and cultural marker. More than a religious place wherein prayers are
performed five times per day, it is an institutionalized category and a highly
discursive and contentious field. Since its foundation in 856, this mosque
has played a leading role in the cultural exchange and transfer of knowledge
between Muslims and Europeans.
As a small dot at the heart of the medina, Al-Qarawiyin is built in a full
circle; around it there are other micro-circles that are organized hierarchically
from the most privileged artifacts, bazaars, and houses located near the
center, to minor shops and poor areas in the outer circles that face the gates.
Al-halqa performance, as a free and state-licensed folk expressive behavior,
is situated most often at the medina gates and market-places – far from the
sacred center and its own sacred and didactic halqa. Though the performance
halqa is situated on the periphery of the circle, it functions as an entertaining
social commentary – that amounts to parody sometimes – on what is going
on inside the inner circles. It is thus a tolerated form indicating the boundaries
between sacred and profane, and a carnivalesque mirror of topsy-turvidom
 The Halqa 31

generating an oscillation between the inside-out and the outside-in of the

whole circular medina. Even when the narrative performers were presumably
charged with teaching doctrine or morality, they often utilized humor and
entertainment to pursue this end, and such strategies always involved the
possibility, indeed one might say the proclivity, to slip into critique.
The renowned square called Jemma-el-Fna in the city of Marrakech
(see Figure 1) is one of the few remaining sites that celebrate al-halqa’s cul-
tural diversity and richness. The site still preserves the spirit of al-halqa
despite the increased tendency towards its folklorization. Rather than “The
Assembly of the dead,” which is the literal translation of its name, it is an
assembly-place of infinite variety and a magic space where folk perform-
ance cultures have flourished every day for at least four centuries. The first
mention of Jemma-el-Fna, from the seventeenth century, shows that the
halqa performances were already well established there. The theologian
Hassan Al Youssi reports that: “In my quest for knowledge I arrived in the
year 1060 (CE 1650) of the Hegra in Marrakech. There I went one day to the
grand esplanade (Jemma-el-Fna) to hear the praises of the Prophet. I took a
place in an imposing circle (halqa) made up of those curious to hear an old
man who told them comic stories.”6 Throughout its fascinating history, the
square has been home to some of the great Moroccan itinerant performers
and storytellers.

Figure 1 Al-halqa in Jemma-el-Fna, Marrakesh, Morocco (photo courtesy of Association

Jemma-el-Fna)
32 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

Today, most of the micro-circles inside the medina are deployed as

performative spaces, playing grounds, and sites of group experience and
outdoor education for children and adults. While walking back and forth
from the traditional Qu’ranic Schools called “Lamssid” and their homes,
children become accustomed to the environment of al-halqa from their
early formative years. It is their most privileged parcour; r a trajectory that
is located in a liminal space between two disciplinary apparatuses: that of
the inside represented by the law of the father and that of the outside/in as
manifested in the authoritarianism of the traditional Qu’ranic school and
the aura of authority that is indelibly bestowed upon its Master (Fqih( ). This
junction place inside the old medina represents an ideal platform for sponta-
neous performance behavior for children and adults alike, due to its licensed
liberating spirit. The frequent visits of itinerant professional performers such
as Harrba, ’Assala, and ’Aicha Harouda to the narrow streets of the ancient
medina of Fes illustrate the potential efficacy of collective outdoor rehearsed
activities. Here, children practice all sorts of games and engage in the most
intimate interactions that lead to a marked group experience. Mohammed
Kaghat stresses the performer Harrba’s omnipresence all over the city of Fes:
“The most famous visitor to the medina and perhaps the last one remaining
from the entertainers of Rass-L’qlia’ square is a man named Harrba, who is
at once a hlayqi, a meddah, and a smayri … He used to hang around all over
the medina tuning his performance in accordance with his audiences and
their number ... He is Fes’ Thespis, a traveling actor who brings performance to
people.”7 As a professional hlayqi, Harrba turns the whole city of Fes into a
site-specific performance, as the city’s whole environment becomes part of
his moving spectacle.
Al-halqa’s circular form is also manifested in the nomadic life of Moroccan
peasants living in the duwaarr (which literally means the circle). In medieval
Moroccan society, a duwaarr was a circle of tents of the nomads roaming the
landscape of experience and choosing expatriation as their comfort zone;
their cattle kept inside the circle in order to be well supervised. The tradition
around the holy Ka’aba during pilgrimages to Mecca also highlights the
divinity of the circular form in Islam. In the Sufi conception of al-hijab
(the veil) and particularly Ibnu Arabi’s symbolic reading of Arabic alpha-
betical graphic form, the circle stands midway between divine order and the
human order. According to the great Master Ibnu Arabi (1165–1240), Arabic
calligraphy is far more than an ornamental representation of language; it is
a container of differing relationships between the absolute and the finite,
the divine and the human … The letter “nun” (n) “is half a circle. And the
demarcating point that is located on top of the letter reveals the significance
of the other nun that is the divine nun (the sublime nun as opposed to the
underground nun). Also, the nun underwrites the circularity of the universe”8
as an inner dimension of Islam. The divine half of the “nun” remains unseen
and so is the divine order that is veiled for the general public. To unveil such
 The Halqa 33

order one needs to undergo a whole redemptive process of self-annihilation

and learning that parses out all differences. In accordance with the Islamic
experience of divinity and al-hijab, Arabo-Islamic arts have generally privi-
leged the Arabesque tradition and its circularity and openness.
Ellias Canetti provides a significant description of al-halqa in Voices of
Marrakech. In the section called “Storytellers and Scribes,” he observes that:
“The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. It is around them that people
throng most densely and stay longest.”9 Canetti reports that this popular
spectacle draws its public in a curiously dense way. The spontaneous complic-
ity between the performer and the public deeply affected Canetti’s account.
What is so special about al-halqa that makes it a site of a condensed presence
of bodies? It is precisely due to its set of socio-cultural preconditions, artistic
grace, and the participative energies of the performer(s) and audience, along
with its formulaic repertoire. Al-halqa stages a script that persistently escapes
closure through its insistence on openness. Canetti observes that the per-
formance is lengthy: “an inner ring of listeners squat on the ground and it
is some time before they get up again. Others, standing, form an outer ring;
they, too, hardly move, spellbound by the storyteller’s words and gestures.”10
At least four intrinsic components of a performance event are implied in
Canetti’s description. First, is al-halqa’s theatricality; second, its circular archi-
tecture; third, its spell-binding effects upon its viewers; and fourth, its acting
strategies that fuse verbal and body languages. Gesture as a visual metaphor
is artfully articulated in the performance.
In his critique of Nikolai Lesskov’s writings, Walter Benjamin pays a
particular tribute to the living immediacy and present force inherent in the
act of storytelling, despite his departure from a nostalgic view of the story-
teller’s position in modern society. His analysis of the difference between
novelists and storytellers in “The Storyteller” highlights the shared experi-
ence that is typical of storytelling as a live process:

What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the
fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral
tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in partic-
ular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that
reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who
are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace
of the novel is the solitary individual.11

Given al-halqa’s magical capacity to implicate “Others,” it negotiates the

differing relationships among its participants, and in the process it reformu-
lates social legitimation and cultural values. The role of the spectators in the
fulfillment of the halqa performance is mandatory, as they are active partici-
pants and co-subjects rather than passive recipients. The agency embedded
in an audience’s participation is best illustrated, by Erika Fischer-Lichte, as
34 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

autopoetische feedback-schleife (the autopoietic feedback loop) wherein the

“aesthetic experience of a performance does not depend on the ‘work of art’ but
on the interaction of the participants.”12 In Fischer-Lichte’s terms, al-halqa is an
ideal self-generating performance paradigm with an interminably operating
feedback loop. The concentration of audiences in a circular way around the
performer, who in turn is facing them from all sides, allows the circulation
of energy between themselves and the hlayqi and vice versa. This incessant
flow of energy is partly what makes al-halqa a heightened esthetic experi-
ence and a moment when all simulacra are temporarily interrupted and no
everyday spectacle is taking place.
The storyteller makes use of improvisation, voice, body, posture, flows,
tensions, and release of energy to create an intricate rhythmic relationship
between movement and text so as to explore beyond her/his everyday self
without fully disappearing. Performance space is genuinely shaped and
characters are erected through voice and body movement, intuition, and
imagination. When a storyteller relates to an audience, Peter Brook notes,
in his comments on the storyteller’s acting strategies, “he tries with
everything at his command to lift the audience to an imaginary world –
without disappearing himself ... At the center, the actor doesn’t need to
disappear. One of the things that keeps the story alive is that the audience
sees the man who is telling the story as himself, and the audience is having
a nice warm relationship with that person.”13
Hassan Bahraoui, in his study of Moroccan pre-theatrical forms, observes
that “besides the mimetic and acting strategies of al-halqa, its distinguished
play with distantiation can hardly be found in [Western] classical theatre.”14
Distantiation has a double function in al-halqa. It highlights the judiciousness
of suspense – a device as old as the Thousand and One Nights. Meanwhile, it
disrupts the performance with another performance or series off performances
producing an endless set of, say, meta-halqas as aspects of the mise en abyme
resulting from its constant use of framing devices. Schuyler describes the
subtlety of the transition from performance to musical pitch in the follow-
ing terms: “Musicians may engage in a mock argument over the text or the
rendition of a song …. The introduction of prayer is a second fund-raising
strategy: the attempt to divorce the appeal for money from entertainment.
The performers’ pleas may be cast entirely in religious formulae.”15 These
mock arguments, prayers, blessings, and appeal for financial assistance are
artistically delivered in such a way that they become part of the spectacle. Seen
from a theatrical perspective, these are paradigmatic elements of a perform-
ance text as a theatrical event. These strategies are the crossroads of highly
exalted acting techniques fused and enacted in a very simple formulaic
space. Such fusion brings together a number of contradictory acting strate-
gies in a single performance: Stanislavskian acting methods of identification
are enacted by the performers’ adoption of trans-historical characters, and
Brechtian techniques of distanciation are foregrounded to shift from one
 The Halqa 35

narrative frame to another, from one persona to another within the very
same narrative, to reflect on the performance itself, or to comment on other
performances and halqas.
Framing is more than an artistic device in the storyteller’s halqa; it is a
matter of survival too. Scheherazade’s heirs are conscious of the spellbinding
effects of framing as a strategy of telling stories-within-stories-within-stories
ad infinitum, and by doing so, they could simply survive and persist in tell-
ing stories. In Romancing Scheherazade, Lahsen Benaziza recalls one of the
powerful moments of framing stories by a typical itinerant storyteller in the
Wednesday Fairs of Benslimane, a town near Casablanca; his recollection
runs thus:

The wily storyteller would lead his tale to a climax, then pause, and hat
in hand, he would walk around the crowd of listeners and make pleas to
their generous hearts. All too eager to see him get on with the story, the
listeners would fumble for change in their pockets and toss a rain of coins
in the storyteller’s hat. But instead of resuming the interrupted story and
leading it to its denouement, the storyteller would surreptitiously digress,
open another frame, get another story off the ground, lead it to its climax,
and pause again for more money, only to digress again, open the third
frame, and tell a new story, and so it went for, as it were, one thousand
and one Wednesdays.16

Framing is what keeps Scheherazade alive, and is thus one of the secrets of
al-halqa’s performative boundlessness. This tradition relates directly to The
Arabian Nights where, according to John Barthes, “Scheherazade tells by
[his] count 169 primary tales; she moves to the second degree of narrative
involvement on no fewer than nineteen occasions, to tell 87 tales within the
primary tales, and to the third degree on four occasions, to tell eleven tales –
within-tales-within-tales – 267 complete stories in all.”17 Al-halqa demonstrates
the same process of framing; its stories remain unfinished, and yet framed
within other stories. Like the storytelling which it utilizes, al-halqa serves
both as a source of artistic delight and entertainment, and as a means of
reinforcing cultural identity.
Abidat r’ma is perhaps the halqa form closest to Western proscenium thea-
tre. This is a musical performance, an extension of the peasants’ natural envi-
ronment and nomadic life ideally performed during harvest time in particular
areas of Morocco – the plains of Al-hawz, Al-gharb, ‘Abda, Dokalla, Shiadma,
Z’aer, and also among the Arab converts of the Berber tribes of Zemmour.
The phrase Abidat r’ma is composed of two words: Abidatt (dedicated people),
and r’ma which is, in turn, derived from rimaya (shooting arrows, fling or
throw) and ramye (the sound of the stone while being thrown in the desert).
So, the combination Abidat r’ma implies that these are dedicated people who
shoot words and music rather than al-barud d (gun-powder). The deployment
36 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

of the phrase Abidat r’ma is significantly related to those entertainers who

used to accompany hunters in their day-long hunting expeditions. They were
both servants and entertainers. The r’ma were nomads and travelers and also
second-class people. Their spectacle comprises a variety of singing, acting,
and improvisation. Like the usual al-halqa, r’ma’s spectacle is located in a
circle (see Figure 2), but with an inviting aperture that is intended to engage
audiences. This kind of “arché-scriture” is due to the nature of the spectacle
and also its audience. Most of the time the spectacle starts as an appeal from
the part of the r’ma, seeking to be hosted by the generous (talbin dif allah).
In the past, the spectacle used to take place in the government houses (dur
al-makhzan), a fact that helps to explain the often semi-circular perform-
ance, for its audience was conceived by y r’ma as highly privileged people.
Within this self-consciously constructed hierarchy, an imaginary division
was formed. As a result, a fourth wall similar to the Western theatre’s stage/
auditorium fracture occurs also in the r’ma performance.
The spectacle off r’ma is far from conventional Western practice, however,
based on acting, acrobatic games, and improvisation. Their music extends the
dramatic aspects of their acts of representation. Also, their musical instruments,
which are made of rural material and animal skins, reflect their natural
environment. Indeed, natural environment is strongly present even in their
songs and narratives. As an example, a major theme in r’ma is the forest.
While listening to their songs, one is compelled to feel the extent to which
these people admire and desire to protect the forest as a natural environ-
ment. In one of their songs, the forest is represented as a scapegoat, and the
r’ma cries out (long before modern environmentalists): “mal l-ghaba m-qalqa
mn-harr l-mnshar khayfa wt-’ayet a-m-mal-li skhito biya …” (Why is the forest
angry? from the pain of the saw it is afraid, and crying out: “how dare you,
my own people, get rid of me!”).
This carnivalesque tendency of orature toward subversion or at least toward
continual renegotiation of established structures, parameters, and authority,
has always made it the object of suspicion if not outright oppression by those
in power. By the middle of the ninth century the qassas had lost the support
of religious authorities and were condemned for misleading and abusing
their gullible public. The officially sanctioned qassas could be easily sup-
pressed, but the storytellers of the halqa operated outside such authority
and continued their creation of alternative worlds often deeply committed
to social and political satire. They had troubled the Islamic religious authori-
ties almost from the beginning, but these authorities were as unsuccessful in
silencing them as were the later French colonial powers, who in their turn
became the subject of the halqas’ critique.
 37
Figure 2 Al-halqa in Assila, Morocco (photo from Khalid Amine’s collection)
4
Shadow Plays and Costumed
Performers

Widespread and varied as the storytelling tradition was both in the Maghreb
and in the Arab-Islamic world in general, it was by no means the only sig-
nificant type of performance activity within that world in the pre-colonial
period. A wide variety of other such activity also existed, most importantly
in the puppet theatre tradition and in the rich collection of rites and rituals
and theatricalized ceremonies in every part of this region.
The shadow theatre, in Arabic khayal al-zill, a performance tradition with
obvious ties to the live theatre, is a very ancient form in the Arab world.
It is well documented in Egypt from the tenth century onward and three
shadow plays of remarkable literary complexity created by Ibn Daniel in
Cairo have been preserved from the thirteenth century. A recent edition of
these plays (in Arabic) by Hopwood and Badawi, includes a useful English
introduction which notes the many similarities between these texts and
those of the maqamat, including stage directions and similarity of charac-
terization, especially the interest in tricksters, rogues and “people from the
lowest strata of society who live by their wits and eloquence.”1 The shadow
theatre is generally thought to have appeared in Algeria during the sixteenth
century, at the same time that Algeria joined the Ottoman Empire. Historian
W. Hoenerbach suggests, reasonably, that such entertainments were intro-
duced to Algeria by soldiers in Turkish garrisons, who traditionally performed
them for the Festival of Ramadan.2 Certainly the most widespread form of
the shadow theatre in the Maghreb is the form known as Al-Quaraaqoz,
clearly closely related to the traditional Turkish Karagoz (“black-eye”), the
most popular variety of shadow theatre in Turkey and indeed throughout
much of the Ottoman Empire, including the Middle East, Greece, North
Africa, and the Balkan states. The shadow theatre of the Middle East used a
stand, as did its cousin, the European marionette theatre; but instead of an
open stage a canvas was stretched across the front opening and illuminated
from behind by an oil-lamp. This stand was set up in public squares, coffee
houses, and on special occasions such as weddings or circumcisions, in
private homes. The shadow player pressed brightly coloured figures, about
38
 Shadow Plays and Costumed Performers 39

a foot high and made of leather, against the canvas, using guiding rods inserted
into the figures. Normally all the shadow figures were controlled by a single
player, the muqaddam; but he could also hire assistants or pupils to help
with multiple figures. He might also be accompanied by three or four musi-
cians, playing tambourines, a reed flute, and a drum. In the prelude to
the performance, Karagoz, the principal character, would open the perform-
ance by greeting the public, praising the government, and announcing
the subject of the piece. The performance was then made up of short
comic dialogues, dances, and scenes normally involving linguistic misunder-
standings, violence, surprising turns, and sexual innuendo. Performances in
this tradition were often reported as a popular and widespread form by
later visitors to Algeria such as Puckler-Muskau, who expressed shock at the
obscenity of a Garagûz he observed in Algiers in 1835.3 Although the Turkish
form most commonly concerns the conflict of the wily peasant Karagoz and
his higher class but more slow-witted rival Hacivad, in Algeria Al-Quaraaqoz
is more often pitted against Laala Sunbaya and her servant. In both Turkey
and Algeria the performance utilizes much interaction with the audience
and much improvisation of words, gestures, and actions.
Aside from their obscenity, the shadow plays were noted for their social
criticism, especially of the abuses of court officials and the wealthy and power-
ful. This tradition naturally made them vehicles of criticism of the French
occupation, and thus the target of attacks and suppression by those forces.
In Tunisia they were outlawed entirely by the Resident General, René
Millet,4 and in Algeria by the French authorities in 1843 and again in 1911.5
In the more remote areas of both countries, however, they continued in
popularity well into the next century and the expression “faire le Gargûz”
(to play the fool) can still be heard today.
Returning to live performance, the other major field of such activity in the
Maghreb is that of ritual and religious performance, perhaps the most varied
and complex type of performance activity in cultures around the world. Almost
all ritual performance involves self and other, the doubling of consciousness,
the simultaneous operation of different levels of reality, and the “restored
behavior” which Richard Schechner has cited as fundamental to performa-
tive activity. Often the central figure in such activity is disguised as a visible
Other, and the masquerade persona and world thus created is a hallmark of
both theatre and much cultural performance. Indeed, Richard Southern in
Seven Ages of Theatree took the masqueraded figure as the foundation of theatre
throughout the world. “It is clearly not for nothing,” he points out,

that the one symbol of theatre which above all others has come to be
accepted through the world is a mask. What does a mask do to the man?
Two things; it takes away the person we know (it can even take away
humanity). And it invests the wearer with something we do not know but
which is awful and non-human, a god or a devil … but the player in a
40 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

mask, powerful as a mask is, may yet be partially betrayed; most obviously
by his hands, next by his feet, next by his arms and legs and last by his
trunk. These at least are human and familiar.
Take now an “extension” of his mask, and with it let the hands be
gloved, the feet shod, the arms and legs clad, and the body invested, and
you have a complete concealment of the world and a complete revelation
of the supernatural.
And you have the origin (and can appreciate the significance) of theatrical
costume.6

Among the many examples of such activity in the Maghreb, perhaps the
best known is Bujlud,7 or the master of skins, a major performance behavior
that has been practiced all over Morocco as well as in Algeria and Tunisia.
Abdellah Hammoudi began his anthropological study on sacrifice and mas-
querade, entitled The Victim and Its Masks, with a fundamental question:
how and under what conditions can one manifest this other that is oneself? 8
Bujlud’s masquerade seems to offer an answer to Hammoudi’s question.
Bujlud is a masquerade that is part of a ritual cycle inaugurated by “the blood
sacrifice” of the id-el-kbirr and the festival of Ashura. As Hammoudi puts it:

Indeed, the blood sacrifice inaugurates a ritual cycle that will end some
thirty days later with the ceremonies of the Ashura, a festival for the dead
in which the participants give alms, eat dried fruit, and buy toys that the
children of the community waste no time in appropriating. The sacrifice
and the Ashura mark the passage of time; the first brings the old year to
a close and the second opens the New Year.9

These rituals are temporal landmarks that map the annual cycle. Bujlud is
situated between two other rites: Sacrifice and Ashura. It stages an act of
representation full of mystery, yet profoundly rooted in the sub-historical
formation of Moroccan culture long before the coming of Islam.
Many theorists have seen theatre as originating in such ritual, as the passage
of time removes its sacred character. Eugenio Barba, for example, argues that
while ritual is built up “around the repetition of an action which was origi-
nally performed by a god or a supernatural hero,” when the repetition loses
its religious foundation “we are left with nothing but an empty shell, a for-
mula which the critics attach to the phenomena of theatre when they cannot
be categorized in any other way.”10 This may indeed explain the transforma-
tion of Dionysian ritualistic formulae into secular theatre in ancient Greece,
but we find in the Maghreb performance behaviors and rituals that have
remained closely connected with religious markers, never hollowed out
to give birth to a theatre tradition in the Western model. Post-colonialism,
however, has manifested a strong tendency to retrieve these underground
traditions, and at times divorce them from their religious content.
 Shadow Plays and Costumed Performers 41

The whole Bujlud masquerade can be seen as Richard Southern would see it,
as an embryonic form of theatre; it is a highly artistic formulaic performance
space that perpetuates itself through a constantly rehearsed script (an unwritten
text, literally speaking, but inscribed in the communal imaginary), precisely
the first “age” of theatre postulated by Southern in his evolutionary model
of the development of the art. The Frazerian hypotheses applied by Emile
Laoust, in his study of the Berber version of Bujlud ((Bilmawn), date the mas-
querade back to long before the Arabo-Islamic conquest. The performance is
considered by Laoust as “the drama of the god’s death and resurrection, which
celebrates the year drawn to its close (worn out and dying) and the beginning
of a new time. An old agrarian religion based on the renewal of nature adopt-
ing practices introduced by the new religions: Christianity and later, Islam.”11
Laoust’s reading is problematic, based heavily as it is upon the Frazerian
model of a pan-Mediterranean resurrection cult and also upon an evolution-
ary assumption which sees the Bujlud as a faint secular echo of a much more
primitive religious practice than the more highly developed and sophisticated
Islam. Still, he offers an answer to the mysterious combination between
sacrifice (as an Islamic religious practice) and bujlud (a licensed non-religious
ritual, yet mysteriously annexed to the Feast of Sacrifice). The masquerade
seems to be an extension of the id el-kbirr (the Feast of Sacrifice), insofar as it
enacts a representation that uses a prop (animal skin) proper to sacrifice. And
this very fact constitutes the ambiguous compromise between two overlapping
orders: the religious and the pagan. As René Bravmann observes:

The acceptance of masking and figurative rituals in an Islamic context

therefore cannot be construed simply as a case of massive backsliding or
apostasy, but should be viewed as a reflection of the pragmatic results of
the confrontation of Islam and traditional cultures. Aspects of indigenous
life are retained everywhere precisely because they provide solutions that
lie outside the universalistic realm of Islam.12

Thus, this masquerade represents a hybrid performance space that fuses

pre-Islamic as well as Islamic dogmas. Theatricality dominates the whole
masquerade, and is manifested at various levels. The most striking feature
is the use of masks and costumes. Often Bujlud is accompanied by a man
or boy dressed as a woman, sometimes Bujlud’s wife, sometimes the wife
of an old man called Sheikh Al-Shukuyk (“the Oldest of the Old”).13 Other
costumes and masks represent other social identities: the Jew, the slave, the
Muslim, and Bujlud. The latter is the monster who wears animal skin, and
who is mysteriously Othered out of the human order, yet incorporated once
again as a source of vitality and blessedness:

[I]ndeed the slave and Jews are transformed by simple tricks of costume
and make-up and belong to familiar classes of men. The actor who has
42 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

become Bilmawn, on the contrary, has left the human order. Among
invisible beings he has the distinction that the only thing known of him
in everyday life is his name ... . Bilmawn is to the human order what the
slave and Jew are [to] the community: the other. He is otherness. But he
is a radical otherness, while the slave and Jew represent specific cases in
the universal classification of men.14

Clearly, as indicated in Hammoudi’s critique, the masquerade represents the

collective fictitious self through the subversive mirror of topsy-turvidom.
Social identities, as cultural constructs and products of hierarchical power
structures, are represented in a carnivalesque subversive way. Bilmawn is the
unique being who is an alien Other, yet paradoxically his claimed fertility is
appealing, especially to women. The whole festivity is a drama that invokes
the underground self in a peculiarly hybrid manner.
In Jajouka, a small village in the foothills of the Rif mountains in northern
Morocco (about 60 miles south of Tangier), Bujlud is mysteriously associated
with the rhaita pipes (a sort of oboe), flutes, and drums that captured Western
attention in the early 1950s. Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs,
and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones were the first ones to explore this her-
itage. During the Feast of Sacrifice here, a Jajoukan man dressed in a freshly
slaughtered goat skin leaps around dancing all night long while the legen-
dary music of Jajouka blares into the open air of a ring-like agora or circle
of villagers. Entranced by the hypnotic fields of the rhaita pipes and drums,
Bujlud chases onlookers aggressively, sometimes with his switch. This fact
is what led Wetermark, and Brion Gysin after him, to think of this annual
performance behavior as a re-enactment of the ancient Roman rites of Pan:
the Lupercalia ensuring fertility, and sustaining the age-old balance between
the two sexes. Such a rite is also deployed by Shakespeare when Julius Caesar
asks Antonius to touch his wife Calpurnia, as the holy chase will certainly
shake off all sterile curses.15
Brion Gysin was not only fascinated by Jajouka’s music but also by the
various processes of ritualistic formulae that permeate such magical musical
delivery: “Fifty raitas banked against a crumbling wall bellow sheet light-
ning to shatter the air. Fifty wild flutes blow up a storm in front of them,
while a platoon of small boys in long belted white robes and brown wool
turbans drums like young thunder. All the villagers, dressed in best white,
swirl in great circles and coil around one wildman in skins.”16 The complicity
of Jajouka’s women villagers gives strong support to Gysin’s theory. William
Burroughs also evoked the image of Pan when he encountered Bujlud in
Tangier, describing his encounter as “Face to face with the Goat-God.” He
reported that: “Boujeloud in his black goatskins is dancing in a little square
lit by bonfire snatching up switches to whip the women who run screaming
before him. If he touches a woman with his switch she will become preg-
nant before the year is out.”17 Another modern traveler, Stephen Davis, was
 Shadow Plays and Costumed Performers 43

called to Morocco in order to observe the whole rite of Bujlud on-site along
with its magic music that has inspired the Rolling Stones ever since Brian
Jones’ first visit. He describes the event in his book entitled Jajouka Rolling
Stone: A Fable of Gods and Heros: “The drums kept up their brutal, primordial
beat, and again the goat scampered through the fire, sending a shower of
orange sparks flying upward. Tahir, who had been leading the drummers, got
up without losing the beat and led Boujeloud into a cluster of perhaps fifty
white-blanketed girls and women, who ululated and yodeled in high wild
voices as the drummer and Boujeloud entered their pulsating circle.”18
Up till now, there is no record of any use of Bujlud performance on the
Moroccan stage; but the character of Bujlud with all its complexities and
intricacies often appears as Herma, or the Other from within. Still, the Jajouka
master musicians who highly esteem the mythical tradition of Bujlud have
now become international due to the pilgrimages of Brian Jones and Mick
Jagger, among others. Bujlud’s pipes and drums have become very popular in
postmodern circles, due to various collaborations and interweaving between
the master musicians of Jajouka and the legendary music group, the Rolling
Stones (and other American rock and pop music groups as well). These
collaborations are a kind of writing and inscription within arenas of
the translocation of ethnicity. They are fusions between basic orality and
Western music, mediating between two different cultures, and ultimately
two different publics; they are attempts at preserving an oral tradition that
is, according to Paul Bowles, under siege because of the advancement of
consumer culture in Morocco. In a related context, the series of recordings
of traditional Moroccan music that Bowles made for the Library of Congress
in 1959 attempted to preserve a vanishing art. Ironically, the music recorded
by Bowles enhanced the gaze of many postmodern musicians who not only
were inspired by it, but who have repeatedly sought to incorporate these
autochthonous rhythms into their own music. The current international
music festivals of Gnaoua and TanJaz (the first in Saouira and the second
in Tangier) function against the essentialist trajectory traced by Bowles as
the “archetypal seeker for the innocent state, the stainless past, the Eden,
as he imagines, of pre-mechanized man.”19 As has occurred in much auto-
chthonous performance, this ancient rite has found new life and relevance
in the most contemporary artistic expressions.
5
Carnival and Ritual Performance

There is a close connection between the dynamics of the mask and the
masquerade performance and the operations of carnival, another major
performative activity in the Maghreb. In his study Le Maroc inconnu which
contains many examples of indigenous folk performance which he gathered
in that country between 1872 and 1893, ethnographer August Mouliéras
comments on the carnival in the Rif, a fascinating area where pagan myths
and observances are deeply imbricated with Islamic practice and quasi-
Islamic rites honoring the marabouts (holy persons).
The modern Rifain carnival perpetuates a secular tradition with origins
lost in the mists of time. A grotesque spectacle takes place three times a year:
the Muslim new year, which takes place at Al-id-al-kabirr (The Great Festival),
and Al-id-es-sghirr (The Small Festival) and at Ashura. From the moment the
sun rises the crowd invades the streets, awaiting the appearance of the five
persons who make up the unique masquerade found in the locality.
Mouliéras goes on to describe the traditional “five persons,” who have more
recently been utilized by dramatists with a commitment to folk material
such as Kateb Yacine, and the short farcical skit they perform. The persons
are Ba-Cheikh (the Wise Man), his wife (with crude jewelry made of trash),
the Cadi (judge), a grotesque figure of authority (with a huge beard, shells
for ears, and face darkened with henna), the donkey, and the Jew. A parody
trial takes place ending with a grotesque verdict and mock prayers.1
Like the Bujlud, the situation and the characters in the carnival’s mock trial
are deeply embedded in folk culture and indeed may still be found today in
various forms across the Maghreb. In Kagylie, the Amazight region of Algeria,
the old man Ba-Cheikh appears as Amghar azemni, an ancient figure dressed
“in a sheepskin mask together with a great beard and a white moustache,” who
serves as a “guide, counselor and judge.” In this version he is accompanied by
a group of slaves, their donkey, a chorus of meddah who serve as narrator, and
a group of peasants who sing when they are offered gifts of food.2
The costumed performer, as Southern pointed out, creates a theatrical-
ized space by his very appearance, but performance behavior can also be
44
 Carnival and Ritual Performance 45

inspired by specific locations which have associations closely tied to peoples’

ritualistic formulae and acts of representation. Such spaces can produce
powerful performances of high artistic and creative merit. One such space
of particular importance in the Maghreb is the grave (or graves) of a holy
person, a marabout. The marabout is a major figure in the Islamic belief of
the Maghreb, a person thought to have a special relationship with God, sim-
ilar to that of the Christian saint. Sites connected with famous marabouts,
especially their graves, can become locations of the most compressed and
elaborate spiritual formulae and devotional cults. The grave is a functional
marker within the whole scenery. The saint’s blessedness (baraka) is sought
repeatedly as a recurrent leitmotif in the whole festivity. In the process a
deeply rooted theatricality is re-enacted. The saint’s grave is the center of
all sanctified rituals; its residue is a marked scene and performance space.
A clearly defined area, the hurma, surrounds every grave, large or small, and
the activity carried out within this area is elaborately defined by traditional
practice. More than a stage prop, the grave’s legitimacy is bestowed upon
all dramas performed on its site. The tomb is a mytho-historical landmark
that spells out and demarcates a sub-historical presence. Such presence, in
its turn, sanctifies the current presence of ritualistic formulae and bestows
all performative activities with energy and legitimacy. A central part of the
ritual performed at graves is the recitation of Dhikers by professional oratorical
performers, the meddah, a term also applied, as we have seen, to professional
storytellers. The Dhikerr is a familiar phrase or maxim which in the ritual is
repeated constantly by a meddah or a group of meddah (meddahin), a powerful
oral effect which has been employed by a number of contemporary dramatists
in Algeria and Morocco.
In addition to the activities at the shrine itself, there are clear performative
elements in the pilgrimage to a given shrine, the musem. As a site of both
elaborate formulae, as well as artistic free play, it is a carnival-like open space,
like a huge open-air theatre wherein a number of discursive acts of represen-
tation are anchored. The space is inscribed with a polyphony of voices and
a multitude of shapes and colors that are unified through the carnivalesque
ambiance of re-voicing tradition and idealizing transgression. These highly
codified quasi-sacred spaces allow leisure to take place as smoothly as pos-
sible, because leisure in the Maghreb is very much a performance event
that requires its stage, its location, its timing, and its props. It is also during
this annual or seasonal pilgrimage that many children accompanying their
parents are introduced to the magic world of storytellers, for there is always
a storytellers’ corner in all musems, as there is in all fairs and markets. They
become tuned with the circularity of the Muslim calendar. The field games of
the season, along with their required props, are picked during these fleeting
encounters with other children coming from other parts of the little cosmos.
But, it is left to the children to negotiate their manifestations as field plays
of the season.
46 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

In the Maghreb, as in Europe, there is a widespread tradition of carnivalesque

observances, developed far back in the region’s history and normally con-
nected to rituals concerning the changing of the seasons, the most important
of which is the Ashura. Edmund Doutté has provided a useful compilation
of the theatrical elements in such observances:

The most characteristic element of carnivalesque manifestations is the

dramatic element; all known carnivals are made up above all by represen-
tations: sometimes these are primarily combats, simulating the conflict
between winter and summer. More often they are actual dramas: origi-
nally these were sacred dramas, representing the death of a god, or the
loves of a god and goddess and their death. These were “sympathetic
dramas,” that is to say, they were designed originally to influence the
course of nature. Later the sacrifice of the god was enacted in religious
form, creating acts of adoration. Most commonly these dramas were
performed with masks or disguises. There was an attempt to identify
oneself with the dying god, as when the sacrificer puts on the skin of the
victim. This is no doubt the origin of the theatrical mask and the murder
of the god is the origin of dramatic art.3

Although the theory of the origins of theatre in rituals of the dying god is by
no means universally accepted, no performance scholar would deny Doutté’s
basic observation of the heavily theatrical element in traditional seasonal
rituals and in carnival, as they have been observed in Algeria, Tunisia, and
especially Morocco by Doutté and other ethnographers. The ritual combats
Doutté mentions have been recorded far back in the history of the Maghreb.
Saint Augustine mentions such an event taking place in Cherchell, Algeria,
and the Andalusian geographer Leon l’Africain reports performed mock
combats in Fez in his encyclopedic Description of Africa, published in Venice
around 1530. Ritual combats between individual masked figures and, more
frequently, costumed groups, are still an important part of seasonal festivals in
many parts of the Maghreb. One well-known example is the Festival of Sbeiba
in the village of Djanet (Algeria). Legend places its origin in a celebration of the
victory of Moses over the armies of the Pharaoh, and Doutté and Frazerian
anthropologists would clearly seek its beginnings in the seasonal rituals,
but the content suggests a half-remembered historical event, the reconcili-
ation of two tribes, which is in fact the content of the ritual. In any case it
is claimed to go back centuries, and nominally celebrates a treaty of peace
between the two tribes of Elmizan and Zellouaz, utilizing singing, chanting,
masks, swords, and ritual battle and reconciliation.
Sbeiba begins with representatives of the two tribes extolling the strength
of their young men, the beauty of their young women, and the courage of
their elders. They boast of and display their skill in dance, poetry, costume,
song, coiffure, masks, and swords. The dances are executed accompanied by
 Carnival and Ritual Performance 47

tambourines, while the representatives of the two tribes, in great splendor,

exhibit the sacred fabrics which recall their tribal origin and their unity in the
face of the enemy. The warriors of the two camps dress themselves in costumes
of varied colors and parade against a background of lines of women chanting
encouragement. They never actually engage in mock battle, but in abstracted
combat, displaying their weapons, defying and challenging each other. Late in
the afternoon, the elders intervene to stop the military display and to thank
the participants for their bravery and valor.4
Other seasonal celebrations have even more elements of both carnival
and theatre. An outstanding example from Morocco is the Sultan tulba (the
Students’ Sultan), a remarkable carnivalestic masquerade that fuses a variety
of artistic genres manifested in performance forms and bears a number of
striking resemblances to the Feast of Fools in medieval Europe. The mas-
querade is one of the most famous in the Maghreb, and is discussed at some
length by Frazer in his classic study of religion and mythology, The Golden
Bough. In a chapter entitled “Temporary Kings,” Frazer notes that:

The Mohammedan students of Fez, in Morocco, are allowed to appoint a

sultan of their own, who reigns for a few weeks, and is known as Sultan
t-tulba, “the Sultan of the Scribes”… The temporary sultan is surrounded
with the pomp of a real court, and parades the streets in state with music
and shouting, while a royal umbrella is held over his head … for the first
seven days the mock sultan remains in the college; then he goes about
a mile out of town and encamps on the bank of the river, attended by
the students and not a few of the citizens. On the seventh day of his
stay outside the town he is visited by the real sultan, who grants him his
request and gives him seven more days to reign.

Frazer also provides the reported origin of this ritual, drawn from French
colonial historians:

When Mulai Rasheed II was fighting for the throne in 1664 or 1665, a
certain Jew usurped the royal authority at Taza. But the rebellion was
soon suppressed through the loyalty and devotion of the students …
Forty of them caused themselves to be packed in chests which were sent
as a present to the usurper. In the dead of night, while the unsuspecting
Jew was slumbering peacefully among the packing-cases, the lids were
stealthily raised, the brave forty crept forth, slew the usurper, and took
possession of the city in the name of the real sultan who, to mark his
gratitude for the help thus rendered him in time of need, conferred on
the students the right of annually appointing a sultan of their own.

This account, Frazer considers, “has all the air of a fiction devised to explain
an old custom, of which the real meaning and origin had been forgotten.”
48 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

This “real meaning and origin” is of course the death and resurrection of
the king/god in very early cultural ceremonies which is the foundation of
Frazer’s monumental work.5
Whatever its origins, the Sultan tulba is based on both the representa-
tion and recreation of a monarchic atmosphere, through theatrical games,
improvisational comedy, and the reading of witty newsletters. It is a licensed
masquerade that represents, or rather duplicates, the whole body of the
monarchy. It was essentially celebrated as a period when students put aside
their studies and was moreover highly valued by the general public as a
leisure space of unrestrained merrymaking. According to the Moroccan
historian Mohammed Mennouni, quoting Ben Zidan, the masquerade seems
to have evolved from the already ongoing nuzhat tulba (students’ parade)
which traditionally took place during the spring break from classes.6 This
parade had to fulfill two main objectives: the first was to provide the
students with a break from their academic life during which they could
entertain themselves, and the second was to shake up the rigidity that
characterized the power relationships between master and disciple not only
in the ancient schools of Fez, but also between governor and governed in
the culture at large.
Sultan tulba was a licensed carnival that enabled the students through
public speeches, newsletters, and other means to use satire as a means to
criticize ministers, Caids, and all persons in positions of power, including the
Sultan himself. They even criticized their own behavior, acting as gourmet
table-hoppers who are after nice food wherever it is. Such linguistic lines of
substitution and transformations are concretely built up upon a scaffolding
of official and sacred narratives, a fact that creates a sharp comicality. Sultan
tulba’s speech on the sixth day of the masquerade is one example out of
many that show this farcical spirit. Hamid Triki highlights the comic aspects
of such speeches: “In honor of this very day, always Friday, the vizir proposes
that the Habous of our Sultan pronounce the famous Khotba of Soltan
Tolba, a paroxysm of the verbal burlesque, with a carnivalesque accompani-
ment yet always recalling the major preoccupation of the Tolba, which is
their concern for their daily bread, along with, of course, their studies.”7
Sultan tulba consists of the recreation of a small kingdom of ancient
schools’ students for seven days and seven nights. The king is elected among
the students in one of the schools’ mosques. Elections are open to families
and tribesmen like a public auction sale; and they are subject to the highest
bidder. Indeed, the secret behind this public interest in the students’ carnival
lies precisely in the fact that the elected sultan is entitled to request some-
thing from the real king. As soon as the king is elected, he is granted a symbolic
power whereby he is eligible to choose his ministers and high-ranking
officials. The real king then sends real monarchy’s icons to the elected
Sultan: an Arabian horse, royal robe, a majestic umbrella, servants, and lots
of food. The budget of the students’ Sultanate is collected from the auction,
 Carnival and Ritual Performance 49

as well as donations from the king, ministers, and rich merchants in a tour
of the medina announcing the carnival and transforming the cities of Fez
and Marrakech into performance spaces. Once everything is ready, the car-
nival moves towards the outskirts of the city. Upon its arrival, a whole tent
city of students at leisure is erected in the plains surrounding the city walls.
The biggest tent is that of the Sultan. Next to it is the mosque, surrounded
by other student’s tents and yet more tents for guests. In his Journal Marocain
for 5 March to 16 April 1889, Pierre Loti witnessed this festival on his way
to the actual Sultan’s palace in the city of Fez:

These white tents, outside the city, are the campground of the thulbas
(students) who at this time are celebrating their great annual festival in
the countryside. But the word student does not really suit these sober and
grave young fellows. When I speak of them I will use the term thulba,
which cannot be translated (It is known that Fez possesses the most
famous Islamic university and that two or three thousand young people
from all over North Africa come to pursue their studies in the great
mosque of Karaouin, one of the most holy sanctuaries in Islam … It is
with smiling submissiveness that these young folk take part in these
amusements. Yet they all come, the viziers, the merchants, the trades
people … and at last, on the eighth day, the sultan himself, the real one,
comes also to render homage to the sultan of the students, who receives
him on horseback, under a parasol like a caliph, and treats him as an
equal, calling him “my brother.”8

The entire masquerade is based on the representation of power. It is

a performance that is not only licensed by the highest authority of the
country, but the real Sultan takes part in it too. During the seven days of
licensed representation, everybody is assigned a particular role within the
small mamlakat talaba (student kingdom). The whole drama reaches its peak
with the actual visit of the real Sultan whose presence legitimizes the whole
representation. And it proves the importance of such masquerade wherein
the sultanate sees itself reflected through the mirrors of carnivalesque
representation. The masquerade culminates in the annual meeting between
the real king and the imaginary king of students. Thus, the masquerade
of Sultan tulba repeatedly stages the same text, though it is not written,
for the re-experiencing of something identical is clearly in itself a source
of pleasure and entertainment. The sultan tulba is a state-licensed affair
wherein the hierarchy of the official order is overturned; yet it remains the
sort of performance Terry Eagleton described as “a permissible rupture of
hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual
as a revolutionary work of art.”9
If carnival, according to Bakhtin, is a means for displacing otherness
through “the grotesque body,” it is no wonder, then, that Sultan tulba
50 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

defamiliarizes all kinds of familiar relationships within its marked perform-

ance space. This very grotesque body is always in the process of becoming,
insofar as it “is never finished, never completed: it is continually built, cre-
ated, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the
world and is itself swallowed by the world.”10 In “Theatre and Dialogism”,
Marvin Carlson comments on the distinctly performative overtones in
Bakhtin’s writings in the following terms: “Like the anthropological liminal,
the Bakhtinian carnivalesque directs our attention to models of transforma-
tion and counter-production, to centers of parody and excess both within the
heart of any social system and at its margins.”11 The subversive play of the
carnival consists of temporarily suspending the hierarchical power-structure
inherent in the practice of everyday life. As Bakhtin notes: “The laws,
prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of
ordinary, that is non-carnival life are suspended.”12 Thus Sultan tulba’s social
function is inherently ambivalent insofar as it operates both as a transgressive
and a redemptive enterprise.
The annual meeting between Sultan tulba and the legitimate Sultan of
the kingdom highlights what Terry Eagleton refers to as “a permissible
rupture of hegemony”; it is a meeting that stands midway between reality
and representation within the space of performance. The students’ Sultan
is allowed to temporarily transgress the king’s authority while the latter
pays him a visit during the sixth day of the masquerade, yet immediately
afterwards the ludic hierarchical power structure is brought to an abrupt
end. It happened that during the early 1970s, during a difficult period of
political tensions between the king and opposition, the Sultan tulba itself
was brought to an abrupt end. However, it is also thanks to King Hassan II
that this performance behavior was at last transplanted onto the contem-
porary Moroccan stage. According to Tayeb Saddiki, King Hassan II was so
very much conscious of the performative possibilities of Sultan tulba that he
asked both Saddiki and Abdessamad Kenfaoui to put it onstage. Some even
claim that the King himself made some editorial comments and additions
to the original script. If Sultan tulba was somehow erected as a licensed
performance by Sultan Moulay Rachid in the second half of the seventeenth
century, it was retrieved and transposed to modern theatre thanks to King
Hassan II three centuries later.
L’bsatt is yet another performance event that is close to contemporary
theatre. It is based on a traditional scenography, a stage, and most impor-
tantly, on archetypal characters, namely: L’mssiah, Bakchich, L’bouhou,
and Neshat. The origin of the performance of l’bsatt is disputed between two
of Morocco’s traditional imperial cities: Fez and Marrakech. Hassan Mniai
writes: “l’bsatt started in the era of King Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah
(1757–1790) who used to see its spectacles and observe through them the
corruption of the state.”13 L’bsatt was a court entertainment, performed
for the amusement of the Moroccan kings. The performances were short,
 Carnival and Ritual Performance 51

amusing farces with a central rogue character call the buhu in the north of
the country and Al-M’siyyah in the south. The meaning of the word l’bsat
itself is disputed. It literally means “a large plain” or “carpet;” whereas the
similar l’basatt can mean “amusement” or “venture.” As social satire, l’bsat
deals with politically sensitive themes aimed at critiquing the hierarchical
power structure. Corruption and power abuse are major themes off l’bsatt,
which is traditionally performed in al-makhzen (officials’ homes). This very
enactment constructs an “Other” in the very heart of the establishment,
as a fictitious self made up of the confluence of the imaginary and the
symbolic. It allows power holders to see their distorted images through
the mirror of l’bsat’s representation. Thus l’bsatt functions as a melding of
the conscious and the unconscious realms of Moroccan traditional peasant
society with all its cultural complexities and hierarchical power structures.
That such entertainments were still presented in the early twentieth century
is confirmed by Edmund Doutté, who observed such a performance in
1907, reporting that:

In Marrakech, Herma Bou Jloud is given at the Aid el-Kbir, but it is at the
Ashura that the masquerades, and above all the little dramas, take place in
the open air; this custom is highly developed, and some real comic gems
are performed, particularly before the Sultan. Indeed, the actors enter the
court of the mechouar, r and there satirical scenes, often full of wit, take
place; like those performed everywhere else, they feature the qadi and
the burlesque trial, but the greatest success is reserved for the European
ambassador, with his mock interpreter and secretaries; and especially the
ministers, who are directly portrayed and cleverly ridiculed. This satiric
liberty is all the more remarkable in that it most often takes place before
the very ministers it satirizes, and some of them are rather uncomfortable;
but their colleagues and the sultan roar with laughter, and they have no
choice but to put a good face on it.14

The performance described by Doutté, though not identified as such, is

certainly the l’bsat, for the performance takes place inside the Sultan’s palace
and presents a subversive body of distorted images from within the power
structure.
Yet another highly theatrical Moroccan performance is Sid-lketfi, an imme-
diate offshoot of l’bsat,t most associated with the city of Rabat. Like l’bsat, t
it is a highly mimetic counter-hegemonic event in fact sponsored by those
in power. It stages social behaviors with a particular emphasis on vice and
frailty. It flourished under conditions of cultural and socio-political repression
on the one hand, and colonial intervention on the other. Sid-lketfi sought to
intervene in the process of demystifying the almost mythologized practices
of various mystic religious groups. It was composed of 12 performers led by a
muqadem (a leader like the one who led the dithyramb in ancient Greece).
52 The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

They met at the house of the Pasha or some sponsor from the upper classes
and engaged in a special ritual repeated at each meeting, very much in the
manner of a theatrical performance.
L’bsatt and Sid-Iketfi have been sometimes dismissed as theatrical manifes-
tations on the rather specious grounds that they are specialized aristocratic
entertainments, with no popular base. Of course this distinction has never
been applied by European theatre historians to their own tradition, which
is heavily involved with just such entertainments, but one does not have to
rely upon aristocratic pastimes to find a widespread sense of the theatrical
among the peoples of the Maghreb. Masked figures like the Bujlud are only
one of many such manifestations, and there is scarcely a repeated public
social event that does not possess important performative elements. Let us
close with a single striking example, the traditional marriage rites among
the Tuareg people of southern Algeria. Here the whole community is
involved in a repeated traditional series of actions that can only be described
as a community drama:

At sunset the bridegroom goes with his entourage to the bride’s tent.
Here too, the artisans are in front. Among the Kel-Away tribes they are
drumming and dancing on the way. At the west side of the tent a group
of elderly women of the bride’s family make a pretense of blocking the
bridegroom’s access to the tent, but while the artisans negotiate loudly
with the women and give them a small present, the bridegroom and his
“best friend” with some effort sneak into the tent from the north side.
In the end the entire entourage of the bridegroom are huddled together
in the tent, but then the girlfriends of the bride arrive, and a sort of
“struggle of the sexes” arises during which the young girls try to get close
to the bridegroom and touch his veil or steal his sandals or some of his
ornaments, while the young men defend him.15

When the European colonial powers arrived in the Maghreb, they found
there a flourishing performative culture, ranging from the oral demonstra-
tions of the ubiquitous storytellers through the almost infinite variety of
festival and carnival observances, to the fundamentally theatrical perform-
ances in the Moroccan court. Some of these were distinctly Islamic, others
almost certainly pagan, and the majority a complex blending of the two.
The Europeans, with their culturally conditioned idea of theatre, based upon
the European and especially the French tradition, viewed these activities as,
at best, quaint local customs certainly unworthy of the name of art, and at
worst, as perverse and unpatriotic locations for the expression of subversive
and anti-colonial expression. Due to the often carnivalesque and satiric
tradition of such work this latter suspicion was often well grounded. Thus
the official colonial attitude was either to ignore such manifestations or to
outlaw them.
 Carnival and Ritual Performance 53

When European anthropologists began to collect material about these

performative traditions, they took an understandably more positive atti-
tude toward them, and their records are often the most valuable sources
we have. Nevertheless until very recent times the anthropologists shared the
biases of the colonial enterprise in general. The performance tradition was
considered interesting as an example of the primitive mind and its culture, but
if it had any relation to theatre as the Europeans knew it, this was as a vague
and dim groping toward that form, like British mummers or the masked
dancers of so many so-called primitive peoples. The lack of a European-
style tradition of theatre was generally blamed on the stultifying influence
of Islam, seen as a monolithic system of belief an important part of which
was the forbidding of any sort of physical imitation. Only in recent years,
with the rise of an interest in performance within culture and a recognition
that European theatre is only one manifestation of a very broad spectrum
of performed cultural activity, have theatre scholars become aware that
a study of the history of theatre in the Maghreb must start not with the
arrival of European actors and stages, but with an in-depth study into the
most ffundamental cultural observances of the indigenous peoples of this
complex region.
Part II
Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb
6
Nineteenth-Century European
Theatres

The development of modern, European-style theatre in the Maghreb is

here, as in much of the world, closely associated with the colonial era, but
European colonialism operated in very different ways in what is now Algeria,
Tunisia, and Morocco, and although the development of the modern theatre
in these three countries has many similar features and shares important
common reference points, there are also distinct differences, reflecting the
very different historical development of these three modern nations. Before
the coming of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, most of
the region now known as Algeria and Tunisia was controlled by an earlier
external power, the Ottoman Empire. The control was a very tenuous one,
however. Although Algeria was a part of the Ottoman Empire from the
early sixteenth century, its leader, the powerful military figure Khair al Din,
known in Europe as Barbarossa, was accorded the title of beylerbey, or local
governor by the Ottoman Sultan, and over the next two centuries the Deys
of Algiers, while nominally within the Ottoman Empire, in fact paid little
heed to distant Turkey. The territory of present Tunisia, then called Ifriquiya,
was incorporated into the Empire in 1547, but it too developed a tradition
of relative independence, so that the Bey of Tunis owed little allegiance to
the Dey of Algiers and even less to the distant Sultan.
Morocco remained outside the Ottoman dominion altogether; its power-
ful Saàdi dynasty resisted the westward expansion of the Empire from the
Algerian borders, and gave to the country a unique prestige in Europe. Given
its strategic position at the crossroads of naval routes, Morocco’s involve-
ment in inter-European alliances and conflicts began as early as 1213 when
a British Ambassador was dispatched by King John of England to Morocco’s
fourth Almohad Sultan, Mohammed Ennasser (1192–1213), seeking an
alliance against France. Meanwhile, the growth of Anglo-Moroccan trade
had been a major cause of friction between England and Portugal for many
years. The Battle of Ksar El Kebir fought on Moroccan soil in 1578, where
Don Sebastian of Portugal was defeated, is an instance of such entangling
alliances. The death of Sebastian in the battle and the unification of Catholic
57
58 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Union) that followed created an unusual stir
in Britain and was closely attended to by Queen Elizabeth. George Peele’s
play entitled The Battle of Alcazarr (written in 1588 and published in 1594),
the first English dramatic piece to bring Morocco to the English stage and
popular consciousness, deals with the tragic death of the king Don Sebastian
in the battle. In fact, Peele’s presentation of the Moroccan-Portuguese war
inaugurated a whole cycle of Elizabethan dramas about Morocco, including The
Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, George Chapman’s The Conspiracy
of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), and Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me
You know Nobodyy (1606).
The coming of the Alaoui dynasty,1 the present ruling house of Morocco, to
power in 1659 began to move Morocco more and more into the international
consciousness. In 1661, the King of Portugal gave the city of Tangier to King
Charles II of England as part of the marriage dowry of Princess Catherine
of Braganza. On 29 January, 1662, 3000 English soldiers arrived in Tangier
Bay under the Earl of Peterborough; British-Moroccan relations experienced
an era of tensions during the English occupation of Tangier from 1662 to
1684. When Moulay Ismail (1672–1727) became Sultan, Tangier had been a
British colony for ten years and the Moroccan-British relations were already
blemished by the issue of British captives in Morocco. This period knew a
dynamic and sometimes tense diplomatic activity between the two countries.
In 1684, the British were forced by the troops of Sultan Moulay Ismail to
evacuate the city after destroying the mole and blowing up York Castle in the
Kasbah along with other forts. Moulay Ismail, often called the Louis XIV of
Morocco, in fact established diplomatic relations with that monarch, as well
as with England.2 In 1682 Mohammed Temin was appointed by the Sultan as
ambassador in France. In 1699, Abdellah Ben Aicha was also appointed ambas-
sador in Paris; he was received by Louis XIV on 16 February 1699. In 1777, at
the peak of the American Revolution, Morocco was the first country to rec-
ognize the fledging American Republic.
In the meantime, the Deys and Beys of Algeria and Tunisia continued to
rule their areas and, as the eighteenth century progressed, impinged more
and more upon the consciousness of the international community by the
raids of their ships upon the vessels of the many nations pursuing trade in
the Mediterranean. Tunis was one of the major home ports of the notorious
Barbary Corsairs, who preyed upon shipping throughout those major inter-
national waters. In fact it is thanks to the corsairs that the Maghreb experienced
its first recorded European theatrical performances in modern times. In 1741,
during the brief reign of Ali Bey, pirates captured a French ship containing
a group of French actors, who were taken to Tunis. Identifying themselves
as entertainers, they were required to demonstrate their art before the Bey.
Fortunately the director of the company left a detailed account of his adven-
ture in a, probably somewhat sensationalized, letter to a friend which was
published in France.3 According to this report, when the corsairs captured
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 59

the French vessel, they found incomprehensible the painted canvases, the
crowns, the masks, and the bizarre costumes carried by the company. With
difficulty a translator explained their profession, unknown in Tunis, and
when it was understood that they were some sort of entertainers, they were
taken to the court to see if they could amuse the Bey, known to be of a mel-
ancholic disposition. Because of the language barrier, they prepared a panto-
mime. Literally performing for their lives, they offered a pantomime called
“Harlequin Statue and the Parrot.” The court was delighted by the actresses
and by the comic antics of Pantaloon, but when Harlequin appeared they
reportedly were shocked and horrified, at least some of the spectators tak-
ing him in his black mask and costume for some sort of demon. The entire
company were arrested for causing an uproar in the court and thrown into
prison. After a number of days of confinement, the director was finally able
to explain the confusion, and, promising to use no more masks, presented a
series of more successful performances. The company was kept at least for a
time, as captives to continue this service.
Hardly surprisingly, however, this isolated event did not inspire further
such performances at the Bey’s court or elsewhere in Tunisia for the next
century, although shortly after the French performances, Charfeddine
records a visit to Paris by representatives of the Bey Ali Agha to develop dip-
lomatic ties, which at this time had existed between France and neighboring
Morocco for almost a century. This was a visit which included invitations
to the major Parisian theatres. Thus in 1743 these Tunisian representatives
witnessed the famous dancer La Carmago and Rameau’s Les Indes galantes at
the Opera, and performances of Molière’s Don Juan, Regnard’s Le Joueurr and
Arlequin et Scapin magiciens par hasard d at the Comédie Italienne. This time
the Tunisians are recorded as having no problems with Harlequin, played
by the popular Carlin, but their major reactions were to the visual and aural
spectacle of the Opera, where they marveled at the scenery, unable to tell if
it were real or simulated, and at the performers, unable to decide if they were
live or mechanical.4
In the Maghreb itself, however, entertainments of this sort had to await the
establishment of a substantial European community in Tunis with a taste for
such diversions. Such a community first developed in Tunis, thanks to its long-
standing community of Italian immigrants. The first of these were Livornese
Jewish merchants, who appeared in this city as early as the sixteenth century.
During the eighteenth century their numbers were supplemented by immi-
grants from Sicily, only 140 kilometers away and indeed visible on a clear
day. The early Sicilian immigrants brought their puppet tradition to Tunisia,
which provided an alternative to the long established Karagozz shadow puppet
theatre of the Ottomans, and presented, among other subjects, spectacular
sea battles between Christian pirates and Ottoman Muslims.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century Tunis possessed an Italian
community of about 1500, with only about 100 French. The better educated
60 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

of these, headed by the Italian-Jewish community, had a strong taste for

European culture, and after 1815, when many more immigrants of this
group arrived, salons, concerts, and private theatricals began to flourish.
The first public theatrical performances in Tunis seem to have taken place in
1826, when a local entrepreneur assembled a company in Milan to perform
in Tunis for a year. The death of the Bey’s wife caused the theatre to close
for a month, during which time the actors’ wages were stopped, resulting
in a lawsuit which provides the little information we have on this venture.5
Other such ventures followed, and from this time onward there is a more or
less continuous European theatre in the city.
Most such companies performed at the Tapia theatre, a public theatre
built in 1826 by a family of that name in Zarkoun Street, a main thorough-
fare for the European community in Tunis. A description of this modest
structure has been left by Captain Gottfried Scholl, a Swiss officer of the
King of the Two Sicilies, who visited it in 1842. The house seated some 300
and resembled “a small vaulted shop where an orchestra and two rows of
boxes had been constructed.” Oil lamps provided the lighting.6 Scholl also
noted that the original idea of attracting visiting companies from Italy had
not proven practical:

It was an amateur company performing, no professional troupe having

been able to maintain itself in Tunis, not because the income was poor,
but because those poor devils, the directors, could never keep an actress
for more than a week. From twelve years of age to sixty, beautiful or ugly,
good or bad, they were carried off at once by some rich collector of fresh
delicacies; scarcely arrived, they disappeared as if by magic and since it
is no longer fashionable today to have men playing women’s roles, the
battle was at last given up.7

As for the audience, the theatre was packed, and Scholl remarked on the
fashionable and elegant dress of the ladies, but he also notes that there was
“not a single Tunisian in the house,” either “because they were not invited
or because the offering [a French melodrama, The Swiss Orphan, translated into
Italian] was not to their taste.” Local audiences, he reported, were much more
drawn to an equestrian circus that had opened in Tunis the previous year.8
Theatre in the European style was established in Algiers at almost the
same time as in Tunis, but under distinctly different circumstances. In Tunis
the European theatre was established strictly as a diversion for the primarily
Italian immigrant community and was organized either by Italian entre-
preneurs as a commercial enterprise or by local amateurs for their own
entertainment. In Algiers, European theatre was from the outset specifically
tied to the French colonial project. The reported beginning of the long and
often bloody French occupation of Algeria came close to farce. In 1827 the
excitable Dey of Algiers, still distantly answerable to the Ottoman Empire,
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 61

became involved in a dispute with the French consul over a long-standing

financial disagreement and hit him in the face with a fly-swatter. The French
repeatedly demanded an apology and three years later sent a fleet of 500
ships to “wipe away the insult” of the “fly-whisk affair.”9 Clearly, however,
this was much less a matter of offended dignity than an attempt by the
French sovereign Charles X to give luster to his troubled monarchy with a
dazzling foreign victory.
Algiers itself was soon occupied, but the victory was not that dazzling. In
July of 1830 the Dey of Algiers surrendered, but later that same month the
monarchy in France fell and Charles went into exile in England. The French
remained in Algeria, but resistance to their presence was strong, especially in
Algiers, where this presence was the most concentrated and visible. Opinion
was divided within the occupiers as to how extensive this occupation should
be. Unfortunately for the Algerians, the leading voice for total occupation,
Bertrand Clauzel, was the first commander of the Algerian expedition, and
his view prevailed. The struggle was not an easy one. For a number of years
the French controlled only a few coastal enclaves, and one tribal leader, Abd-
el-Kader, managed to assemble an army that provided a serious challenge to
the French until it was finally overwhelmed and forced to surrender in 1847.
In the meantime, theatre in the French style was introduced to Algiers,
the one location in Algeria where the French felt reasonably secure. Clauzel,
in his role as the first French governor general, signed in 1830 a decree for
the construction of a state-supported theatre in the French style in Algiers,
an official emblem of French occupation, very different from the Italian
immigrant theatre in Tunis. Another venture in Algiers, also beginning in
1830, was much more successful and closer to the Italian model. This was a
company of French amateurs who began performing in the Djenina palace,
a confiscated Turkish edifice in the city. Until the Djenina palace burned in
1845 it regularly presented French comic operas, vaudevilles, and dramas,
obviously for an audience composed of French soldiers and bureaucrats
stationed in the city. Touring Italian companies also appeared there present-
ing bel canto opera. The first plays to be printed in Algeria were connected
with this venture as well. An unnamed “Algerian” edited (in French) opera
texts of Rossini’s Sémiramis and Donizetti’s Bélisaire and Lucie de Lammermoor
in 1837, 1838, and 1839.10
While European production venues came and went in Algiers, the Tapia con-
tinued in its position as the only significant continuing European theatre in
Tunis. The Genovese traveler Henry Dunant, visiting the court of Mohammed
Bey in 1856, recorded a detailed picture of the Tapia at that date. The loges
mentioned earlier by Scholl seem to have disappeared, since Dunant notes
that there are

no galleries: a few rows of chairs and benches and at the back, in a semicir-
cles, “boxes” separated by rough canvas dividing them up for middle-class
62 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

households, whom the customs of the time do not allow to mix with the
unknown persons in the pit. Décolleté for the ladies, black suits for the
men are the obligatory dress for these “boxes.” Lighting is by oil lamps,
giving a very crude illumination. A movable screen, placed before the
footlights, is used for “night effects.” The scenery is clearly scenery, with
chairs painted on the backdrop. An old table of white wood and two
chairs suffice to portray the Grand Ducal palace when they are recovered
with a red pan d’andrinople.

With the help of the Tunis Philharmonic the company presented opera,
doing Traviata in 1856.11 Subsequently, Dunant reports, Mohammed Bey
commanded an Italian company, then presenting Traviata at the Tapia, to
also perform this at court, along with a play called Death and the Doctor,
r both
of which, in sharp contrast to the royal performance a century before, were
enthusiastically received.12 Like most of the nineteenth-century European the-
atres in Tunis, the Tapia was eventually destroyed by fire, this one in 1879.
European cultural life, concentrated in Tunis, remained predominantly
Italian for most of the nineteenth century. The leading theatres in the early
nineteenth century, in addition to the Tapia, were the Teatro Italiano in
the rue Zahmoul, devoted to prose drama, and no less than three theatres
for Sicilian puppets installed in strongly Sicilian neighborhoods. All puppet
stages were quite modest, with two or three rows of chairs, and a piano for
entr’acte entertainment. In 1858, another theatre was opened in Tunis, the
Cicolo Europeao, featuring touring Italian opera. The much smaller French
community enjoyed correspondingly less such entertainment, although
occasional touring companies appeared. Alexandre Dumas, on a brief visit
in 1846, reported seeing announcements for two productions for a French
children’s company, directed by the famous Parisian rope dancer of the
Empire period, Mme Saqui. Two plays were announced: Michel et Christine, a
one-act comedy with song by Scribe and Dupin, from the Parisian Gymnase
and Sedaine’s comic opera Le Déserteur, from the Théâtre Italien. Dumas was
highly incensed at both the choices and the company. For the first, it was
“hardly worth the trouble to come to Tunis to find the Gymnase and the
Opera-Comique there,” and for the second, the idea of “a troupe of poor
children six hundred leagues from home in Tunis was enough to bring tears
to the eyes.”13 Reluctantly, Dumas was persuaded by his guide to attend, but
he unhappily did not record his impressions.
It should also be noted that although European theatre in Tunis was created
primarily by and for Europeans, there were a few among the native Tunisian
intellectuals who knew French and Italian who had some acquaintance
with European theatre and, in the case of those who visited France, even
some first-hand experience of it there. Thus in 1846, the same year Dumas
visited Tunis, the Bey Ahmed I visited Paris, and was treated to a perform-
ance in his chateau by Louis-Philippe, and later in the century, in 1881, the
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 63

Tunisian minister and author Bayram Al-Hamis described visits to a number

of Parisian theatres and even discussed individual actors.14
Meanwhile, a distinctly new phase in the French occupation of Algeria
began in 1852 with the coming to power of the new Emperor, r Napoleon III.
Napoleon III rejected the goal of total European colonization advocated by
some of his ministers, citing the American crushing of the Indians as the sort
of “inhumane” model he wished to avoid. Instead he proclaimed, on a trip
to Algeria in 1865, that “Algeria is not a colony … but an Arab kingdom,”
and “I am as much the emperor of the Arabs as of the French!”15 During
his visit, Napoleon attended a special performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto in
the recently erected Imperial Theatre, built in the fashionable European
Renaissance style and opened in the first year of his reign. The Djenina
Palace theatre having burned, the new Imperial Theatre became the center
of European cultural life in the capital. Enlarged several times for a constantly
expanding public, the theatre was rebuilt in even grander style by the archi-
tect Oudot in 1882 as the Algiers Opera. By this time the French occupation
had undergone a major change. Despite Napoleon III’s vision of Algeria as
an “Arab kingdom,” the process of appropriating the best land for French
colonizers (the colons) was already well under way and the tribal territories
were shrinking to less desirable enclaves, in fact very much in the pattern of
Indian reservations in the United States. In 1871, when the administration
of Algeria moved definitively from the army to the colons, the new shape of
Algeria was firmly set. It was not to become a protectorate, like Tunisia, but
an official part of France, composed of three departments separated by the
sea from the rest. The colons were full citizens of France, while the colonized
were “subjects,” with almost none of the rights or protections enjoyed by
the colons.
It was of course these colons, now the dominant class in Algeria, who
became the chief support of the growing numbers of French theatres. Stable
theatres were established not only in Algiers, but in the major secondary cities
Oran and Constantine. French vaudevilles and melodramas were their stand-
ard fare, and the names of a few presented then have survived. Interestingly,
all those known, though created in France, mostly during the 1870s, are
set in Algeria: Paladihe’s Amour africain, d’Hervilly’s “Moorish comedy,” La
Fontaine des Béni Ménaud, and Choiset’s La Kahéna, based on the story of a
Berber Queen.
Morocco, with a much less substantial European expatriate population
than either Tunisia or Algeria and (so far) less touched by the imperial ambi-
tions of its European neighbors, was much slower to open to the modern
European stage. The first modern European theatre built on Moroccan soil
was Teatro Isabelle II, named after the Queen of Spain immediately after the
Spanish conquest of Tetouàn in 1860, a full generation after the appearance
of such structures in Tunis and Algiers. It was a wooden construction, con-
ceived by a renowned architect of the time called Lopez Camera. However,
64 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

this theatre was closed on 5 May 1862, and was later dismantled, as the
Spanish conquest of the city lasted only two years and there existed no
significant immigrant population to support it as did the public of the Tapia
or the Djenina. It was not until after the establishment of the French and
Spanish protectorate in 1912 that ongoing European theatres appeared in
Morocco.
In the meantime a thriving European theatrical culture developed in Algeria
and even more in Tunisia. The real flowering of European theatre in Tunis
began in the 1870s in the wake of Italian unification, when immigration from
Italy sharply increased. An important part of this was Sicilian, so that before
the end of the century Sicilians made up almost 70 percent of the Italian
Tunisian population. This not only encouraged Sicilian puppet theatre but
also plays in the Sicilian dialect. In 1880 the city had some 40,000 inhabit-
ants, including around 4000 Italians and still only several hundred French.
Not surprisingly, then, when Tunis saw a rapid expansion of theatres near
the end of the nineteenth century, this remained largely for the benefit of
the Italian community, even after 1881, when the French protectorate was
established.
The first of the late nineteenth-century theatres was built in 1875 by
Italian architect Di Castelnuovo for a Jewish entrepreneur, David Cohen-
Tanugi (1835–1928), who had traveled to Europe for the Expositions of 1855
and 1867 and developed there a taste for this art. His theatre, originally
called the Nouveau, but more generally known as the Theatre Cohen, was
the largest yet seen in Tunis, a 400-seat house decorated in white and gold on
a red background was fitted with galleries and individual boxes for bourgeois
families. A performance of Ruy Blas by Benjamin Goddard opened the
theatre in December of 1875. Gounod’s Faustt was given its first performance
in Italian there, followed by Donizetti’s La Favorite. The year after the open-
ing of the Theatre Nouveau, the Gran Teatro opened on the Rue Al Jazira, on
land donated to the Italian community for a new opera house by the Bey. It
remained open and popular until the end of the century.
The establishment of the French protectorate in 1881 had little effect at
least for a number of years on the relative size of the French and Italian popu-
lations in Tunis, but the effect on the European theatres in the capital was felt
almost at once. French playhouses and French plays now became the fashion.
The main thoroughfare of the European community was the broad Avenue
Jules Ferry, leading directly from the harbor into the heart of the city. Indeed,
it strongly resembled a monumental French boulevard with its wide central
zone planted with rows of towering trees. This soon became the entertain-
ment center for the European community, lined with hotels, elegant cafes,
and theatres, and increasingly during the 1880s these were not Italian, but
French. During the 1880s a cluster of theatres were built along this avenue.
The first to appear, in 1882, however, continued the Italian influence. This
was a small, wooden building, the Arena, under the direction of Napoleone
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 65

Zannetti, expanded a few years later into a multiple-use building that could
also serve for circus-type entertainments and rechristened the Politeama. Here
appeared the popular reviews of Georges Candas, later a leading journalist
in Tunis, and Italian operas such as Giuseppe Rota’s Beatrice Cenci. It was
destroyed by fire in 1896. Next, in 1883, came another rather small wooden
house, the Théâtre Brulat, opened by a family of that name and devoted
primarily to amateur French productions, under the direction of the poet
Ferdinand Huard. It did, however, host Madame Agar from the Comédie
Française performing Dumas fils’s L’Aventurièree in 1886 and is reputed to have
hosted Sarah Bernhardt as well.16 It had two galleries and a row of boxes. Its
career was a short one, as it too burned down, in 1889.
A longer-lasting venture was the Théâtre Français, opened a little further
down the same street in 1882, significantly the first Tunisian theatre dedicated
exclusively to French drama and operetta. Its opening offering was Offenbach’s
La Fille du Tambour Major. The opening notice promised that “touring compa-
nies” would present “operetta, vaudeville, and occasionally, opera and comic
opera,” as well as plays by such French dramatists as Dennery, Pailleron,
Bisson, Ohnet, and Dumas fils. The historian Charfeddine has discovered
several programs from this theatre, among them one for guest performances
of Mme Favart of the Comédie Française in plays by Augier and Dumas fils
(March, 1891); along with evidence of the arrival of the troupe of M. Donchet
later that same year, and the purchase of 200 new chairs to refurbish the
theatre for this company; a spectacular fairy play, Ondine, in June of 1892; and
a variety of other musical acts and short sketches and operettas.17
By the mid-1880s even some major Italian venues like the Nouveau were
moving toward a more French repertoire, with French operas and operettas
such as Lecocq’s Giroflé-Girofla and La Petite Mariée, Offenbach’s La Jolie
Parfumeuse, and similar works by Audrun and Hervé, operas such as Gounod’s
Faustt and Marchetti’s Ruy Blas and even French prose plays, among them
Molière’s L’Avare and Le Médecin malgré lui. The theatre was renamed La Scala
in 1890, and then in 1892 the Folies Bergères, when it was converted into
a variety house directed by Jo Galano. Concerts were also offered as well
as amateur theatricals and the occasional touring company from France.
The last of these was the company of Frédéric Achard from Paris, which
presented Hugo’s Les Misérables and Dennery’s stage version of Eugene Sue’s
The Wandering Jew w in 1891. Two years later it was converted into a French
restaurant, Au Rosbif, and the building was demolished in 1905.
In 1885 the Teatro Paradiso opened on the fashionable Avenue de France,
built by a Greek entrepreneur, Gringa, next door to a fashionable restaurant
that he also owned. The Paradiso sought to appeal to both the Italian and
French communities. An Italian troupe of 30 actors, headed by Alessandro
Salvini, the son of the great international star Tomasso, were engaged for
the opening season and all 900 seats in the theatre were booked far in
advance for their opening production, Sardou’s Fedora. The elegant house
66 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

was designed by Homere Cypriani, who also served as scenic designer.

The décor was dark gold on a red background with side boxes, a series of
orchestra, parquet, and parterre seats, and boxes on the side and back at
the first gallery level with benches at the second. Cypriani and his chief
machinist Conte achieved scenic effects beyond anything yet seen on the
Tunis stage for a series of Verdi operas and Gounod’s Faust, t which by tradi-
tion opened each five-month season. The repertoire was extremely varied,
from vaudeville to grand opera and from melodrama to the latest successes
at the Comédie Française. The permanent company interrupted its perform-
ances to provide space for touring companies, which now began to include
some of the leading performers of France and Italy. Coquelin brought his
Cyrano de Bergeracc here scarcely a month after its opening in Paris.18 Despite
this continuing success, the Paradiso succumbed to the common fate of
many theatres of its period. It was destroyed by fire in 1889, but rebuilt
and reopened as the Théâtre Français, then the Théâtre Douchet, after its
director, Jacob Douchet. Its popularity clearly contributed to the movement
to establish a major municipal theatre, but when that opened in 1902, the
Douchet’s public was drawn away and it soon closed.
Despite this ever-increasing theatrical activity, many in the European com-
munity still felt that the organizations so far established continued to lack
the quality and stature proper to a major capital city, especially one seeking
to attract international visitors. In the Dépêche Tunisienne of 31 December
1889, an article appeared, entitled: “The Embellishments of Tunis,” which
began:

The great flaw of Tunis, which renders it a bit monotonous, is the reason
that, despite the proverbial gentleness of its climate, despite the pictur-
esqueness of its Arab quarters, despite the ravishing views from the hills
which surround it on three sides, it has not yet become a winter resort, is
that the distractions found in all major cities are absolutely lacking there.
There is no well-equipped theatre, no public garden like the Tuileries
or Luxembourg, no pleasant surroundings. There is, however, a strong
interest in creating attractions in Tunis which will encourage foreigners
to come and pass the winter here. The question of a Municipal Theatre
is being studied, as well as a casino as is found in European resorts, and
we firmly believe that the creation of such places of diversion should be
no more delayed, the difficulties which they faced now being somewhat
lessened.19

Thus in June of 1890 the Municipal Council of Tunis took up the question of
a Municipal Theatre and Casino, and accepted the proposals of a M. Hirschler,
who had created a Casino in Boulogne-sur-Mer, to undertake this project. The
expense of building both a theatre and casino concerned the authorities, who
decided to combine the two with a public garden in a large entertainment
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 67

complex. The Dépêche Tunisiennee of 5 September 1890 provides the details. The
location selected was that of the recently burned Théâtre Français, but extend-
ing much beyond the space of that enterprise, to some 8000 square meters.
Behind the garden, with a kiosk for concerts, would be the casino/theatre.
The theatre should have around 1000 seats, two galleries, and be convertible
into a ballroom or banquet hall. It should also have a café-restaurant seating
at least 200 and several adjacent salons. The casino was to remain open from
November through May and the café, gardens, and salons throughout the
year. Theatrical performances, opera, comic opera, vaudeville, comedy, and
operetta, were to be given at least three times a week from November through
March. During this period an orchestra of 30 musicians was to be employed
to provide accompaniment for the theatre and daily concerts.20
Although original plans called for an opening in 1891, construction moved
slowly, plans were changed, and in fact the Municipal Theatre and Casino
did not open until 1902. In the meantime a number of smaller houses
appeared, none of great distinction but taken together providing an interesting
variety of theatrical offerings in the city in the final decade of the century.
The Avenue Jules Ferry remained the center of such activity. Here were
found the Café Theatre de la Monnaire, which existed from 1890 to 1914;
The Théâtre de Plein Air; the Petit Théâtre de Douchet, lasting only from
1898 to 1902, devoted to French plays; and the Théâtre Tunisien, created in
1901, also for French drama. On the nearby Rue de Turqui was the Teatro
Italiano, opened in 1895 and closed in 1943, which offered prose drama and
variety entertainment. A number of amateur dramatic societies also provided
theatrical entertainment at this time. The Société Dramatique Victorien
Sardou in T Tunis presented French and Italian plays from 1894 until 1898.
An “international philodramatic society” called l’Avenir provided a series of
productions in 1905 and 1906. By far the most important of these societies,
however, was l’Essor, founded in 1904 by Alexandre Fichet, a teacher of
declamation. This most famous of Tunisian dramatic societies continued its
activities into the 1970s. We will later return to the work of this group.
A few theatres are also recorded outside of Tunis in those cities with a
sufficient European population to support such ventures. At the end of the
century, Kairouan possessed an Eden Theatre, which offered short operas and
the contemporary French drama of playwrights like Sardou. Sousse, a port city
south of Tunis, had at the same time a Casino Plage which presented variety
entertainment and the Umanitâ, offering French operettas, which in imitation
of the Tunisian venture was converted into the Municipal Theatre of Sousse.
The long-awaited Municipal Theatre of Tunis finally opened its doors on
20 November 1902, with a production of Massenet’s Manon. The theatre was
designed in an elegant art nouveau style by the noted local architect Jean Emile
Ferdinand Resplandy, who was director of public works in Tunis from 1894 to
1900 and the designer of a number of major buildings in the city, including
the law courts, the town hall, and the municipal hospital. The elaborate
68 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Figure 3 The Municipal Theatre in Tunis, 1921 (photo courtesy of the Municipal
Theatre, Tunis)

decoration gained the theatre the popular name of the “Bonbonnière” (candy
box), which it still bears today. It was remodeled and enlarged in 1904 and
again in 1912, but the elegant façade remained unchanged.
Culturally speaking, while the opening of the Municipal Theatre was clearly
a source of civic pride and a bid for more of the market for international
tourism, it also served as a focus for the ongoing cultural rivalry between
the Italian and French communities. Although the French had now for two
decades exercised political control, they still remained numerically far behind
the Italians in the city’s population. The census of 1906 numbered about
400,000 inhabitants in Tunis, of which about 52,000 were Italian and only
18,000 French. The opening of an official city theatre that was French-spea-
king thus almost inevitably inspired a parallel Italian venture, and one year
after the opening of the Bonbonniere, in 1903, the Italian-speaking Teatro
Rossini opened nearby on the Avenue Jules Ferry. A M. Baron designed it, on
the model of the elegant Politeama Theatre in Livorno. The façade was in ori-
ental style and provided access not only to the theatre but to a hotel, a large
café, and a department store. Within the theatre were two galleries, each with
six boxes and a stage box on either side. The parterre had numbered seats
and the total seating was 1700, though up to 2000 could be accommodated
on days of large attendance. The stage was 19 meters wide and 16 deep with
a proscenium opening of 11 meters. The managers had obtained the scenic
stock of the recently closed Douchet theatre, which formed the basis of their
 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres 69

scenery. Perhaps the most unusual feature of the building is that it could be
converted into an arena for circuses or equestrian performances. Moreover,
its roof could be opened for summer performances. The venture was to be
open all year, for both its permanent company and for visiting troupes from
Italy. The opening production on 12 March 1903 was Verdi’s Rigoletto.
The reports on the opening by the leading French paper in Tunis, the
Dépêche Tunisienne, and the leading Italian one, L’Union, clearly indicate the
nationalist rivalry being played out in the city’s two new theatres. The former,
in its issue of 14 March, gave the opening production distinctly qualified
praise and ended on a distinctly condescending note: “We can only wish the
new theatre to follow like a respectful younger brother the glorious destinies
of the Municipal Casino-Theatre which, while it welcomes the elite, the select
public of our city, will leave to the Politeama Rossini the privilege of pleas-
ing the masses, which is really not as easy as one might think.” L’Union, not
surprisingly, responded with an ironic commentary on this casual placing
of the Rossini in the second rank, to which the Dépêche replied, in shocked
tones, that it had no intention of belittling the Italian venture and that it
had used the term “young brother” only in a strictly chronological sense
and without any of the “Machiavellian intentions that the Union assumes.”21
The Municipal Theatre of Tunis inspired not only the rival Rossini but
several imitations in other Tunisian cities. That in Sousse has already been
mentioned, but the most important of these was in Sfax, Tunisia’s second
most important port city.
In 1905 the dramatic organization Essor, inspired by the people’s theatre
movements in France and Germany, added to its title “The People’s Theatre,”
which it fulfilled by offering, for the most part, free performances of Italian
and French plays for audiences in Tunis and a number of other cities. The
ambitious sort of fare it offered may be seen in its first free performance
in Tunis on 6 June 1905. This was composed of two scenes from Molière’s
The Miser,r a poem by Hugo, one of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Musset’s
Lucie, a short farce by Florian, Le Sermentt by Richepin, two scenes from
Beaumarchais’s Barbier de Seville, and a short piece by Alphonse Daudet.22
Essor remained an important part of the French-oriented Tunisian cultural
scene throughout much of the twentieth century. In the years before World
War I it presented a total of 44 plays, classic and modern. Recent authors
were favored, the comic dramatist Courteline in particular. The most noted
project of the company during these years, however, was the reclaiming of
the Roman theatre at Carthage for dramatic representation. This project was
initiated by the Institut de Carthage, dedicated to the study and preserva-
tion of the ruins, and its president, Louis Carton, who felt that dramatic
performances in the ruins would call the attention of the authorities to their
importance. The great tragic actor Mounet-Sully had provided a model for
such an event, with his productions of Oedipus in the Roman theatres of
Béziers and Orange.
70 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Funding was found and a number of leading cultural figures of Tunis

recruited for the event. Fichet of Essour was in charge of the central dramatic
part of the festival, which took place on 27 May 1906. Dr Carton provided
a detailed description in the September issue of the Revue Tunisienne.23 Two
hundred orchestra chairs had been provided, but the bulk of the crowd, some
4000, gathered on the sloping area around the orchestra, as had the original
Roman audiences. After the necessary opening speeches and a triumphal pro-
cession of figures in Roman dress, the audience was treated to the chorus of
the Philistines from Saint-Saens Samson et Delila and the final act of Corneille’s
Polyeucte, performed by Fichet and his company. The festival was repeated the
following spring, with two new dramas presented, created for the occasion
and featuring Mme Delvair from the Comédie Française and Mme Vernet
from the Odéon; La Prêtresse de Tanitt by Lucie Delarue-Mardus and La Mort
de Carthagee by Grandmougin. This time almost 7000 attended.24 Despite this
success, the festivals were not repeated until after World War I, when they
were revived by the Society of Friends of Carthage.
7
The First Arab Performances

Although a few Arabs attended the European theatres in Tunisia and Algeria,
mostly those connected to the staffs of the French bureaucracy, these cultural
institutions remained largely supported by and for the benefit of the European
population in these countries. A substantial and ongoing theatre for the major-
ity Arab public did not appear in any part of the Maghreb until the opening
years of the nineteenth century, then inspired by a mixture of municipal pride,
colonial concerns, local interest, and, perhaps most importantly, tours of
pioneering Arab theatre companies from Egypt.
Before examining this development, however, we must acknowledge the
early and apparently unique appearance of an Arab-language play published
anonymously in Algiers in 1847, the first known modern play published
in Arabic, 26 years before the next known such publication in Beirut. This
surprising document was discovered by Dr Philip Sadgrove of the University
of Manchester in the early 1990s and presented in an annotated edition with
Dr Shmuel Moreh in 1996.1 Sadgrove also revealed the author of the anony-
mous Nuzahat al-Mushtaq wa-Ghussat al-Ush-shaq fi Madinat Tiryaq l-Iraq (The
Pleasure Trip of the Enamored and the Agony of Lovers in the City of Tiryaq
in Iraq) as Abraham Daninos, an Arabic-speaking Sephardic Jew and profes-
sional translator for the French occupiers. While there is a general consensus
among Arab scholars that the first modern Arabic play in the European sense
was presented in Beirut, Maroun An-Naqqash’s Al-bakhil, no scholarly atten-
tion has yet been paid to this first modern Arabic play to be published in the
Arab World. Moreh and Sadgrove have provided extensive information about
this dramatic piece by Daninos, which pre-dates An-Naqqash’s performance
of The Miser: “Now it is clear from the texts published here that An-Naqqash
had a predecessor further afield in the far West of the Ottoman Empire in
Algeria, Abraham Daninos.”2 The play was printed in Algiers in lithograph and
then sent to a member of La Société Asiatique in Paris. Daninos’s play was
also first mentioned in Le Journal Asiatique on 17 August 1848 by Jules Mohl:
“Avant de quitter la poésie Arabe, je dois mentioner une curiosité littéraire;
c’est un drame Arabe en vers, précédé de l’exposé de la situation, de la
71
72 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

liste des personnages, enfin un drame en règle, au moyen duquel l’auteur,

Mr Daninos, Alger, parait vouloir essayer de donner aux Arabes le gout du
spectacle et de la poésie dramatique.”3 Daninos’s play was also mentioned
in 1850 in the annual review of literature in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft: “The newest of the newest in the grove of the
Arabic muses is at present a play in verse by Mr Daninos, interpreter at the
Civil Court of Justice in Algiers, entitled ‘The Tranquilities of Mind of those
filled with Desire and the Pain of Lovers,’ of course an Afro-European hybrid.
You could hardly call it a Semitic half-breed. In any case it is only slightly
related to Bottcher’s Ältesten Bühnendichtungen (Oldest Dramatic Poems).”4
Daninos’s play is an “Afro-European hybrid,” for it weaves together perform-
ance traditions belonging to two different cultures. Its extended dialogues
are frequently unacknowledged quotations from The Thousand and One
Nights and from kachf al-asrarr (The Revelation of Secrets) by Izz Al-Din B. Abd
al-Salam al-Maqdissi (d.678/CE 1279). The play has a local field of reference
besides its recourse to an alien medium. Daninos’s play has a prologue, a list
of characters, and stage directions. Its prologue contains a brief synopsis of
the whole drama. “This may have been read by a figure called al-was-saff (the
praiser of God).”5 This technique, typical of the Arabic tradition of shadow
plays, proves that Daninos’s textual practice was oscillating between Eastern
and Western performance cultures. The ethnic background of Daninos is
highly significant. Algerian Jews, a minority between the Europeans and the
Muslims, had been in Algeria since the time of the Phoenicians, with whom
they helped to establish Algiers and other coastal trading centers. Other Jews
came from Palestine, some fleeing the Egyptians, others the Romans. In the
sixteenth century came yet another wave, fleeing the Inquisition in Spain.
When the French arrived in 1830 there was already an Algerian Jewish com-
munity of some 25,000, and they welcomed the new arrivals as potential
trading partners in a manner that contrasted sharply with the resistance of
most Muslims and Berbers. This attitude, combined with the assimilation of
French Jews during the Revolution, encouraged the French to look kindly
upon the Algerian Jewish community, and in 1845 they recognized Algerian
Judaism as a religion organized along the French model, with chief rabbis
in Algiers, Oran, and Constantine; the same three cities, it might be noted,
sufficiently permeated by French culture to have permanent French theatres.
Daninos’s close contact with the occupiers was thus very much in the pattern
of the Jewish community’s welcome of the new occupiers.
Daninos’s play, however, is not at all a French-derived product, but is based
on a story from the Thousand and One Nights, and strongly suggests traditional
Algerian folktales and shadow presentations not only in its language, but in
its theme and structure. Although the author’s motives for its creation are not
known, Moreh and Sadgrove speculate that at a time of increasing French
cultural and political hegemony, the author may have seen his work as an
assertion of native culture.6 It is not known if Daninos’s play was actually
 The First Arab Performances 73

presented, although the use of stage directions in the text suggests it might
have been, but in any case it apparently remained an isolated experiment.
Theatre in the European manner, even when using familiar material and
an accessible language, was clearly still too alien to attract a native Algerian
public, and another half-century passed before such an audience began to
be developed.
While the French authorities in Algeria had understandably little interest
in the development of an Arab-language theatre, the municipality of Tunis
felt rather differently. The new Municipal Theatre there having come into
being with part of its mission as appealing to both the Italian- and French-
speaking population of the city, it not surprisingly soon occurred to the
directors that a true municipal theatre should also attempt to reach out
to the majority Arab-speaking population, not hitherto provided with any
serious exposure to this art. Members of the board of directors, aware of a
rapidly developing Arabic theatre culture in Egypt, proposed in 1907, soon
after the opening of the new theatre, that Arab-speaking troupes, probably
from Egypt, should from time to time be invited there, as a way of improving
the manners and morals of the public that would be attracted.7 Working
in conjunction with the Italian consulate, the municipality assembled a
rather heterogeneous group of Arab functionaries connected to these two
organizations to prepare an Arabic staging of Othello. But even as this project
was still in preparation, it was overtaken by the arrival in Tunis of a traveling
Egyptian company, the first of several that would provide a far more important
model and stimulus to native Arab theatrical expression.
Despite the colonial occupation of Algeria and Tunisia and the resulting
subordination of their largely Muslim native populations, the Maghreb
remained connected to the rest of the Arab/Muslim world through a constant
stream of books, newspapers, journals, and visitors. Among these connec-
tions were the first tours to this region of Egyptian theatre companies at the
beginning of the twentieth century, for the first time offering the Arab popu-
lation of the Maghreb European-style theatre in the Arabic language rather
than that of the occupying French or Spanish or the expatriate Italians.
Though these Egyptian companies are generally credited with introducing
European theatre to the Arab-speaking population, it must be remembered,
as was stressed in the discussion of pre-colonial theatre in the Maghreb, that
a great deal of performative activity had long been practiced throughout this
region. There remain a wide variety of reports that provide evidence of vari-
ous forms of native theatrical activity; some in fact quite close to European
practice in the Maghreb during the nineteenth century in addition to the
popular shadow plays. One of the most intriguing of these is a report by a
mid-nineteenth-century French traveler named Potter of a local festival held
by a tribal chieftain in Algeria which featured a company of actors performing a
dramatic sketch. The reporter continues that such presentations were spon-
sored by a number of Arab princes in the region, and he compared them
74 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

to the dramatic performances sponsored as a kind of “snobbism” by feudal

lords in Europe.8
The extent of the sort of secular activity described by Potter is difficult to
determine, but much better documented is the extensive performance associ-
ated with religious celebrations, and in particular with marriage and circum-
cision festivals. In 1908, precisely the year of the first Egyptian theatre tour
to Algeria, Edmond Doutté published in Paris a major survey of magic and
religious practice in the Maghreb, a large portion of it devoted of the various
ceremonies, rites, and performance practices associated with various carnivals
and festivals. In addition to a wide variety of disguises representing different
genders, social classes, even animals, Doutté’s sources describe in detail a
variety of short dramatic scenes from various Algerian communities, mostly
associated with the festival of Ashura. Among these are scenes of a deceived
husband (usually a European), and a mock trial conducted by a presumed
pilgrim from Mecca.9 The dramatic character of such activities may seem clear
to readers today, but the cultural context of such festival performance and
of the first Egyptian tours was so different that it seems likely that no one at
the time saw any relationship between the two activities, even students from
the schools, whom we know were interested in both kinds of performance.
The first such tour to visit the Maghreb was a company calling itself The
Egyptian Comedy ((Al koumidia el Masria), headed by Abdel-Qadir Al-Masri.
The company was a substantial one, with 23 members, including six women.
They began their tour of the Maghreb with an invited performance at the
court of the youthful Sultan Abd Al-Aziz in Morocco, whose love of sport-
ing events and public entertainments was well known. The company then
traveled to Tunis, where they spent almost a month, and then appeared
briefly in Algiers before returning to Egypt. In each of these three countries
they offered the first professional productions of modern theatre in Arabic.
In Tunisia, the director of the Municipal Theatre announced their upcoming
performances in the Dépêche Tunisiennee of 25 September, emphasizing that
these were the first in Arabic in that country, by noting that “Up till the
present, dramatic or comic art [in Arabic] has been represented by little scenes
in which the famous Karagoz held the leading role. It seems to me that it
would be an interesting experiment in a kind of decentralization of the theatre
in favor of the indigenous Muslims and Israelites who make up the majority
of the population.”10 The major offering was the heavily French-influenced
comedy Al-’Ashiq al-Muttàham (The Accused Lover), translated into Egyptian
Arabic from a Turkish source by the company’s director. The story is clearly
influenced by European comedy, with a pair of separated lovers, a disagreeable
father, and a comic servant, indeed Harlequin himself, played by Al-Masri.
After this offering at the Municipal Theatre, the company spent the month
of Ramadan (most of October) at the more modest Café Kharief, presenting
French-style comedies and dramas, before proceeding, briefly, to Algiers, and
then home.
 The First Arab Performances 75

Despite their month-long stay in hospitable Tunis, this first company in

fact exerted much less influence on the Maghreb theatre than another, better
known Egyptian company which appeared just two months later, in December
of 1908. Its director, Jawq Sulayman Al-Qardahi, is generally credited with the
introduction of modern Western-style theatre in Arabic to both Algeria and
Tunisia. Al-Qardahi was a figure of considerable importance before his arrival
in the Maghreb. He was the last of the Syrian/Lebanese directors who were
central in establishing European-style theatre in Egypt in the late nineteenth
century. He had begun performing in Egypt in the 1870s in a company
headed by another Lebanese, Yusef Haiyat. In 1882 he established his own
theatre in Alexandria and in 1884 moved to Cairo, where his wife appeared
as the first woman on the Egyptian stage. Despite political instability, which
continued to trouble all Egyptian theatres, Al-Qardahi persevered, and even
took his company on tour, first through Egypt, then to Syria, and finally to
Algeria and Tunisia.
They first performed in Algiers, where they offered Najib Al-Haddad’s
Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi, a work calling for religious tolerance adapted from
Walter Scott. It is not at all surprising that this pioneering company would
offer a performance based on the highly respected historical figure Salah
El-Din Al-Ayoubi
A (1137–1193), the great liberator and defender of Al-Quds
(Jerusalem) and its Al-Aqsa mosque and Dome. The performance was very
much a tribute to this historical hero, a reminder of the Arabo-Islamic colonial
predicament and common destiny, as well as a call for unity from the Gulf
to the Atlantic to fight the new crusaders. The play’s focus was on the Arab
version of Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi’s famous victories during the Crusades and
his recapture of Jerusalem in October 1187. His later confrontations with
Richard I (Lionheart), King of England, during the Third Crusade constitutes
the bulk of the main plot of the play and is given almost mythical propor-
tions. As the events unfold, war and peace become the context of more subtle
relationships between Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi, Richard I, and the latter’s
European allies from the time he landed in Palestine through his illness and
the signing of a peace treaty.
However, alongside the echoes of enmity and warfare, the play’s sub-plot
exemplifies the prevailing Arabic courtly love in medieval times in opposi-
tion to ecclesiastical sexual prejudices against women in the Arabo-Islamic
cultures. The writer explains in the introduction that he “adapted its theme
from some histories of the Crusades and what happened between Sultan Salah
El-Din Al-Ayoubi and King Richard (Lionheart) and his allies … But added
necessary romantic scenes in order to please the audience.”11 These had been
common melodramatic and sensational features of the early Arabic theatre,
at least since the Lebanese Maroun An-Naqqash (1817–1855). Courtly love,
singing and poetry became important in theatre productions. Also, Najib
Al-Haddad’s reference to “some histories of the crusaders’ war” includes both
Western and Eastern sources. Admittedly, Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825)
76 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

remains the most significant influence, as its events happen precisely during
the Third Crusade, in the crusaders’ camps when King Richard was ill. In sub-
sequent years, the Al-Haddad play became the standard opening piece first
for touring companies and then for the fledgling new Arab-languages com-
panies appearing in the Maghreb. The play became a central reference point in
the emerging nationalists’ consciousness and stirred up pride in an almost
vanquished public watching their ancestors’ accomplishments during the
heydays of Arabo-Islamic civilization. The message was equally well received
by the Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans from the Sultan to the common
people. The chaotic energies of Maghreb youth that could not be possessed
or controlled by the new colonial discursive structures was at last released in
theatre pieces like this and passed onward with a momentary enthusiasm.
Qardahi’s company planned to follow the example of the Al-Masri company
and spend most of their tour in Tunis, but, much to the irritation of the
Arab-speaking community, not a single major theatre in that city was available
to house this company. Accordingly, they spent early December in the city
of Sousse, where they presented a European-oriented repertoire typical of
early Arabic drama, opening again with the Al-Haddad play.12 Their subse-
quent performances, all enthusiastically received, showed how dominant the
standard European repertoire was in the offerings of these early Arabic touring
companies. Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi was followed by an Arabic Hamlet, then
Himdan, an adaptation of Hugo’s Hernani, Matami an-Nisa, adapted from
Dumas’s Catherine Howard d by the Syrian/Egyptian theatre pioneer Iskandar
Farah and Othello. Not until their sixth program did the company offer a
work actually based on Arabic material, Ins al-Jalis, adapted by Syrian Abu
Khalil Al-Qabbani from the Thousand and One Nights. On 7 February they
presented Verdi’s Aida, the first opera performed in Arabic in the Maghreb.
The work, originally composed for the opening of the Cairo opera in 1869,
had been translated into Arabic by Sali Khalil an-Naqqas, who brought the
first company of Syrian actors to Egypt in 1876. Other plays in the repertoire
included adaptations of Racine and Ponsard.13 Qardahi’s company completed
their Sousse visit with Shuhadae al-Gharam, adapted from Romeo and Juliett by
Najib Al-Haddad and an Arabic version of Racine’s Esther.
After a three-day visit to the smaller town of Bizerte, the company at last
prepared to perform in Tunis, only to be almost immediately involved in a
serious scandal there. The Board of Directors of the Jewish Hospital in the
city demanded a benefit performance. Qardahi, surely with some malice
aforethought, announced that the benefit would be a work called Yusuf
as-Siddiq ((Joseph Sold by His Brothers). The proposed depiction of the prophet
Joseph on stage outraged conservative Muslims and the French authorities
banned the work. Qardahi then presented instead a production of Romeo and
Juliet, the proceeds of which went to the Muslim Benevolent Association.14
The company then settled at the Rossini, where they performed for several
weeks, preparing to return to Algeria for further performances there. In May,
 The First Arab Performances 77

however, Qardahi died in Tunis and his company broke apart, some of them
returning to Egypt and others remaining in Tunis.
Those who remained in Tunis joined the native group of amateurs at the
Municipal Theatre who had been assembled a year before for the never-realized
project of presenting an Arabic Othello. Less than a month after the death
of Qardahi they combined with the native group that had been preparing
Othello before their arrival to form the first ongoing Tunisian theatre company.
They named themselves an-Najma (The Star) and launched their first season,
appropriately, with a play entitled Al-Qaa’id al-Maghribi (The Maghreb Leader).
Among the company were a number of the future leaders of the Tunisian
theatre such as Ahmed Boulayman (1884–1976) and Mohammed Bourguiba
(1881–1976). Thus while Qardahi’s company inspired some of the first Arab
troupes in Algeria, they literally formed the basis of the first professional
Tunisian company. For this reason Qardahi has been called the father of
Arab theatre in Tunisia, and the 2009 centennial celebrations of that theatre
commemorated the establishment of this new company a century before.
Although only Tunisia, among the countries of the Maghreb, offered a fairly
steady roster of Arabic theatre in the European model in the years immedi-
ately before World War I, these early years were troubled by many company
rivalries, defections, and failures. After only two productions, two leading
actors of the newly formed Egyptian/Tunisian company returned to Egypt.
A third, Ahmad Afifi, was sent to Egypt for replacements for them, but when
he returned, a month later, it was with an entire new Egyptian company, that
of Ibrahim Hijazi. This new company arranged with the Rossini theatre in
Tunis for a two month engagement and the Egyptian/Tunisian company was
displaced. They performed for a time in other towns and for private gatherings
in Tunis, but disbanded permanently in 1910. In fact the Hijazi troupe did not
fare much better, despite their gaining of the Rossini stage. Only their opening
production, the usual Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi, and Al-Haddad’s adaptation of
Romeo and Juliett enjoyed some success. Among their productions, however,
should be noted the first original play written in Tunisian, As-Sultan Byn
Judraan Yaldizz (The Sultan before the Walls of Yaldiz, 1909) by Mohammed
Jaibi, a prominent journalist who established several major publications and
became an important member of the Liberal Constitutional Party, an important
contributor to Tunisian independence. Attendance, however, was very poor,
partly because the new company was widely considered to be inferior to that
of Qardahi but also out of irritation in the community over the dispossession of
the Tunisian artists.
A number of voices, led by the Arab paper Al-Taqaddum, began calling,
even during the tenure of the Hijazi company, for a purely Tunisian troupe.
In December of 1910 a new society was announced, As-Sahama al-Arabya
(Arabian Gallantry), preparing for a production of Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi.
A disagreement broke out within the company, however, and in fact Salah
El-Din Al-Ayoubi was finally presented by a splinter group, Al-Adab al-Arabiya
78 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

(Arabian Letters) at the Municipal Theatre in April of 1911. As-Samaha

regrouped and under the leadership of Ibrahim Al-Akoudi (1890–1942) began
presenting its own works the following year. For the next several years the
rivalry between these two companies dominated the Tunisian Arabic theatre.
Al-Adab began with strong popular support and for four seasons provided a
wide range of dramatic entertainment, including much of the Qardahi reper-
toire as well as Schiller’s The Robbers and a number of French plays translated
for the first time into the Tunisian dialect. A committee of three bilingual
Tunisian scholars undertook this task: Mustapha Sfar, Hassa Guellaty, and Ali
Al-Khazmy. Their efforts produced two Tunisian versions of Molière works:
At-Tabib al-Maghsuub (The Doctor in Spite of Himself) and Marid al-wahm
(The Imaginary Invalid) and contemporary comedies by Valabregue and
Molineaux. By the spring of 1912, the new society felt itself sufficiently well
established to appeal to the municipality for a subsidy similar to those granted
already to the Municipal Theatre and the Rossini. Their petition noted that:

1. The Al-Adab society has during the past two years at the Municipal Theatre
presented some twenty productions which have been of great interest
to the indigenous population. In diverting these from such unhealthy
distractions as cafés chantants, café concerts and other such activities,
we believe we have carried out a useful work by creating in the country
an Arab theatre made up of exclusively Tunisian elements. These efforts,
Mr President, have been very costly for our young society, which would
be eager to continue this project of popular education if it could depend
upon the aid and support of the Municipality.
2. We know how much the Municipal Council of Tunis has always contrib-
uted generously to aid private initiatives. The Municipal Theatre and
the Italian Theatre receive every year important subsidies, not counting
the gymnastic and musical societies which are also included in the city
budget.15

In the subsequent city council debates, it was first proposed offering Al-Adab
an annual subsidy of 8000 francs, the same as that given to the Rossini, but
some members objected that the Rossini had the expenses of maintaining
a large theatre as well as those of booking and bringing foreign companies,
whereas Al-Adab, being a group of local amateurs with no permanent venue,
did not have such expenses. Eventually, however, the Council voted to pro-
vide them a subsidy of 5000 francs, the first such subsidy given to a theatrical
company in Tunisia.16
Despite this apparent advantage, the rival As-Sahama managed to win over
two of Al-Adab’s leading actors in 1912, one of them Alya Bannan, one of
Al-Adab’s few actresses. As-Sahama also imported a leading comic actor from
Egypt, Jabran Naum. Thus reinforced, they began in July to offer productions
three days a week at the “Blue Rotunda” of La Goulette, a venue in suburban
 The First Arab Performances 79

Tunis that had been from time to time used by Essor and other amateur
groups. Arabic versions of standard French classics dominated the repertoire.
After opening with Corneille’s Le Cid, the company filled out the year 1912
with Othello and two plays by Hugo. Despite this French orientation, however,
they were invited at the end of the year to perform regularly at the Rossini,
as Al-Adab had been before them. During the next two seasons As-Sahama,
under the direction of their leading actor, Mohammed Bourguiba, presented
17 plays in 35 performances at the Rossini. Ten of these were adaptations
from the French, three were from Shakespeare (Hamlet ( t, Othello, Romeo and
Juliet),
t three were from Syrian/Egyptian dramatists, and only one was an origi-
nal Tunisian work, Masara al-Khyana (The Tragic End of the Traitoress, 1913)
by Mohammed Manasu, an actor in the company.
In the years just before World War I, European-style theatre also began
to appear outside the capital. Not surprisingly, the first such development
occurred in Tunisia’s second largest city, Sfax, a major commercial port located
some 270 kilometers south of Tunis. Here the society at-Tahdib as-Safaqisi was
established in 1913, presenting in November Shaheedat al-’Afaff (The Victim of
Purity) on the stage of the Municipal Theatre which had been built in neo-
Moorish style by the French just ten years before. The following spring the
new company toured to Tunis as well as to the cities of Kairouan and Sousse
with the play Az-Zalum. The port city of Sousse, about half way between Tunis
and Sfax, and with a similar European orientation, established a company as
early as 1913. This was the Troupe Israélite of Makhlouf an-Najjar, composed
of young Jewish boys, the oldest only 14. They specialized in Molière and
Biblical subjects, premiering with Joseph Sold by his Brethren in classical Arabic,
which they toured to Sfax and then to the Municipal Theatre in Tunis in
1913. An-Najjar’s company did not survive the War, but the troupe in Sfax
reassembled in the 1920s and continued for the next decade as an important
regional company. Kairouan, Tunisia’s holiest city, and in the center of the
country, 160 kilometers south of Tunis, not surprisingly was much more resist-
ant to European-style theatre than such commercial ports as Sfax and Sousse.
Nevertheless, a significant theatre grew up there in the 1930s and 1940s,
which will be discussed presently.
The visits of the Egyptian companies to Algeria in 1908 and 1909 were
much more brief than those to Tunisia, and although they aroused a certain
interest in such work among some students and European-oriented intellec-
tuals, they did not provide the seeds of a local theatre as they did in Tunisia.
More important during the pre-war years was the activity of Emir Khaled,
a major figure in Algerian political history, with a subsidiary interest in literature
and the theatre. Khaled was born in Damascus, received military training
in Paris, and was assigned in 1895 to Algeria, where he pursued a military
career before turning to politics and becoming a central figure in the Algerian
nationalist movement. Central to Khaled’s vision was the development of a
new Algerian literature, in which vision theatre held a central position.
80 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

In 1910, when he began to publish the first essays which looked toward his
future political career, Khaled visited Paris, where he encountered George
Abiad (1880–1959), one of the key figures in the development of modern
theatre in Egypt and indeed in much of the Arab world in the years during
and just after World War I. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Abiad appeared first as
an actor in French plays there and, moving to Alexandria, discovered in that
city the developing Egyptian theatre. He was so successful as an actor that
he attracted the attention of Khedive Abbas, who sent him to Paris to study
at the Conservatory there. In Paris he frequented Sarah Bernhardt’s salon,
met Yacub Sannou, the founder of the Egyptian theatre, then in exile, and
engaged so fully with the French theatrical scene that he was able to organ-
ize a company of French actors, supported by the Khedive, with which he
returned to Egypt in 1910. This company performed Horacee and other French
classic works at the Khedive Opera House with such success that the Egyptian
Minister of Education, Saad Zaghloul, commissioned Abiad to develop an
Arabic educational system for Egypt with theatre as one of its central features.
With only a very small repertoire at his disposal, Abiad encouraged Egyptian
intellectuals and literary figures to translate existing plays into Arabic and to
create new works. He also brought together many of the leading performers in
the country to create a new company to perform these works. They presented
their first offering, an Arabic version of Voltaire’s Oedipus, in 1912, followed
by their first original Arabic one, a one-act poetic drama Chahid Beirutt (The
Martyr of Beirut) by the eminent Egyptian poet Hafez Ibrahim. A series of
original works and translations of Shakespeare, Delavigne, and others followed,
substantially increasing the available repertoire of Arabic drama.
Abiad also remembered his promise in Paris to pass on to Khaled in Algeria
the dramatic fruits of his theatrical labors and so, soon after their premieres
in Cairo he sent Khaled Hafez Ibrahim’s poetic drama Chahid Beirutt along
with two others, a version of Macbeth in Arabic by Mohammed Haft, and
Vertu et Fidélitéé by Khalil and Yazji. Khaled immediately arranged for the per-
formance of these plays by groups of interested amateurs that he organized in
Algiers and also in the cities of Medea and Blida. Other new works followed;
the Medea company presented La Mort de Hussein, fils de Ali in 1913, and
in 1914 Jacob le juif. f 17 During the next several years these small companies
provided a model both in organization and repertoire for a number of other
amateur groups. The Algerian theatre director Mahboub Stambouli reports
in his memoirs that almost all of the plays presented in the various Algerian
cities between 1910 and 1920 dealt with historical characters from Arabic
and Islamic history.18 When Abiad arrived in Algeria in person with his tour-
ing company in 1921 he found a still fledging but rapidly growing theatrical
community there, some of the seeds of which he had himself planted.
Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco were all profoundly affected by World War I,
but in very different ways. For the first time, Tunisians, as citizens of the pro-
tectorate, were drafted into the French army, and Algeria, officially a part of
 The First Arab Performances 81

France, provided infantry and cavalry who were heavily involved in most of
the major conflicts of the war. At home, strict censorship put strong restric-
tions on such activities as theatre and publishing. Both of the leading Algerian
theatre companies, As-Sahama and Al-Adab ceased performing entirely,
not to resume until 1920. Morocco was even more profoundly affected by
the European tensions of these years. For many years Morocco had been a
target of French interest, seeking to expand its North African empire west-
ward from T Tunisia and Algeria, but the protection of other states, especially
Germany, allowed Morocco to maintain its long-held, if fragile, independence
into the early years of the twentieth century. As early as 1907 an agreement
among Morocco, the United States, and several European countries signed at
Algeciras opened the way to French and Spanish incursions into Morocco,
the French gaining gradual control over the most fertile regions, le Maroc
utilee (useful Morocco), while Spain was left with the mountains of the north
and the arid desert of the south, le Maroc inutilee (useless Morocco). This situ-
ation was reinforced in 1911 when Sultan Moulay Hafid, besieged in Fez by
rebellious Amazigh tribesmen, appealed to the French for assistance. Their
intervention relieved the city but provoked a protest and military response
from Germany, already deeply concerned by the steady expansion of French
interests in Morocco. Despite the high tensions between these two coun-
tries, peace was achieved by the Treaty of Fez (30 March 1912) which made
Morocco officially a protectorate of France and Spain, recognized by Germany
in exchange for territory in the central Congo and French Equatorial Africa.
The historian C. R. Pennel notes that this treaty “guaranteed the religious
authority of the sultan but did not set out how this was to be secured… . It
allowed French troops to operate anywhere and gave French administrators
control of foreign affairs. It emptied the sultanate of practical content.”19 Thus
the majority of Morocco became another French protectorate, like Tunisia,
while a smaller portion, including Tangiers and the Rif mountain range, came
under Spanish control. The tensions between France and Germany were thus
temporarily eased by the sacrifice of an independent Morocco, but this was
only a small part of the much larger developing European crisis which erupted
two years later in World War I. By this time Morocco, as a French protectorate,
was required, willingly or not, to supply troops for the European conflict.
8
The Developing Maghreb Stage

“France does not colonize like others to exploit but to civilize,” wrote
Jacques Ladreit de Lacharrière, in specific reference to Morocco in 1930.1
Certainly that sentiment described the attitude of the first Resident General
in French Morocco (from 1912 to 1925), Louis Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934),
whose appreciation of Moroccan indigenous cultural expression is undeniable,
but who inaugurated an era of exoticism and folklorization of the native
culture’s basic orality. Lyautey’s colonial policy popularized the discur-
sive strategies of peaceful penetration and indirect rule of Morocco – as a
Protectorate of the French Republic rather than a Département D’outre-Merr or
“settler’s colony” like Algeria – inducing in the population a form of perni-
cious self-regulation as interpolated subjects rather than free citizens. The
set of imperatives that he laid down had little in common with the French
colonial policy of assimilation in other colonies: “Vex not tradition, leave
custom be. Never forget that in every society there is a class to be governed,
and a natural-born ruling class upon whom all depends. Link their interests
to ours.”2 A gradual secularization of education was implemented by the
introduction of technical modernity along with its scientific lexicon. In fact,
“modernity,” as Charles Kuzman observes, “appeared to generate wealth
and commodities that the Islamic world lacked and desired.”3 However,
since its first inception in the Arabo-Islamic World during the Napoleonic
invasion of Egypt up till the present moment, this approach has been subject
to numerous revisionist compromises.
The advent of modernization within the context of colonialism established
a fracture between the old pastoral dynamics and the new modernist ideals.
Orality (including the pre-colonial masquerades and performance cultures)
was strategically overshadowed and made into the other from within and
without through a whole apparatus of folklorization and auto-exoticism.
Such orality was construed as a museum piece, or even an inert repository of
a disappearing culture that needed to be preserved for following generations
as a projection of the old Moroccan society. With the increase of European
penetration in Morocco, Islamic jurisdiction was little by little minimized
82
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 83

by the interference of modern administration located in modern new cities.

The Ulama (Religious Authorities) of Al-Qarawiyin steadily lost their exclu-
sive control over education, as the French built new modern schools, which
naturally emphasized French culture and the French language. The new
cities, along with their new institutions, increasingly dominated the old
medinas. Morocco’s urban tissue, ever since the Lyautey era, has become
characterized by a strong dualism that includes an old medina with narrow
meandering streets around mosques and with quarters for bazaars and artisans
organized according to activity and craft, and the modern city that has been
constructed according to modern architectural norms since the Protectorate.
The best example of this situation is the division between la ville nouvelle
of Fez, founded by Resident General Lyautey in 1916 outside the walls, and
the old Fez, which was gradually emptied of historical significance and
transformed literally into a virtual live museum designated by UNESCO as
a world heritage city.
Predictably, the establishment of European protectorates in Morocco
encouraged, here as elsewhere, the growth of a European population and the
establishment of European-style theatres. The first such venture was begun
a year before the Treaty of Fez and opened a year after it. This was the Gran
Teatro Cervantes in Tangier. It was built by a well-to-do Spanish couple with
a strong interest in the arts, Don Manuel Peña and Hope Orellana, in coop-
eration with the entrepreneur Antonio Gallego, who had opened a modest
variety house, the Liceo Rafael Calvo, in this city in 1897. As its name sug-
gests, the Cervantes was very much a Spanish venture, created by and for the
city’s growing Spanish population, and the work of Spanish artists. Even its
building materials were imported from Spain at the request of its architect,
Armstrong Diego Jimeze. The interior of its dome was painted by y Spanish
artist Federico Bank, with other interior decoration by Jose de la Rose. The
façade was the work of Candid Mata of Seville, and Bussat, a leading Spanish
scenic artist, designed the settings. The 1400-seat theatre at the beginning
favored music groups from Spain and Mexico, but before long its repertoire
became quite diverse, reflecting Tangier’s growing importance as an interna-
tional city. For the next half-century it served as a real cultural bridge between
the two banks of the Mediterranean Sea. It served as a performance space for
both theatre and music concerts and as a cultural center for conferences and
debates, a real place of convivencia. In 1918, Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), the
greatest tenor of the time, appeared there. Estrella Castro (1914–1983), the
passionate Spanish singer and actress, performed her famous “Copla” (Spanish
popular song) on this stage. Lola Flores (1923–1995) and her partner Manuel
Caracol (1909–1973) also performed their Flamenco songs.
During the 1920s, the Moroccan theatre scene experienced an alteration
similar to that undergone in Algeria and Tunisia some 15 years earlier.
Having begun to experience European-style theatre imported by the expatriate
community, the country was then exposed to an Arabic version of such
84 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Figure 4 Teatro Cervantes, Tangier, Morocco (photo courtesy of Abdelaziz Khalili)

theatre by traveling actors from Egypt and Tunisia. According to Moroccan

theatre historian Abdellah Chakroun:

In 1923 an Arab theatre company arrived in Morocco via Tunis and

Algiers; it had as a name “the Company of the Arab Rebirth” ( Jawq an-
Nahda Al-Arabiya), and was directed by a certain Mohammed Azzedine
Al-Masri … Men of culture and notables went to see it; it has also given
a presentation in the Palace of the Sultan. Mohammed Azzedine Al-Masri
received a high decoration from the Sovereign, Moulay Youssef … Tunisian
and Egyptian actors were thus associated, forming a company with
Mohammed Azzedine Al-Masri as a star, actor-musician-singer. This
company produced the play “Salah Ed-Din Al -Ayoubi” which it gave in
Tunisia and Algeria … then in Morocco.4

Abdelwahed Ouzri, the artistic director of the contemporary Moroccan

troupe, the Masrah Al-Yawm (Today’s Theatre Company), emphasizes the
cultural negotiation involved in this first encounter:

In 1923, the company of Mohammed Azzedine Al-Masri arrived in Morocco

and gave performances in Tangier, Rabat, Fez, Marrakesh and even in the
Royal Palace … the visits of the Arab troupes, to a certain extent, allowed
familiarization with the practice of theatre, and especially contact with a
theatre already under the influence of Western theatre. Let us mention
that in their tours, the Arab troupes also performed adaptations of Molière
[[Le Médecin malgré lui], and Shakespeare [[Romeo and Juliett].5

Mohammed Azzedine Al-Masri was soon followed by other companies from

both Tunisia and Egypt, who played a significant role in “familiarizing” the
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 85

Moroccan public with the Western model of theatre-making. Later in 1923

the company of Chadli Ben Friha, who had trained with George Abiad,
arrived from Tunisia. The following year the city of Fez invited the
Egyptian Al-Firqa al-Mokhtalita (Combined Company), numbering among
its members Abd-al-Razzaq Krtnsks, Hasan Banan and his wife Aliaa, and
Rafool and his Syrian wife. Several members of this company, led by Hasan
Banan, decided to remain in Morocco, and in Marrakesh formed one of
the first ongoing professional companies in that country. They created
mainly satirical works and performed successfully for several years in Jenan
El-Harty.6 A number of the leading companies of Egypt followed, headed by
those of Najib Al-Rihani (1889–1949), presenting popular critiques of contem-
porary society, and Fatimah Rushdie (1909–1996), a gifted singer and one
of the first female stars of the Arab theatre. These traveling theatrical companies
that visited Morocco continuously starting from 1923 served as mediators
between Moroccan audiences and the newly built European theatres.
The year 1923 is thus a key date in the brief history of modern Moroccan
theatre. For the proponents of the Western model of theatre-making, this
year stands for the founding moment for theatre in Morocco in the Arabic
language. However, for the advocates of Moroccan traditional performance
cultures, it represents a moment of rupture and split between the past per-
formance activity and the present Eurocentric theatre traditions borrowed
from the West either directly or via theatrical visiting groups from the
Middle East.
World War I, which saw Morocco converted from its long independence
to the status of a protectorate, saw equally radical changes at the other end
of the Mediterranean, in Egypt. There, these years brought an end to the
long if not strongly enforced participation of Egypt in the Ottoman Empire.
The Empire allied itself with the Central Powers, encouraging England,
which already was a strong presence in Egypt, to make that country a British
protectorate and remove it from Ottoman influence. For most of the artists
of the developing Egyptian theatre this was not a source of much difficulty,
but it was for George Abiad, perhaps the most prominent theatre artist
in Egypt at this time. Just as the war began he merged his company with
that of one of his leading rivals, that of singer and dancer Salama Hijazi.
Her abilities complemented Abiad’s dramatic skills, brought the combined
company tremendous critical and financial success, and caused them to be
generally considered the leading troupe in the country. They opened their
new collaboration with that cornerstone of early Arabic theatre, Al-Haddad’s
Salah El-Din. Unhappily this success lasted only a few months. The Khedive,
who had from the beginning strongly supported Abiad, was deposed in
December of 1914 and went into exile. The new Abiad/Hijali Company,
apparently no longer feeling as welcome in Egypt, began the most extensive
touring of the Arab world so far undertaken by an Arab theatre company.
Touring was hardly a new experience for Abiad. His company had already
86 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

toured widely in Egypt and in 1913 went as far afield as Palestine, appearing
in a number of Palestinian cities and giving them their first experience of
Arabic theatre.
Inevitably their travels took them to the Maghreb, an area already opened
to Egyptian touring during the previous decade. In the spring of 1921 they
traveled as far west as Algeria and Tunisia, though not, somewhat surpris-
ingly, to Morocco, which had to wait two more years for the arrival of the
distinctly less prestigious Al-Masri company. In all three countries, however,
these Egyptian visits of the early 1920s provided a significant stimulus to the
modest dramatic activities already taking place there. The Abiad/Hijazi com-
pany was composed of 30 actors and singers, an orchestra, and a company
dramatist, Farah Antun. They returned to both Algeria and Tunisia in 1923
and in subsequent years Abiad returned several times to Tunisia, sometimes
with other artists and sometimes alone, and came to occupy as prominent a
place in the early history of the theatre of that country as he did in Egypt.
During their first visit to Algeria, in 1921, the Abiad/Hijazi company
presented two historical dramas, the usual Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi and
another historical drama by Nagib Al-Haddad, Taratu el arab (The Revenge
of the Arabs), based on Chateaubriand’s novel The Last of the Abencerages.7
The productions were presented in Algiers at the Kursaal, built a few years
earlier as a theatre, but now struggling to survive as a seasonal casino and
music hall under the direction of a Parisian entrepreneur, M. Provost. The
Kursaal was rather removed from both the European center and the native
sections of Algiers, and the Arab population, unfamiliar with the theatre and
unaccustomed to such publicity as posters or advertisements in the few
Arabic papers, showed little interest in the venture. The small audiences
were composed mostly of those Europeans who frequented the Kursaal in
any case and Arab students. A number of the latter were, however, inspired
to organize student performing groups, most notably Al-Mouhaddiba (The
Educator) created in 1921 by Ali Cherif Al-Tahar, who served as actor,
director and playwright, creating three plays for the group, all studies of
the evils of alcohol, the one-act Achifae ba’d anâ (Cure after Testing, 1921),
Khadîa’t al gharam (Passions Betrayed, 1922), apparently a three-act elabo-
ration of the previous work, and a three-act tragedy, Badi’’ (1924). The first
was presented in a hall at the Algiers Lycée, the third at the Kursaal, and
the second at the so-called Municipal Theatre. After its high point with the
visit of the Emperor in 1865 the Algiers Opera, despite its grandiose Second
Empire building, had settled into a pattern of quiet mediocrity. Renamed
the Municipal Theatre at the beginning of the new century, it was run by
a director, appointed yearly by the city, who undertook to present three
operas a week by his French company for a six month season and to fill the
other nights as best he could. Normally these alternatives were contem-
porary French comedies, but as Arabic plays began to appear these provided
another alternative.
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 87

A cluster of other student productions are recorded during these same years
at the Kursaal in Algiers and in the community of Blida, a mountain resort
village some 50 kilometers southwest of Algiers, which were produced by a
young man who, as actor, director, and perhaps most important, chronicler,
would come to occupy a position at the very center of the colonial Algerian
theatre, Mahiéddine Bachtarzi (1897–1986). Like many of the leading per-
formers in the early Algerian theatre, Bachtarzi began his career as a singer
of religious songs and talented chanter of the Koran. This in turn led him to
join a prominent Algerian musical company, Al Murtribya, which had been
established in 1910 primarily to perform Andalusian music. Its leader was an
Algerian Jew, Edmond Yafil, and the company contained 75 Algerian Jews
and three Algerian Muslims, one of which was Bachtarzi.
In 1922 Yafil was approached by an Algerian man of culture, Mohammed
Mansali, who had spent several years in Lebanon to avoid the compulsory
French military service in his homeland, and while in Beirut had developed
an interest in the fledgling Arabic theatre there. He returned to Algeria
with several plays by Maroun An-Naqqash which he had seen performed
in Lebanon and which he felt a company like Al Murtribya might present
along with a musical accompaniment. Yafil in turn asked Bachtarzi to
establish a theatrical wing of the company. He formed El Temthil el arabi
(The Arab Theatre) and presented early in 1924 Fi Sabili el Watan (For the
Fatherland), a strongly patriotic piece for which Yafil’s orchestra provided a
musical accompaniment. Although set in Turkey, the play had a sufficiently
anti-colonialist feel to cause the authorities to ban it, though they seemed
to have had little to fear. The political drama offered by Mansali proved no
more popular than the moral dramas of Cherif. There was not yet any devel-
oped taste for theatre-going among the Arab population of Algeria, and per-
haps even more important, this population was largely unfamiliar with the
classic Arabic in which all these plays were written, studied in the schools
but not spoken in the street. The actors were doubtless not much of an
attraction either, necessarily untrained amateurs, selected for their singing
voices and not for any acting ability, paid poorly if at all, and including no
women, not because of moral reasons but because no woman had studied or
could speak the classical Arabic in which the plays were written.
Nevertheless, Mansali and Bachtarzi later that same year presented a
second An-Naqqash play in Blida. This production was Fath el Andalous (The
Conquest of Andalusia), followed by a play of the same type by Mansali him-
self, Tarik Ibn Ziad, named after a North African warrior who led an armed
expedition to Andalusia. The author himself played the leading role and
Bachtarzi, doubtless in an effort to assuage the suspicious colonial authorities,
sang the Marseillaisee in Arabic to conclude the evening. This may have pleased
the French, but it also earned Bachtarzi the condemnation of the Muslim
Arabic-educated elite, who condemned him as an agent of colonialism and a
traitor to his country and warned him he was on their list.8
88 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

From this point onward Bachtarzi moved primarily into theatrical

production, and his memoirs, published in three volumes in 1968, 1985
and 1987, provide the most detailed picture in existence of the formation
and development of the early Algerian theatre. Nevertheless Bachtarzi
has never been fully accepted by later and more nationalistic Algerian
theatre artists as one of their number. The promotion of Andalusian music
by Al Mutribya was strongly encouraged by the colonial authorities as a
European alternative to authentic Algerian folk culture, and Bachtarzi
remained always associated with this project. His memoirs continually
reveal that he was well treated by the colonial authorities and thus always
under something of a cloud with more patriotic countrymen.
The end of the war also saw a striking revival of theatrical activity in
Tunisia, and the opening season of that country’s leading company, As-Sahma,
was extremely successful. Within a year, however, a division appeared between
the governing committee and several of the actors, led by Bourguiba, who
wanted a more engaged, nationalistic repertoire. As a result, Bourguiba and
others departed to form the first jawk in Tunisia. Previously, Tunisian theatre
had been the work of societies, mostly literary, which appointed a governing
committee to run the theatre. The jawk was an independent group of actors,
normally led by an actor-manager in the style of much current European
theatre. Approved by the municipality of Tunis, the new company, called Al-
Hilal (The Crescent) opened in February of 1921 at the Rossini with As-Sab
wa Qaysar, a translation of Voltaire’s La Mort de Césarr (the Death of Caesar)
by Georges Tannus, followed by Shuhadae al-Wataniya, Zaki Mabru’s transla-
tion of Sardou’s Patrie (Fatherland).
In the meantime, Al-Adab, relying largely upon the repertoire of Qardahi
and Hijazi, continued to appear at the Municipal Theatre until 1922, when
the municipality of Tunis proposed a new theatrical arrangement. Hitherto
the Arab theatre in the city had received no subvention, but the arrival
of a highly qualified, French-trained theatre director, George Abiad, with
his company in Tunis in 1921 gave them the confidence to support such
a venture. Abiad was asked by the municipality to remain as head of the
first state-supported theatre in the country and he accepted. The remaining
members of As-Sahama were combined with Al-Adab and Abiad’s company
to form a single, state-subsidized troupe, the Arab Theatre, to perform at the
Rossini in February of 1922 before moving to become the resident company
at the Municipal Theatre. Thus Abiad became, after Qardahi, the second
major figure in the Tunisian theatre, but his career there was a somewhat
erratic one. He set to work with great energy, adding new Tunisian actors
to his company and beginning extensive training classes for them. They
performed one day a week, beginning with dramas from Abiad’s previous
repertoire such as Romeo and Juliett and Dumas’s La Tour de Nesle. The venture,
however, did not attract the public the Tunisian authorities hoped for and
Abiad expected. He decided that the French and English repertoire was too
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 89

alien and shifted to the more familiar repertoire of Qardahi and Hijazi:
Salah El-Din, Ins al-jalis, Haroun Ar- Rachid, but these fared little better.
Disheartened, Abiad gave up the venture after a single season and returned
to Egypt with most of his original company.
It may be that the Tunisian Arabic public, accustomed to the more
rhetorical style of Qardahi, did not respond to the more nuanced and subtle
style of Abiad, or perhaps this audience was not yet large enough to support
both the Arab Theatre and its major rival, Al-Hilal, since that company also
suffered from small audiences, and in fact disbanded in 1923. Bourguiba
retired from the stage, while most of his actors joined the Arab Theatre,
now under the artistic direction of Ibrahim Al-Akoudi, the former director of
As-Sahamah. The major contribution of Abiad’s brief tenure was the group
of important new talents that he developed and who became leaders of the
Tunisian theatre during the next several decades. Among these were Basir
Al-Mithinni (1901–1972), Habib Al-Mana (1903–1948) and Chadli Ben Friha
(1903–1945).
The influx of new actors and the disappearance of a major competitor
should have brought new life to the Arab theatre, but other difficulties offset
these advantages. Most importantly, the municipality, after the departure
of Abiad, stopped its subsidy for the company and allowed it to perform
at the Municipal Theatre only grudgingly and with strong encouragement
to move elsewhere. At least a more congenial home was soon found, in
the private theatre of Ali Ben Kamla. Until 1923 Ben Kamla was the owner
of a cinema, but when it burned he decided to build a private theatre, the
first in Tunisia, in Le Passage, the Jewish quarter of Tunis, a favored area for
entertainments. It opened with a combined program of cinema, concerts,
and comic sketches, but in January 1924 provided a home for the actors of
the Arab Theatre, which remained there until its breaking up in 1936. The
real impresario of the company was Ahmed Boulayman, whom Ben Kamla
utilized as actor and as designer of scenery and costumes. Boulayman also
provided close ties to most of the endeavors of the early Arabic theatre in
Tunis. He had been a member of the group gathered to present Othello in
1908 when they were overtaken by the arrival of the Egyptian company, and
he had served as a key member of the Hijazi and Abiad companies. He also
served as literary manager for Ben Kamla, though his selections were hardly
memorable. The company presented a few new plays, primarily Arabic adap-
tations of popular French melodrama writers like Ducange and Dennery,
and comic sketches by the popular writer Abderrazak Karabaka, but their
basic repertoire remained that of earlier years.
The decade between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, despite ongoing
tensions with the foreign colonial authorities and native religious conserva-
tives, was a period of significant growth in the theatres of all three major
countries of the Maghreb, with increasing professionalization, expansion
of companies, and many new works entering the repertoire. The Tunisian
90 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

theatre remained the most active and productive of the three, but it was dur-
ing this decade that the theatre in Algeria became truly established, while
the younger theatre of Morocco still remained in its formative years.
The Algerian theatre may be said to have reached maturity in 1926 with the
arrival of its first great and continuing success, the play Djeha, co-authored
by a popular author of dramatic sketches, Allalou and the actor Brahim
Dahmoune. Arlette Roth, one of the first historians of the Algerian theatre,
writes that Djeha basically involved a “triple innovation: in genre, theme
and language. The first plays presented in Algeria were in literary Arabic and
concerned social themes and noble subjects such as patriotism. Djeha was a
gross farce in Arab dialect.”9 Djeha provided, at last, a solution to a problem
that had long haunted the fledgling theatre of Algeria, how to attract a
committed audience that would ensure its survival. After the rather disap-
pointing reception of the Mansali plays in 1924, several members of the
newly formed company, headed by Bachtarzi and Dahmoune, continued to
seek a more popular form of theatrical entertainment, trying out a variety of
material in different modes. They arranged with the proprietor of a cinema
near the Kursaal to offer songs and short sketches between films, to provide
a variety of entertainment much after the model of programs of mixed live
acts and films in Europe and America at that time. These short sketches
relied heavily on improvisations and word-play, and usually dealt with
everyday life and the traditional themes of folk farce, cuckolded husbands,
comic drunks, tricks, and roguery. Perhaps most important, they were
created in the popular dialect, and immediately attracted the public that the
more literary earlier theatrical offerings had never drawn. Soon programs of
such sketches were offered not only in the cinema but in the Kursaal, more
directly associated with live entertainment.10
One of the first and most popular authors of these little sketches was
Sellali Ali (1902–1992), who took the stage name Allalou, and Djeha was
essentially a more elaborate development of the sort of material that had
already proven its popularity in his previous work. The play, in three acts
and four scenes, skillfully wove together material from a variety of sources:
Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire and Le Médecin malgré lui; a traditional folk
tale, Le villain mire; themes and characters from the Thousand and One
Nights; and most importantly, the character Djeha himself, a beloved
trickster rogue who had been a popular figure in Middle-Eastern folk litera-
ture at least since the late Middle Ages. Co-author Dahmoune played Hila,
Djeha’s overbearing and manipulative spouse. Women were not often seen
on these early Algerian stages, due to family resistance and social pressure,
but Dahmoune probably was drawing on the French comic tradition of men
playing elderly and tyrannical women.
With a growing audience and a body of dedicated performers and writers,
the Algerian theatre expanded rapidly after the success of Djeha. During the
next several years, plays, reviews, sketches, and farces were regularly seen
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 91

in a number of Algerian cities. Allalou and Dahmoune remained popular

for several years, but the rise of the popular comedian Rachid Ksentini
(1887–1944) eclipsed them, and so angered Allalou that he retired from the
stage in 1933 and burned all his manuscripts.11 Ksentini began his career in
the French merchant marines, and thereby visited Europe, North America,
India, and China before returning to his native Algeria in 1925. That year
he encountered Allalou in a café, who invited him to join his young theat-
rical company, Ezzahia. Ksentini first appeared there in a small role in an
Allalou comedy in 1926, Zouaj Bou Akline (The Marriage of Bou Akline) with
such success that Alloula created a whole series of sketches for him based
on the Thousand and One Nights. These successes encouraged Ksentini to
leave Alloula and join with the dramatist Dhelloul Bachedjerrah to form a
new company, Al-Hilal El Djazairi (The Algerian Crescent), in 1927. For this
group he created his first original work, El-A’hed el-wafl (The Faithful Vow),
which, unhappily, was a failure. According to the memoirs of Bachtarzi, this
was not only because Ksentini created an unsuitable role for himself, but
even more because he did not begin the evening with a musical program,
then considered essential to such an entertainment.12
Ksentini adjusted both of these problems in 1928 with a comedy closely
modeled on his Allalou success, Zouaj Bou Borma (The Marriage of Bou
Borma). Ksentini, like Molière, drew upon the traditions of popular impro-
vised comedy and was himself the star of most of his popular comedies.
Both Bou Akine and Bou Borma deal not only with marriage, but with drunk-
enness and farcical plotting. Bou-Borma, a notorious miser, agonizes over
the cost of his impending marriage. His brother and friends get him drunk
on the marriage eve and play a series of pranks, culminating in putting him
to bed, shaving off his mustaches, applying make-up and dressing him in
women’s clothing. Ksentini also addressed the public desire for a musical
introduction by composing several songs to precede the play. These also
proved popular and Ksentini soon, like a number of Algerian performers,
became as well known as a singer as he was as an actor. His particular blend
of realism, farce, and fantasy made him the leading Algerian dramatist in the
years around 1930, which has been called the apogee of colonial Algeria.
One of the major theatrical developments of the 1920s in the Maghreb
was the coming of women to a prominent position on the North African
stage. Actresses were introduced to this stage at the very beginning, as
members of the touring Egyptian companies. Indeed, Qardahi’s wife, who
came with his company in 1908, has been credited as being the first actress
on the Egyptian stage. Most leading companies, especially those in Tunisia,
included actresses, but these were distinctly secondary company members
until the 1920s, when several of them became leading stars. Unquestionably
the most famous of these was the Tunisian Habiba Messika (1903–1930),
a Jewish singer trained for the stage by Mohammed Bourguiba. Her debut
opposite Bourguiba in the inevitable production of Salah El-Din which opened
92 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the As-Sahama theatre in 1920 after the end of World War I was one of the
great theatre events of the decade. She became Bourguiba’s leading lady and
the most beloved actress of her time (aptly fulfilling her chosen stage name
of Habiba, “much loved”). She later went with Bourguiba when he left
As-Sahama to create Al-Hilal Company in 1921.
When the two groups recombined in 1925, Messika was unquestionably
the star of the company. Like many European stars, she insisted on a basic
payment (500 francs) per role, whatever the receipts, and was so popular that
her demands had to be met, creating a considerable burden for the theatre.
Her success was equally great in both male and female roles. Perhaps the
most surprising was the patriarch in Joseph and His Brothers, a work hitherto
generally avoided by Arabic companies, but now a great success thanks
to Messika’s interpretation. Her performances of figures like Delilah (with
her usual leading man, Hamda Ben Tijani as Samson) made her a major sex
symbol, a Tunisian epitome of the “roaring twenties.” She inspired a legion
of fans, most of them young bourgeois Tunisian dandies, who became
known as the “soldiers of the night.” Sometimes, these needed to play a
more active role in her support than simply cheering her appearances. The
best-known example of this was when the theatre presented Romeo and Juliet
in 1925 with Messika as Romeo. Her kiss with Rachina Lotfi’s Juliet outraged
conservative audience members, who stormed the stage and set fire to the
scenery. Only the intervention of Messika’s faithful soldiers of the night
prevented a major riot.13
In November of 1928 Messika enjoyed one of her greatest triumphs in a
new creation, An-Nisr as-Saghir,r based on Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon (The
Eaglet), created as a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, of whom Messika was in
many ways a Tunisian equivalent. She was preparing a production of Aida,
starring herself, Mohammed Al-Agrebi, and BenTijani, when disaster struck.
Messika was sprayed with petrol and set afire by a former lover in her Tunis
apartment. The news of her death in 1930, at the age of 27, caused an
outpouring of grief throughout the country. Her elaborate funeral was a
national event.
Although Messika was by no means the only well-known actress on the
Algerian stage in the 1920s, her dominance and success was such that
she served as a model for a whole generation of female performers. Her
influence was rivaled only by that of the Egyptian Fatimah Rushdie, whose
tour to Algeria and Tunisia in 1932, two years after Messika’s tragic death,
provided important further encouragement to women to appear on stage.
Rushdie was already well known as an actress in Cairo in 1927, when she
formed her own company with her husband Aziz Eid. They opened in Cairo
with the play Love, by Sarah Bernhardt, a fitting choice in that in later years
Rushdie came, like Messika, to be known as an Arabic Bernhardt. Like both
Bernhardt and Messika, Rushdie was enormously successful in both male
and female roles. She also ventured into directing, the first woman in the
 The Developing Maghreb Stage 93

Arab world to do so. The arrival of her company in Algiers in 1932 attracted
spectators from across the country to witness a series of plays including one
written by Rushdie herself, Masra’ Kliyubatra (The Fall of Cleopatra).
The example of artists like Messika and Rushdie clearly helped the
development of many women theatre artists in both Algeria and Tunisia
at this time. Fadhil Khetmi (1905–1992), a prominent member of the Arab
Theatre company in the late 1920s, became an important pioneer in the
new women’s rights movement in Tunisia, Al-Qiyada an-Nissàiya (Women’s
Leadership) and founded the first woman-led company in the country in
1928, just a year after Rushdie’s company was established in Cairo. Just two
years after Rushdie’s visit in 1932, Adjouri Aïcha made her debut under the
stage name Keltoum. She became Algeria’s best known twentieth-century
actress, with a career extending into the 1990s and involving over 200 plays
and more than 20 films. In Algeria the 1930s were dominated by the popular
dramas of Rachid Ksentini, which owed much of their success to his favorite
leading lady, Marie Soussan.
During this same decade, the example of Khetmi encouraged another
pioneering woman of the theatre, Wassila Sabri, to establish a theatre
following Khetmi’s model, the Firqat Wassila Sabri (Wassila Sabri Company)
which operated from 1937 to 1940, offering such plays as Othello, Romeo
and Juliet,
t and Assahra (The Desert) by the Egyptian dramatist Youssef Bek
Wahbi, with all the roles in each played by women. Her leading actress was
Noureddine Ben Rachid, but during a brief illness of Ben Rachid, a younger
actress, Hedi Semlali replaced her, with such success that she began to share
the honors of the company. In fact the two actresses created a series of comic
sketches together that were among the company’s greatest successes, and
toured Algeria in 1938. Upon her return to Tunis, Semlali joined with Fachla
Khetmi to revive her company, and enjoyed a great success with Al Amira
Banga (The Princess Banga) by the popular avant-garde author Ali Douagi.
9
The Theatre of Resistance

The development of theatre in the Maghreb during the 1920s and 1930s took
place against a backdrop darkened by two continuing antagonistic forces,
one political, the other religious. On the political side a growing resistance to
European occupation became more and more a topic for theatrical expression,
which in turn increasingly stimulated the occupying authorities to view the
developing theatre with suspicion, and eventually with censorship and even
closures. This was especially the case in Morocco and Algiers. Between 1921
and 1926 the Rif tribesmen rose against the Spanish occupiers in Morocco
and were eventually, and only with great difficulty, subdued with the aid of
the French. With the region presumably restored to calm, the French organ-
ized a series of grandiose celebrations of the centennial of the invasion of
Algiers, which was clearly to be taken to represent the European conquest of
Africa. The entire occupying culture, perhaps especially in Algeria, took on an
air of unreality, providing a fitting background for Ksentini plays like Er-raqed
(The Sleepers) about two drug-takers who dream that their miserable tent is
an elegant room and who quarrel over the arrangement of its furnishings,
or Dar-el-mhabel (The Insane Asylum), which shows a husband discovering
himself in a madhouse, put there by the false testimony of his wife.
Indeed, beneath the celebratory surface, tensions and resistance were
building within the three countries and even in France itself. The Etoile
Nord-Africaine (Star of North Africa, ENA) was founded among the immi-
grant communities in Paris in 1926, an organization that called openly for
the independence of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco from France. Dissolved
by the French government in 1929, it went underground and continued
to mobilize support for independence throughout the next decade. In all
three countries also, the theatre became at least guardedly involved in the
struggle. In Algeria plays began to shift from the sort of farce, buffoonery,
and stock caricatures that were a specialty of Ksentini to works with distinct
social and political allusions. As a result, the theatre began to attract the sus-
picion and from time to time the censure of the French authorities, hitherto
not very vigilant of theatrical activity. Ksentini, hardly a political dramatist,
94
 The Theatre of Resistance 95

discovered this to his regret in 1932 when he attempted for the first time a
play dealing with contemporary social issues, Faqo (They Woke Up), which,
in a manner reminiscent of Tartuffe, condemned religious hypocrites and
other profiteers who exploited the naivety of the common people. It was
promptly banned as a subversive work, even though or perhaps because it
accurately reflected shifting public taste. The kind of farce-comedy in which
Ksentini had made his reputation was giving way to a drama of more specific
social engagement, and he lacked the ability of his more successful rival,
Mahiéddine Bachtarzi, to mix these traditional comic devices with moral
uplift and more serious social commentary. In 1934 he gave up writing
entirely, and joined Bachtarzi’s company as an actor, singer, and composer
of songs, especially with a patriotic flavor. Here he continued, with fading
public attention, until his death in 1944. Largely forgotten after his death,
he was rediscovered after independence and today holds an honored place
in the history of Algerian theatre and song.
One of the founding members of the Star of North Africa, Chebbah Mekki
(1894–1988), also had a significant dramatic career, although the first of his
18 works were often banned by the censors and he was largely forgotten
both by the official theatre and by theatre scholars after independence. Upon
his return from France to Algeria in 1929, he founded in Algiers a dramatic
society, El Kewkeb, which presented some of his best-known works, among
them Tarek Ibn Ziyad d (1930) and La femme ivrogne ignorante (the Ignorant
Woman Drunkard, 1939).
Throughout the 1930s there was an ongoing struggle in Algeria between
authorities and theatre artists, who attempted to present recognizable pictures
of contemporary life without such obvious critique of the colonial situation
as to bring about a ban. The Star of North Africa sponsored a tour to France
in 1935 of a patriotic theatre piece, Ala n-Nayyiff (Excess), after its success in
Algeria. It played in several French cities before being banned in Lyon for its
championing of Algerian customs. Ksentini and Bachtarzi, the most popular
dramatists of the period, were also those most often closed down by the
censors, even though both seem to have attempted to avoid clear political
statements. Still, Bachtarzi’s 1937 El Kheddaïne (The Traitors), attacking the
popular target of hypocritical Muslims and the abuses of the French overlords,
demonstrated how much even his theatre had entered the political discourse.
Since 1934 Bachtarzi’s company had been regularly touring through the
country, the first dramatic company to do so in an organized fashion, but
the reception of a controversial play like El Kheddaïne varied enormously
from location to location. It was allowed in some cities, banned in others,
and everywhere the subject of lively discussion in the press, championed of
course in the more pro-Algerian papers and condemned in the more pro-
French ones. An article in Le Petit Oranais praised the efforts of the governor
general to shut down such subversive performances but also showed the
difficulty of controlling them. A local censor, judging that the theme of
96 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

El Khaddaïne expressed subversive sentiments, banned the performance of

this piece within his territory. When the director of the company protested,
it was agreed that only The Marriage by Telephone would be presented, and
the production was allowed to move forward. But during the performance
the actors inserted into their dialogue the most aggressive passages from
El Khaddaïne, attacking the sovereignty of the French in Algeria.1 Even the
whimsical Zid’ayatt (1938), depicting a group of fish who banded together
against fishermen, was seen as a political allegory and banned.2
Not surprisingly, then, most of Bachtarzi’s works created between 1934 and
1939, during which time he was the unchallenged leader of Algerian drama-
turgy, dealt with contemporary life while avoiding the more troubling aspects
of colonialism. Such was the case with his quite successful 1934 Bouzarai fi
al askarr (The Peasant in the Regiment), which held the title character up to
ridicule, his 1939 Ma yenfaa ghir Essah (Only the Truth Counts), dealing with
a young man who rejects his village upbringing and emigrates to the city, an
increasingly common phenomenon, or Boutchenchana (Cocaine), the same
year, which was totally in harmony with a current government cam-
paign against drugs. The potentially controversial subject of mixed marriage
between a European and an Algerian Muslim was, interestingly, the subject
of two plays which might almost be seen as together presenting a balanced
view on this matter. The protagonists in the 1934 Al-en-nîff (Duty) are both
confused and naive and the unhappy outcome of their union is based more
on this than on the clash of cultures. Les Femmes (Women, 1937) shows a
much more sophisticated and mature couple, who derive strength from their
cultural differences.
In Tunisia, where the theatre was much more closely involved with the
government, especially the municipal government of Tunis, the ongoing
tension was somewhat less, but the French authorities, who at first encour-
aged theatre as a way of “Frenchifying” Tunisian citizens, became more
suspicious as certain artists, especially those associated with the leading
company Al-Adab, turned more and more to social criticism. Monitoring
increased and outright censorship occasionally occurred. The Comedy Theatre
(Al-Masrah Fukaahi) during the 1920s particularly specialized in dramas
of social criticism concerning current problems, and a group formed in
1925 calling themselves Firqat as-Saada (Happiness Company) was openly
political, with close ties to the Liberal Constitutional Union Party (Destour),
founded in 1920 and dedicated to liberating Tunisia from its position as
French Protectorate. This is not to say that such theatres did not present
a variety of fare, including such Arabic standards as Salah El-Din and Ins
Al-Jalis mixed with such predictable European adaptations as Hamlett and
Romeo and Juliet. Nevertheless, the repertoire as a whole clearly worked to
undermine the colonial project and to develop a national spirit and con-
sciousness. Those plays written in classical Arabic offered insights into the
history of Tunisia, the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, and Andalusia,
 The Theatre of Resistance 97

while those written in the Tunisian dialect provided moral instruction and
social critique.
Even when absent in Egypt, Georges Abiad continued to exert an influence
on the Tunisian theatre. A group of his friends and disciples, including Ahmed
Bulayman, split away from the Arab Theatre in 1927 to form a group called
Al-Mastaqbal at-Tamtili (The Theatrical Future). The group was headed by
Mohammed Lahbib (1903–1980), who became director and house dramatist,
the director Basir Al-Mithinni, and the actress Fadhil Khetmi. Lahbib, before
becoming involved in the theatre, was already known as an educator and
journalist with strong nationalist sentiments which he expressed regularly
in the journal Lissan Achab (The Voice of the People). He worked steadily to
develop a consciousness of a Tunisian national theatre, both through his own
dramas, such as the often-revived Al-Watiq Billah Al-Hafsi and in the crea-
tion of the first history of Arabic theatre in this country, which he published
in 1932 in the journal Annahdha. The Future theatre had in Lahbib a popu-
lar house dramatist, supported by a strong company, but there was simply
not a large enough public to support three ongoing theatres in Tunis. Once
again a call went out to Abiad in Egypt to return and attempt to revitalize
the theatrical scene. He returned in the fall of 1932, announcing an ambi-
tious program of opera, tragedies, historical and modern dramas, but in
the event he mounted only three plays, Oedipus, Louis XI, I and Mohammed
Bourguiba’s At-Tagya (The Tyrant, adapted from François Coppée’s Pour la
Couronne, For the Crown) before giving up and returning to Egypt.
Finally, the Mayor of Tunis, Sheikh Al-Madina, tired of the instability of
the Arabic theatres in the city, decided to unite the various scattered troupes
into a single company, Al-Ittihad al-Masrahi, the “Theatrical Union.” The
decision was officially announced in Le Petit Matin of 29 January 1936.
The article complained of the present “exhausting” competition among
theatres in the city, noting that since each theatre had its own directing
committee, this resulted in “as many directors as actors and actresses” as
well as spreading out the still rather thin number of professional performers.3
The new Theatrical Union was placed under the artistic direction of Basir
Al-Mithinni, former co-director of Al-Mustqabal at-Tamtili. It was conceived
as a kind of national theatre, since it received a direct subsidy from the
government instead of the previous municipal subsidy, and moreover it
was given a particular charge to encourage Tunisian dramatists. Indeed, a
portion of the receipts from original works was specifically set aside for the
first time to encourage such endeavors. This emphasis on Tunisian work
continued the long-standing campaign by Lhabib and others and more specifi-
cally supported a project initiated a few years before by one of the groups
folded into the new united company. This was a group that split off from
the Arab theatre in 1924 calling themselves El-Masrah (The Theatre). In a
manifesto published in the paper as-Sawab they announced as their goal the
production “only of plays written or translated by Tunisians,” noting that
98 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

“Tunisia is rich in literary production and counts among its men of letters
dramatic authors capable of rivaling in quality those of Egypt or Syria. It is
time to elevate the Tunisian theatre from the rank of adaptation to that of
creation.”4 In the event, El-Masrah almost entirely presented adaptations
and few original works, but this interest was taken up in the planning of
the new united theatre.
The new combined organization indicated their commitment to local
drama by opening in December of 1936 with a new Tunisian comedy of
manners, Si Hamdun (Mr Hamdun) by Mohammed Zarruq and Abd Al-Aziz
Al-Wislati. Zarruq already had a solid reputation both as a translator, espe-
cially of Molière, and as an author of original works. He and Al-Wislati
had collaborated before, most notably on Jarati (My Neighbor), a work on
the subject of women’s emancipation, one of the last works produced by
El-Masrah before the 1936 union. Si Hamdun was followed by a revival of
Patriee and a new operetta, Ali Baba, by Ahmed Bulayman. In 1937 the theatre,
to encourage new Tunisian drama, began an annual competition. The first
winner was Mustapha Khraief, a Tunisian poet, whose work Al-Kahina, was
based on the seventh-century Berber queen of that name who resisted the
Ottoman invaders and was now widely regarded as a symbol of Tunisian
independence. The work was staged this year and was one of the Union’s
great successes. Such historical dramas with clear anti-colonialist impli-
cations were among the most popular dramatic works in Tunisia in the
1930s, appealing to the growing national spirit without the sort of specific
reference to the current situation to expose them to censorship.
When Arabic theatre in the European style was introduced to Morocco in
1923 the country was in the midst of the Rif insurrection, the bloodiest and
most serious rebellion to date against European occupation in the Maghreb.
Not surprisingly, then, Moroccan drama was from the beginning more
directly engaged with the concerns of occupation and nationalism than
the drama presented in either Algeria or Tunisia. The opening decades of
the modern Moroccan theatre, in the years between 1923 and 1950 were
informed by nationalist agitations to the extent that this era has come to
be known as Masrah al-muqawama (Theatre of Resistance). The forerunners
of this early amateur yet agitational theatre employed it as a legitimate part of
the nationalist agenda. A theatrical performance was conceived of as an
opportunity of awakening peoples’ Arabo-Islamic repressed identities and
manifesting their discontent against the colonizers. The theatre of resistance
was a platform of underground communication and shaping of public opinion.
It was highly attentive to the various processes of articulating national
allegories, and to the colonial predicament of disenfranchised Moroccan
subjects. As a subversive terrain for voicing native pedagogies and regain-
ing an agency lost to the violent colonial intervention, it foregrounded
the political at the expense of the aesthetic. The early performances were
characterized by a general tendency toward politicizing the general public.
 The Theatre of Resistance 99

Changing the world was the main task of such early attempts at playwrighting
rather than representing the world. The greatest Istiklal party leader, poet
and reformist Allal Al-Fassi (1910–1974) praised and prompted the young
generation to practice theatre as a means of empowerment and struggle
against colonialism, and a number of the leaders of the resistance, like
Abdelkhalek Torres (1910–1970), Mohammed El-Qurri (1847–1937), and
Mohammed Ben-Cheikh, also wrote for the theatre. Their dramas were
informed by the desire to stir up the spirit of resistance in the general
public rather than a desire to write for the sake of theatre itself. Indeed
El-Qurri, the martyr of the Moroccan theatre of resistance, was impris-
oned for his subversive activities and tortured to death by the occupiers
in 1937.
The birth of Moroccan drama/theatre within the context of colonialism,
with no parliament and democratic elections, created another platform of
resistance and subversive action against the colonizer. The first generation
of Moroccan playwrights – Mohammed El-Qurri, Mohammed Al-Haddad,
Abdelkhalek Torres, and El-Mehdi Mniai, as paradigmatic figures of this
transitional period – realized theatre’s intricate ability to subvert or even
dispense with the colonizer’s authority. These subversive elements that
exist on the borderline between art and life can be best articulated in
theatre through its multiple potentialities to embody what is normally
thought of as incoherent, chaotic, and revolutionary. Hence, theatre’s
involvement in politics and its embrace of the suffering and everyday life
of its colonized public soon became paradigmatic features of the early
amateur theatre.
Almost immediately after the suppression of the Rif uprisings, and with
those events much in the consciousness of all Moroccans, the first pro-
ductions inspired by the visiting Egyptians a few years before were witnessed,
the work of students in Fez. Not surprisingly, the first such Moroccan-created
performance was the popular Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi, the almost invariable
opening selections by the Egyptian touring companies. It was performed in
March of 1927 by the students of Moulay Idriss School Association in Fez,
shortly followed by another performance of the same type, Intissar al-baraa
(The Victory of Innocence) by Mohammed Ben-Cheikh on 28 May. The
two performances significantly took place in an Arab rather than a colonial
location, at the Assarrajine Hall inside the ancient medina of Fez rather
than in the French new town. That same year another group of young art-
ists from the city of Sale presented Haroun Ar-rachid Wal-Baramika by Najib
Al-Haddad, the Lebanese author of the popular Salah El-Din in the cinema
La Renaissance in Rabat.
Such performances remained fairly uncommon, however, not so much
because of a limited public, but because theatrical activity in the Arabic lan-
guage was almost made impossible in most of Morocco by the French and
Spanish authorities. They viewed public gatherings during these difficult times
100 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

as aggressive actions against colonial authority. Of course, the Francophone

theatre was free from such restrictions, as the French and some few Moroccans
primarily practiced it. Arabic-language theatre enjoyed this sort of liberty only
when it operated within the safe domain of adaptations from French origi-
nals. So, most notably, the company of Mehdi Mniai in Fez avoided arousing
the antagonism of the authorities by presenting, between 1928 and 1930
the first stagings of Molière in Morocco, adaptations by Mniai himself of The
Miserr (Al-Bahil), The Doctor in Spite of Himselff (At-Tabib Raghman ‘Anhu) and
Tartuffee (Tartif), The situation in two particular cities, Tangier and Tetouàn was,
however, significantly different. The degree of freedom enjoyed in the two
cities made them real platforms for nationalist agendas. Journalism and the
arts including theatre were all utilized in the service of resistance, particularly
when the French Protectorate administration banned all theatrical activity in
the rest of Morocco.
Tangier’s international status uniquely contributed to its excessive tolerance,
to the extent of acquiring the name of “Sin City.”5 No doubt this helped to
create an atmosphere in which a potentially threatening art like theatre could
be more easily tolerated, but it must be emphasized that the actual theatre
offerings in “Sin City” were by no means titillating or immoral, but on the
contrary tended to stress moral teachings, usually with distinct Islamic over-
tones. This can already be clearly seen in what is considered the first drama to
be written by a Moroccan playwright/director, Kalila wa Dimna (Kalila and
Dimna), by Mohammed Al-Haddad, presented by the newly formed Al-Jawk
Al-Tanji Li-Tamthil Al-Arabi (Tangier’s ensemble of Arabic Acting). The play
was inspired by Abd-Allah Ibn Al-Muqaffa’s translation of Kalila wa Dimna,
and specifically from the chapter called The Lion and the Bull. Its moral is
that one must not accuse others falsely and must strive to preserve friend-
ships. It was hailed among the first attempts at playwriting due to its histori-
cal substance and moralizing genesis, more than dramaturgical quality. This
was soon followed by another play of a more directly historical character
by the same author: Al-Walid Ibn Abd Al-Malik (Ibn, Son of Abd Al-Malik).
At this early period, theatre performances became spaces for emerging artists
to be seen as they wished to be seen – functioning agents of the Islamic society
that used non-traditional media such as theatre for preaching and moralizing.
Their narratives and little histories conveyed to their audiences how their
present situation derived from the past, and how the signs that structure and
signify the world around them bear witness to the inextricable connection
between past and present. In brief, theatre was utilized as a means of promul-
gating Islamic values.
Tetouàn became a real cultural capital for the Spanish part of Morocco
after the historical visit of the Lebanese anti-imperialist activist Shakib
Arslan (1869–1946) to the city on 14 August 1930 immediately after the
Berber Decree, a highly controversial colonialist ruling that replaced the
Berber courts with the French judicial system and was interpreted as
 The Theatre of Resistance 101

contributing to the colonial plan to divide the Berber and Arab population.
Azouz Hakim, the city’s chronicler, argues that “All documents prove the
increasing importance of the city of Tetouàn after the visit of Shakib Arslan
in 1930. Tetouàn became the center of the Moroccan national movement,
especially its foreign action under the supervision of Abdessallam Benouna
and Shakib Arslan.”6 In the theatre, the key Tetouàn figure of this era was
Abdelkhalek Torres (1910–1970) who, along with his students of the Free
Institute of Tetouàn, on 10 June 1936 presented his own play Intissar Al-Haq
(The Victory of Right) at the biggest Spanish theatre in the city, “Teatro
Español.” Torres was also a key Salafi reformist, a highly influential political
figure, and visionary of the emerging nationalist movement in Morocco
in the 1930s. In him one sees the merging of national and religious influ-
ences that were critical to the vitality and power of the developing theatre
in Tetouàn, and indeed in Morocco and throughout the Maghreb during
the 1930s. To better understand that dynamic, we must now turn from
the theatre’s complex political situation to an even more complex one, its
relationship to Islam.
10
Islam and the Colonial Stage

The unrivalled prominence of the historical drama Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi

by the Lebanese writer Najib Al-Haddad in the development of the modern
theatre of the Maghreb reveals much about the orientation and concerns of
that theatre, especially during its formative years. The presentation of this
work was very much a tribute to the highly respected historical figure Salah
El-Din Al-Ayoubi (1137–1193), the great liberator and defender of Al-Quds
( Jerusalem) and its Al-Aqsa mosque and dome. It was thus also a strong
reminder of the Arabo-Islamic colonial predicament and common destiny,
as well as a call for unity from the Gulf to the Atlantic to fight the new crusaders.
These two themes, Arab nationalism and the defense of Islam, were inextri-
cably intertwined in the story of Salah El-Din and the ongoing anti-colonial
struggle. The new nineteenth-century drama developed in Lebanon, Syria,
and Egypt was already a much more hybrid form than many theatre histori-
ans have acknowledged. Although strongly influenced by European form and
subject matter, it was by no means a mere derived imitation of that tradition,
but a productive new mixture blending the European forms and material with
age-old classical Arabic rhetorical treatises, melodramatic sensitivity, and verse.
Between these first experiments with the new approach and its importation
to and development in the Maghreb a generation or two later, the growing
power of the colonialist project and important internal changes in Islam, espe-
cially the Salafi movement, served to bring together in a common concern the
developing theatre culture and the long established religious culture, so that
not only certain forms of the Islamic tradition became adapted to theatrical
use, but also central themes and narrative concerns. In this light, the signifi-
cance of Najib Al-Haddad’s dedication at the opening of his published script is
quite revealing. He dedicates the play to his uncle Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Yazejie,
a religious authority of the time: “This is the first representational story which
I have written by myself without recourse to Arabization. I humbly present
it to your attention.”1 The play and its dedication to a religious authority
challenges some of the prejudices long in the making in both Europe and the
Arab world about the relationship between Islam and the theatre.
102
 Islam and the Colonial Stage 103

Throughout the brief history of the modern Arabo-Islamic theatre, Islam

has often been inaccurately portrayed as a largely negative force. Such
misleading scholarship has been sustained by Westerners and Arabs begin-
ning with Jacob Landau (1958)2 and continuing through John Gassner
and Edward Quinn (1969),3 Mohammed Aziza (1978),4 Peter J. Chelkowsky
(1979),5 Mohammed Al-Khozai (1984),6 and Mustapha M. Badawi (1988),7
among others. G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy provide an exemplary and
significant example. When their History of the Theatre first appeared in 1968
it immediately established itself as the model for world theatre history, and it
still retains much of its influence in the field today, 40 years and ten editions
later. During the 1970s and 1980s, as more and more theatre research was
done on non-European theatre, subsequent editions of Brockett and Hildy
began to include more Asian material and then material from Latin America
and Africa, but the Arab world remained totally ignored. True, Brockett and
Hildy began their book, as their predecessors had done, with the ritual dramas
of the Pharonic period and then moved on to Greece. The assumption, often
explicitly stated, was that nothing of any theatrical interest had taken place
in Egypt since about 1850 BCE. They openly declare in their ninth edition
that Islam is partly responsible for such absence: “[Islam] forbade artists to
make images of living things because Allah was said to be the only crea-
tor of life … the prohibition extended to the theatre, and consequently in
those areas where Islam became dominant, advanced theatrical forms were
stifled.”8 This stigmatizing generalization is both inaccurate and disturbing.
Yet, as John Bell points out in a 2005 survey of Western scholarship and the
study of Islamic performance, because this history of world theatre “is so
widely used and respected, Brockett and Hildy’s faulty scholarship remains
dominant, the voice of authority.”9
This view of the incompatibility of Islam with European concepts is by no
means restricted to Western scholars; one may find many Arab writers on
the theatre taking a similar position. The problem is often traced back to the
Arabs’ first encounter with the Greek heritage through Syriac translations.
This took place during the golden age of the Abbasid’s dynasty (the second
century of Islam). Mohammed Al-khozai, for example, argues that by “this
time Arabic poetry was maturing; and because of the new monotheistic
faith it was unlikely that Arab scholars would turn to what they considered a
pagan art form.”10 The early Muslims did develop a great animosity toward
the dramatic genre that derived from old Greece and Rome. The main
reason behind such disavowal is religious sensibility since Islam was still
struggling to make space among other religions that preceded it. As the
monolithic discursive structures of Islam were consolidated, all kinds of
cultural exchange with other peoples during the golden period of the expan-
sion of the Islamic empire were indeed influenced by this consolidation.
Greek drama’s celebration of simulacra and conflict constituted a real danger
to the newly established monotheistic Arabo-Islamic structure, as well as to
104 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the social and political orders. Mohammed Aziza concludes that because of
these serious cultural differences, “It was impossible for drama to originate
in a traditional Arabo-Islamic environment.” Muslim Arabs could not have
known drama for the simple reason that none of the four types of conflict
existed in their faith or thought.11
Much of such scholarship is based on a flawed argument produced by some
Muslim orthodox scholars, the so-called guardians of Islamic faith such as
the Moroccan Ahmed Ben Saddik (1889–1946). His letter entitled “Iqamatu
Ad-Dalili ’Alaa Hurmati At-Tamtili” (Substantiating Evidence Against Acting),
published in Cairo in 1941, completely dismissed all activities related to
acting and theatrical representation in the name of Islam. Among this
letter’s arguments against theatrical activity is that “theatre leads women
to prostitution, for there is no respectful actress since women are irrational
beings by nature.”12 Ben Saddik’s argument of course reveals not only his
prejudice against theatrical activity, but also his gender bias. Even more
widespread, in both Arab and Western writings, is the assertion that Islam
does not allow Taswir, the representation of either human or divine forms.
This view has long circulated in Arabo-Islamic contexts, but in reality, there
is no mention anywhere in the Qu’ran speaking negatively about theatrical
activity for its own sake. Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi
include an extensive study of this matter in their 1976 book, The Splendor
of Islamic Calligraphy.13 In their critique of the reported Islamic injunction
against Taswir these authors state categorically that “the Qur’an does not
expressly forbid the representation of the human form. In fact, no single
verse refers to it at all.”14 The only authority for this injunction they can
discover is an unverifiable hadith cited by Al-Bukhari which “expresses the
prohibition on figurative art straightforwardly: when he makes an image,
man sins unless he can breathe life into it.,” and they go on to assert that
“the fuqaha and the orthodox have twisted the allegorical meaning of the
Qur’an the better to impose rules and prohibitions.” According to Khatibi
and Sijelmassi, “this alleged prohibition was directed against the surviving
forms of totemism which, anathematized by Islam, could conceivably rein-
filtrate it in the guise of art. The principle of the hidden face of God could
be breached by such an image. In one sense, theology was right to be watch-
ful; it had to keep an eye on its irrepressible enemy – art.” In opposition to
the widespread view that Islam is opposed to representation, they remind
us of an alternative tradition wherein the prophet Mohammed “permitted
one of his daughters to play with dolls, which are of course derived from
the totemic gods. Moreover, there are numerous examples of figurative
sculpture in Moslem art, and of drawings both of animals and humans. The
Caliph Al-Mansur [eighth century] had a sculpture carved in his palace.”15
Thus, Islam’s assault against totemism should by no means be extended to
theatre, especially theatre utilized in the service of religion as was true of
much Maghreb performance in the 1920s and 1930s.
 Islam and the Colonial Stage 105

This is not to say that the emerging theatre could at all rely upon consistent
support or even tolerance from local religious leaders. Religious conservatives,
especially the marabouts, powerful religious scholars in the Maghreb, were
from the beginning opposed to any sort of theatrical representations, con-
vinced that they were upholding the Qur’anic opposition to totemism. A 1923
article appearing in El Balagh el-Jazairi, the official publication of the marabouts
in Algeria and entitled “Civilization or Degeneration” provides a good example
of such attacks. It read, in part:

The theatres are set up in full Ramadan, offering scenes of buffoonery

toward which people flock, alone or in groups, and one sees among them
women of various sorts: honest women alongside prostitutes who have
nothing to hope from God’s mercy. Some of them come accompanied by
their husbands or brothers, others by their …. [ellipsis in original]16

Theatre artists, especially in Algeria, for their part reinforced this opposition
by commonly including marabouts and other religious fundamentalists
among their objects of satire, not infrequently citing Molière’s Tartuffe as
their model. Indeed, the “traitors” of Bachtarzi’s controversial and often-
censored El Kheddaïne included marabouts along with those who automati-
cally go along with whatever the French authorities propose (the popular
name for these was also the title of one of Bachtarzi’s political satires, Béni
Oui Oui – Those who always say yes). This theme continued for years in
Maghreb drama: Bachtarzi’s later El Ouadjib (Duty, 1951) also had distinct
echoes of Tartuffee in its condemnation of opportunistic marabout politicians.
These religious conservatives did not of course have the power to close theatres,
but they regularly and eagerly added their voice to colonialist forces con-
demning such activity.
Although such opposition was a continuing and in some cases serious
problem for the developing Maghreb theatre, much more important, and
for proponents of Islam and opposed to representation, much more surpris-
ing, was the major support provided to this theatre by religious leaders and
organizations. Central to this support was a powerful new religious movement
which appeared in the Maghreb during the 1920s, at exactly the same time as
the new Arabic theatre in the Maghreb, often made common cause with it, and
in some cases even shared a common leadership. It also contributed impor-
tantly, on its own and working through the theatre, to creating and shaping
the developing drive toward nationalism. This was the salafiyya movement,
so-called because its followers sought a return to the supposed purity of the
earliest Islamic tradition, that of the “pious ancestors,” al-salaf al salih).17
The generally acknowledged first major figure of the movement was Abd
Al-Wahhab in eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia. His message of reform and
purification gradually spread out through the Sunni Arab world, finally
reaching the Maghreb in the years following World War II. There it was
106 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

widely embraced by the anti-colonialist intellectual bourgeoisie, especially

in Morocco and Algeria, who found in it a powerful religious foundation for
the rising nationalist spirit. In this region the Salafi reformist agenda was
focused on three major imperatives: purging Islam from the imperfections
of the conservative Muslim brotherhoods, learning and adapting Western
sciences, and liberating the country from colonialism. In some parts of the
Arab world the Salafi movement at that time and onward, with its emphasis
on restoring a lost purity to Islam, served to inspire suspicion and indeed
active opposition to theatre, both as an imposed European form and as a
potential encouragement to idolatry. That Salafi reforms worked to support
rather than to suppress theatrical activity in the Maghreb was the result of
its unique combining there with two other powerful and interrelated cul-
tural phenomena: the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and the growth of
the Islamic Free School movement.
The so-called Free Schools were a key part of the Salafi reform agenda in
the Maghreb. In opposition to the old Quranic schools of traditional Islam,
the French established a system of schools built upon French models to
support their program of imposing French cultural values on the Maghreb
population. The Salafi Free Schools sought to recapture the pedagogical
initiative from the colonizers, providing an education as rigorous and con-
temporary as the French, but grounded in national and Islamic practice
and values. These independent schools that flourished in major Moroccan
cities were not only attempts at revising the Quranic schools’ frames,
educational syllabi, and methods, but also a cultural reaction against the
newly established public schools and French educational system in general.
The appeal to purge Islam of the imperfections inflicted by most religious
brotherhoods (most of which were flirting with the colonizers), and the
emphasis on the Arabic language became key principles in the Free Schools’
religious and earthly renewal. J. Damis, in his study of the Free School
movement in Morocco writes: “By the 1920s Salafi reformers were trying
to instill a new critical and questioning spirit in the largely passive learning
experience which characterized traditional Moroccan education. This was
part of a more general effort to liberate the Moroccan mentality from its state
of lethargy by propagating, through their writings and discussions, a spirit
of examination and verification. In the Free Schools which they created,
the reformers introduced a more modern, stimulating range of subjects and
discussed the ideas of Salafiya with the older students.” Salafi reformists like
Mohammed Bel-Arbi Al-Alaoui and many others played a central role in
molding a national consciousness and mentoring the emerging generation
of nationalists like Allal Al-Fassi. The Free School movement in the 1920s
was a clear input in the evaluative scrutiny of Morocco’s educational situa-
tion of the time.
Theatre activity flourished in these schools, and indeed in Morocco it
was the Free Schools more than any other venue or organization which
 Islam and the Colonial Stage 107

launched modern Arabic drama and the associations affiliated with them.
The situation surrounding the first major theatre performance in Arabic
devised by Moroccans demonstrates this clearly. The staging of Al-Haddad’s
Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi in 1927 was a project of one of the first of the
Moroccan Free Schools, the Moulay Idriss School in Fez, and although it
lacked the political freedom of Tangier or Tetouàn, the importance of Fez
as an educational center made it a third important center for the early
Moroccan theatre. The location in Fez of Al-Qarawiyin, the most prestigious
mosque and university in the Maghreb, also made this city a center for the
new Free School movement. Mohammed Al-Ghazi was an important figure,
perhaps the outstanding example of the blending of patriotism, religious
and educational reform and theatre. He was well known as a teacher at the
Naciriya Free School in Fez, head of its militant student association, and an
active director of drama. Because of his cultural orientations, however, he
was forced to quit his job and sent into exile by the French. Even the noted
University Al-Qarawiyin was strongly affected by the Salafi wave that swept
Morocco at this time, and several of those most involved with this were also
key members of the first generation of Moroccan theatre artists.
Probably the most prominent of these was the leading educator and
political reformer Abdelkhalak Torres (1910–1970), who was educated at
one of the first Free Schools of Morocco, Al-ahliya, established in 1924 in
Tetouàn. He carried the new ideas with him to Al-Qarawiyin in Fez and in
1935 founded in Tetouàn the first modern Arabic high school in Morocco,
the Free Institute.18 According to the general practice of the Salafi reformers
of the time, he made theatrical performance a central part of the curriculum.
Their production of his play Intissar Al-Haq (The Victory of Right) in 1936
at the largest theatre in the city was one of the major events of the early
years of the Moroccan theatre. It was also a work that so fully illustrated the
basic concerns of the Salafi reformers that it might almost be considered
an Islamic morality play. The three-act comedy, y written in classical Arabic
rather than the local dialect, pursued the basic Salafi program of seek-
ing to revitalize Islamic culture in tune with the colonial situation, by
extrapolating the universal truths in the Qur’an and applying them to
contemporary contexts. The specific subject matter of the play concerned
one of the most pressing social issues of the time: should parents allow
the younger generations to emigrate in order to acquire a knowledge of
modern sciences?
Torres’s career itself provided a clear answer to this question as he pursued
his studies not only in his native Morocco but also at Al-Azhar in Cairo,
then one of the citadels of Salafi thought, and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Later
he built upon this solid and varied education to become one of the leading
political figures of the country, president of Hizb Al-Isslah Al-Watani (The
National Reform Party) in 1937, Moroccan ambassador to Spain and Egypt,
and minister of Justice after Independence.
108 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Mohammed El-Qurri (1900–1937), Torres’s contemporary at Qaraouiyin

University, was a poet, public preacher, r journalist, and dramatist as well
as a prominent member of the Salafi movement. His theatre embodied the
spirit of modernist Islamic social morality. As a disciple of the first genera-
tion of Qarawiyin Salafi reformists, El-Qurri,
Q like Torres, favored moralistic
dramas. His first and most significant piece, called Al-Ilm Wa Nata-aijuhu
(Knowledge and its Results), was presented in April 1928 by Firqat Achabiba
Al-Fassiya (The Fez Youth Company) and was directed by Abdelouahed Ben
Mohammed Chaoui (1911–1968). Like Torres’s Intissar Al-Haq it uses a rather
sentimental comedic plot to embody a moral lesson, indeed much the same
lesson as the play by Torres. The El-Qurri play, loosely based on a popular
traditional French melodrama, recounts the adventures of two orphans sep-
arated by the force of circumstance who are reunited at last after each one
of them had made his way successfully by means of good will and a good
education. Like that of Torres, this play underlines the theme of knowledge-
seeking across the nation and abroad, as El-Qurri’s generation had already
started emigrating to France and Cairo to study. El-Qurri was a powerful and
popular speaker for the cause of independence and when he was banned
from public speaking or travel by the French authorities he disguised himself
as a veiled woman, and in this way was able to move from one mosque to
another in order to explain the political situation to a largely illiterate public.
Unfortunately, he was discovered and captured by the French. Sentenced at
first to two years imprisonment, he was then taken to a prison in Gulmima,
where he died under torture in November 1937.
The convergence of the interests of nationalist and religious interests,
encouraged in mosques and the burgeoning Free Schools in Morocco during
the 1920s, led to a series of attempts at repression by the French authorities.
The most notorious of these was the infamous Berber Decree, a new law
issued by the French on 16 May 1930. This Decree granted Amazigh tribes
the power to practice their tribal law system (droit coutimier), r which used
to be part of a deeply rooted tradition, instead of following French legal
practice. The Moroccan resistance movement, however, saw the new law as
a crude colonial attempt to separate Imazighen and the customary practices
of Islamic courts and thus to drive a wedge between the Arab and Amazigh
population. The ideologists of resistance seized this moment to convert the
spontaneous struggle of Morocco’s youth into a general uprising all over
the country. Not surprisingly, the new Free Schools were at the head of this
movement and students from the same groups that had been involved not
long before in creating a new Moroccan theatre now took to the streets to
help create a new Moroccan state. The first demonstration against the Berber
Decree took place on 20 June 1930 in the city of Sale which, with Fez, had
provided the student actors in the first plays mounted by Moroccans. These
political demonstrations were all colored by Islamic ethics and a strong
sense of the theatre; they were highly ritualized spectacles that originated
 Islam and the Colonial Stage 109

in the large, important mosques in major centers of learning, then spread

all over the city spaces. Not surprisingly, the Qarawiyin in the city of Fez,
Morocco’s major mosque as well as its major center of learning and major
concentration of Salafi proponents, became an exemplary site of important
demonstrations, which continued, and indeed increased, through most of
the next decade.
Despite the close relationship between the pioneer dramatists and political
and religious nationalist movements in the early modern theatre in Morocco,
it must be remembered that from the early 1920s until 1950 Moroccan thea-
tre was primarily the sort of hybrid utterance described by Homi Bhabha,
that is, it mimicked the Western model, repeating it, yet in a different
way or rather a different sameness of “almost the same, but not quite.”19
Bhabha speaks of hybridity as a “deformation and displacement of all sites
of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic
demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies
of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of
power.”20 Returning the gaze and subverting colonial authority, not artistic
achievement, were major driving forces of these first theatrical endeavors.
Indeed, Moroccan adaptation of the Western theatrical models along with
their traditional proscenium arch and stage organization represents an
instance of mimicry, of a double enunciation created by the colonized native.
The Western medium was borrowed only to serve as a means of subverting
colonial power.
Such theatre was based on adaptations as well as on history plays drawn
from the glorious Arabo-Islamic past and most of these performances
were political agitational sites against the colonial discursive structures,
with audiences addressed collectively as subaltern subjects more than
individualized aesthetic spectators. The displacement of hegemony was
a driving force for the early Moroccan dramatists and theatre-makers, for
their projects represent parodic supplements that reinscribe a confirmation
of difference through reversing the colonialist’s gaze. Colonial authority
was denied by such dramas. However, Moroccan theatre of resistance
stands guilty of paying less attention to the artistic merits of theatre practice,
due to the absence of practical training and formation in stage management,
acting, directing, scenic construction, and lighting and stage electronics.
This theatre was “still quite naive in its themes without any vision of
artistic experimentation,” according to Ouzri,21 who observes, in general,
that:

The amateurs of the theatre in Morocco practiced dramatic art by

imitation and amazement. Without putting the question of formation.
This situation lasted until the 1950s, when the services of Youth and
Sports of the French administration decided to deal with the theatrical
formation.22
110 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Although the Berber decree was promulgated in Morocco and aroused the
most immediate and extensive reaction from the native population there, its
reverberations were felt across the Maghreb, as those of the Rif insurrection
had done a few years before. The conflict drew particular attention in Algeria,
and undoubtedly helped encourage the Salafi movement there, which only
became a significant political force after 1930. Central to the movement in
Algeria was sheikh Abd Al-Hamid Ben Badis (1889–1940), who became one
of the leading exponents of reformed Sunni Islam in the Maghreb. In 1931
he and his colleagues established in Algiers the Association of Algerian
Muslims (AUMA) which numbered among its members many of the leading
intellectuals of the country and which was devoted to developing a field of
cultural practice and production outside the growing hegemony of French
culture and rival claimants for indigenous practice such as the Andalusian
movement.23
Like the Moroccan groups with similar concerns, the AUMA was strongly
committed to educational and moral improvement, and regarded theatre
as an important legitimate means to further these goals. Here again Ben
Badis was a pioneer. He established a reformed Islamic school in his native
Constantine, where he himself taught some 60 students, male and female.
In December of 1937 these students presented a play to an audience of
some 800. The play, by sheikh Mohammed ibn Al-Abid Al-Jalali, opened
with a song by both boy and girl pupils extolling education for both sexes.
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this work was inspired by the Free
School dramas of Torres and El-Qurri in Morocco a decade earlier, since the
argument is almost identical. The first scene showed children sent abroad
“to learn the ways of other peoples and to improve themselves.” There
still being no major seat of higher Islamic learning in Algeria, the AUMA
helped encourage study in nearby Fez or in more remote Cairo, Damascus,
or Baghdad. In the second scene, a messenger reported on the journey of
the enlightened children to Egypt and Syria. In the third, the children
themselves return, reciting their thanks in verse to the benefactors who had
sponsored their education. After an interval, the scene changed to present
a sketch in which poor Algerian children, impoverished by family gam-
bling, are arrested and brought to court, where they are acquitted on the
grounds of “acting without discernment.” Presumably the (unstated) moral
was that they needed the inspiration of foreign study to overcome their
circumstances. Ben Badis himself concluded the performance by thanking
the audience and calling upon them to provide good education for their
children, to contribute to the eventual prosperity of Algeria.24
French censorship continued to increase during the late 1930s and early
1940s causing a serious reduction in the available repertoire. Even so, the Free
Schools, less vulnerable than public theatres, continued to utilize theatre in
their program of study, apparently with little government interference.
Among the most active such groups in the years just before World War II
 Islam and the Colonial Stage 111

was the Firqat An-Najm Al-Maghrebi Lit-Tamthil Al-Arabiy (The Maghreb

Star of Arabic Acting Company) created in the early 1940s by students of
Al-Qarawiyin. It offered the citizens of Fez patriotic historical dramas like
Haroun Ar-Rachid.
One of the most striking examples in the Maghreb of the convergence of
religion and theatre at this time occurred in Tunisia. This was the develop-
ment of one of the first significant regional theatres in the country at what
might at first seem the most unlikely of all locations, the city of Kairouan,
Tunisia’s holiest site. There a local photographer, Ibrahim Al-Qadidi, in
1932 formed a group called A-chabab al Qayrawani (Kairouanian Youth),
which presented El Cid and Al-Qabbani’s own Ins Al-Jalis J before disband-
ing and being replaced by Al-Aghaliba, named after the eighth-century
Aglabite dynasty whose capital, Al-Abbasiyya, was located near Kairouan.
The new company struggled for a time to find a practical middle ground
between European liberalism and religious orthodoxy until in 1942, clearly
under the influence of the rapidly expanding Salafi movement, the society
voted to purge its repertoire of all immoral plays and emphasize Islamic
traditions and values.
That same year the author Khalifa Stambuli (1919–1948), an artist and intel-
lectual strongly committed to this program, settled in Kairouan and assumed
artistic direction of the company. Although the company lasted only until
1948, when its theatre was destroyed during World War II, the nearly twenty
plays that Stambuli created for them gave this venture an important place in
Tunisian theatrical history. The orientation toward moral improvement and
social uplift was central to Stambuli’s work, and links him closely to such
contemporaries as Torres in Morocco and Ben Badis in Algeria. His plays were
by no means restricted to his period, however, and many of them, thanks
to their careful plotting, engaging language, and complex characters, main-
tained their popularity throughout the rest of the century. Among the most
performed were Ana al-Jani (I am the Guilty One), A’quibatu al-Kaessi (The
Consequences of Drinking Wine), Asdiqa wal-Hiyanaou Araf askun Ithalitt (You
Must Know with Whom You Associate), and Ah-Flussi (Oh, My Money). His
historical dramas, such as Zyadat Allah al-Aghlabi and Al-Muizz li-Din Allah
al-Fatimi, gained less wide circulation, but still made an important contribu-
tion to the Tunisian stage.
In contrast, dramatists of the early Moroccan theatre of resistance, while
providing an important platform of subversion of colonial authority, possessed
in general little mastery of the mechanisms of playwriting and theatre-making
and little sense of theatrical location. Yet, thanks to its political and reli-
gious content, this sort of drama, even after being banned by the colonial
administration, continued to flourish in the private homes of nationalists.
The inception of theatre practice within the context of colonialism ushered
in the promise of offering the subaltern Moroccans, as victims of colonial
epistemic violence, a platform from which to articulate their own positions
112 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

and correct the brazenly fallacious claims of colonial discourse. Most of

these young artists, however, mainly associated with the Free School move-
ments, pursued their university studies in fields other than theatre; and
none of them went to Cairo or Paris to study theatre or train as actors or
actresses. They left no theatrical legacy behind them, even though many of
them became high officials and distinguished political personalities of the
nationalist movement. Finally, and most importantly, in 1944 the colonizer
banned all theatrical activity in Morocco completely.
11
From World War II to Independence

The upheavals of World War II did much to bring about the long-desired
liberation of the Maghreb from European control. The French Vichy, effec-
tively under the control of Germany, inherited the colonial possessions of
its predecessor and so the Maghreb in effect came indirectly under Axis
control. The tension between Vichy and De Gaulle’s Free French movement
seemed to many in the Maghreb independence movement to provide an
opportunity to regain control of their own destiny by openly or clandes-
tinely supporting the Free French in their struggle against Vichy, the current
occupying power.
Throughout the region the war years were a period of continual develop-
ment of anti-colonial sentiment, though very little of this could be seen
in the strictly limited and controlled theatre of those years. The Moroccan
theatre, still a fragile operation in any case, but clearly – and largely accu-
rately – associated in the official mind with political resistance, was almost
totally suppressed. In 1944 the Vichy government banned all theatrical
activity in that country completely, although in fact such activity did not
entirely cease. According to dramatist Hassan Mniai, rather it “slowed
down,” to still continue in private homes and clubs.1 A similar slow-down
and finally complete closure occurred in Tunisia. During the opening years
of the war, Tunis was home to two major companies. A split in the Theatrical
Union resulted in a new and, for a time, more successful rival, which called
itself Al-Kawkab al-Tamili (The Theatrical Star). This company was headed
by a veteran of the Tunisian theatre, Mohammed Lahbib, co-founder of
Al-Mustaqbal at-Tamtili and most recently in charge of the dramatic compe-
tition established by the Theatrical Union, supported by the popular lead-
ing actors Hamda Ben Tijani and Hedi Semlali. In its opening seasons his
historical dramas, such as Yawm Gharnata (The Day of Grenada) were the
basis of its repertoire, supplemented by revivals of Molière, in which Semlali
gained particular success. In the meantime, the Theatrical Union turned to
another local source of dramatic material, folklore and popular tales, a spe-
cialty of Ahmed Boulayman. In 1942, however, German forces, determined
113
114 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

to make a last stand in North Africa, took over command of Tunisia from
the puppet French government and demanded cessation of all theatrical
activities.
Thus only in Algeria did theatre activity continue officially throughout
the war. This was largely due to the efforts of Bachtarzi, unquestionably the
leading theatre figure in Algeria during this turbulent decade. In fact, despite
his major contributions to the pre-war Algerian theatre, Bachtarzi had left
that country for France in 1937, despairing of continuing production in
the face of mounting opposition and outright censorship. When the Vichy
was established in 1940, however, the new authorities appealed to him to
return to Algeria and establish a pro-Vichy theatre for the troops there, to
perform in bases and military hospitals. Bachtarzi agreed. He obtained a
substantial subvention from the French authorities for his new company,
and its patriotic themes were now seen not negatively as a challenge to the
French, but positively as a response to the anti-Nazi sentiment that was
beginning to appear. The themes he preferred were not at all directly pro-
German, rather the French patrimony, especially as represented by Molière,
was stressed, and Bachtarzi headed his program with new translations of
works by that author into classical Arabic, The Miserr becoming El-Meshh’ah
and The Imaginary Invalid, Sliman-Elluk.
With the occupation of North Africa by the Allied forces and the fall of
the Vichy government, the commanders of the Free French forces took
control of the Maghreb. Nationalist forces in all three countries almost
universally supported the Allied cause either actively or passively, in the
hope that the defeat of the Axis powers could lead to an end of European
occupation of the region. This hope was in fact strongly encouraged by
a number of leading Allied commanders, headed by Dwight Eisenhower
who, when the Allied forces drove the Germans and Vichy forces from
their last Maghreb strongholds in Tunisia, remarked: “far from governing
a conquered country, we were attempting only to force a gradual widening
of the base of government, with the final, objective of turning all internal
affairs over to popular control.”2
In fact, however, De Gaulle, as leader of the Free French, had no intention
of accepting a diminished French post-war empire. In all three countries of
the Maghreb the departure of Axis occupiers simply meant the reinstalla-
tion of essentially the same system of European control that had been in
place before 1940. Local resistance to this betrayal of hopes was widespread
and immediate. As early as May of 1945 the celebrations over the uncon-
ditional surrender of Germany erupted into explosive confrontations in
Algeria between nationalistic natives of Algeria and French troops. Several
thousand demonstrators were killed, sowing the seeds for the bloody and
violent war for independence which broke out less than a decade later.
In the meantime the French, realizing the depth of local discontent,
attempted to respond in some measure to Algerian aspirations. A new
 From World War II to Independence 115

Governing Assembly was created for the colony with two Houses, one
representing the European colonists and certain “meritorious” Muslims,
the other the remaining population of some eight million. Algerian cultural
expression was also encouraged, including the theatre, though always with
the goal of furthering colonial interests. In 1946, French and Muslim coop-
eration led to the founding of an Association du Théâtre Populaire algérien,
directed by Reda Falaki (1920–1993), who was active in radio drama for
children and director of a predominately Muslim company of 15 young
actors, the Masrah El Ghad (Theatre of Tomorrow). The Centre Régional
d’Art Dramatique in 1948 created an “arab section” directed by an Algerian
Muslim, Mustapha Gribi. Most importantly, in 1947 the colonial authorities
turned once again to Bachtarzi, providing him with a grant to establish the
first “professional” theatre company in Algiers, a troupe of 24 under con-
tract to perform every Friday at the Algiers Opera. Soon, Friday matinees for
women were added as well.
Bachtarzi also resumed the tours throughout the country which he had
begun in 1934, but which had ceased in 1937 under the growing force
of censorship. These were instrumental in encouraging theatre outside
Algiers. In the 1930s only Oran possessed a municipal theatre, headed by
Mohammed Errazi, who specialized in updated revivals of Molière adjusted
to comment directly on contemporary political and social events. During
the 1940s Errazi expanded his dramatic offerings to experiment with a
variety of other modes, most notably a popular new genre, the detective
drama, to which genre he contributed, within a single season (1949–50),
Le Justicier, Le Voleur de minuit,
t and Les Trois Voleurs. After 1947 Bachtarzi’s
tours inspired a number of other new companies to join Oran as regional
theatre centers, and thanks to this inspiration and the financial encour-
agement of colonial authorities, a national network of theatres began to
appear. In the east, at Sidi Bel Abbes, Saim Lakhdar formed a municipal
theatre which became the leading producing organization in that region.
Ahcène Derdour formed a company in Annaba, and in Blida, Si Moussa
Kheddaoui organized an ensemble, Amed (Hope), composed of young boy
scouts.
Following Bachtarzi’s tours to Constantine, the capital of eastern Algeria,
a company called El Mazher was founded there by Ahmed Rida Houhou.
Houhou was a local literary figure who specialized in another popular genre
to emerge just after the war – the historical play, often, of course, with a
distinct political subtext. Houhou, who had a solid Qur’anic training, fol-
lowed the example of the Salafi reformers of the 1930s, combining religious
concerns with social and moral messages in his work, all created, according
to the practice of the time, in classical Arabic. All of these features could be
seen in his Malikat Gharnaata (The Queen of Granada), which opened El
Mazher in 1947. Unhappily, he shared the fate as well as the convictions of
El-Qurri and others of his Salafi predecessors. His devotion to the Algerian
116 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

cause led in the 1950s to the burning of certain of his books by the colonial
authorities, and in 1956 to his arrest and execution.
Houhou was probably the most successful of the few Algerian dramatists
who continued into the 1940s and 1950s to write drama in classical Arabic.
Although encouraged by literary scholars and religious leaders, however,
this practice never attracted much public attention. A few such works, most
notably Aboul Id Doudou’s at-Turaaab (The Soil, 1953) and Abdellah Rukibi’s
Masra at-Tughaatt (The Death of Despots. 1959) were able, thanks to their use
of classical Arabic, to gain some attention in other parts of the Arab world,
but after independence, these plays and their authors disappeared from the
stage and from memory, and gradually classical Arabic came to be used on
stage almost exclusively to indicate comic characters holding religious or
political positions of authority.
New popular authors began to appear in the 1940s, the most successful of
whom was Mohammed Touri (1914–1959). Touri was widely considered the
heir of Ksentini, who in fact supported and promoted him in his early years.
Born in Blida, in 1928 he joined the pioneering Amed company of boy scout
performers created by Moussa Kheddaoui, and in 1933, like Bachtarzi, he
joined a predominantly Jewish organization dedicated to Andalusian music
but with a side interest in theatrical performance, this one based in Algiers
and Blida and headed by Mahiéddine Lakhal. From there he went on in the
late 1930s to establish his own theatrical company, Hamat Asma, the first
professional company in Blida. Although he began with comic sketches by
Kheddaoui like Les Malheurs du pauvre (Sorrows of the Poor), Touri soon, like
Ksentini, began to create his own works, with himself in the central role and
containing considerable improvisation and audience interaction. He was
famous for never smiling on stage, and this, combined with a rather phleg-
matic, British air, gained him the title “the Algerian Buster Keaton.” His first
plays were in literary Arabic, but with Le Kilo (1940) he turned to the popular
dialect and achieved his first great success. It was soon drawing large
audiences in Algiers, Constantine, and Oran. He adapted several Molière
plays, among them Les Faux Savants (1935), but most of his works, such as
Le Kilo, Au caféé (1940), Hier et aujourd’hui (1949), and Zat Zalamitt (1951) were
original plays, working with such traditional material as marital discord,
misunderstandings, avarice, and trickery, but basically stringing together
episodes involving his own familiar character, similar to the popular Kish
Kish Bey in early twentieth-century Egyptian popular theatre. In 1942,
upon the recommendation of his friend Ksentini, Bachtarzi invited Touri to
Algiers first to appear in radio drama and then, in 1947 to join the leading
artists of the Arab theatre at the opera, and for the next ten years he enjoyed
great popularity as an author and an actor both on stage and in films.
Plays dealing with the resistance of North Africans to Roman domina-
tion, the most significant of which was Hannibal by Ahmed Al-Madani
(1899–1983), presented in Algiers in 1948, were clearly designed to refer to
 From World War II to Independence 117

the current political situation. Hannibal is of particular interest as the single

contribution to the country’s theatre of one of the leading political figures
of mid-nineteenth-century Algeria. Al-Madani, though of Algerian ancestry,
was born in Tunisia where in his twenties he was already recognized as one
of the country’s leading activist-intellectuals. Although imprisoned for his
political activities during all of World War I, he returned immediately to an
active career in journalism soon after his release. In 1924 he became president
of one of Tunisia’s pioneer theatrical companies, as-Sa’ada (Happiness).
It was just at this time that the French joined the Spanish in the Rif war.
At the height of that struggle, in May of 1925, Al-Madani had published a
leading article in the journal Ifriqiya, of which he was editor, entitled “The
Truth about Events in the Rif: Long live the Rif, Free and Independent!”
A few days later, on 5 June, as-Sa’ada presented Tariq ibn Ziyad, a play
by Abd Al-Haq Hamid, which portrayed the eighth-century conquest of
Andalusia by the Arab-Berber armies of North Africa with the conquer-
ing heroes costumed as contemporary Rifs. The combination of article
and play were too much for the Tunisian authorities. The magazine was
banned, the play closed and Al-Madani was formally expelled from the
country on 6 June.3
Al-Madani took refuge in Constantine in Algeria, where he found a very
different political climate. The city had become one of the centers of the
developing Salafi movement, whose members, at the price of a certain degree
of co-option, were given considerable freedom of thought and expression
by the French authorities. Settling in Algiers, Al-Madani moved from the
theatre into journalism, becoming closely involved with the Algerian Front.
He seemed to have left the theatre entirely when, almost 25 years after
his arrival in Algeria, he created his two most important dramatic works.
First came Hanniball in 1948, one of the most successful of the Algerian his-
torical dramas with hidden anti-colonial messages, and then a translation
into Arabic of Shakespeare’s Othello in 1952, in which the popular actress
Keltoum achieved one of her greatest successes as Desdemona.
As Algerian society became more openly revolutionary, the political con-
tent of the drama also became more explicit, despite the ever-present but
erratic threat of censorship. The modest subsidies quickly disappeared but if
anything, this resulted in further encouragement of the theatres to engage
in political performance. In 1952 Mahiéddine’s play Shamshoum al-Jazaa’iri
(The Algerian Samson), touched off street riots in Oran. The same play
which had opened Bachtarzi’s new Algerian theatre five years before without
incident, and indeed been characterized in the press as “an amusing satire,”4
was now seen as inflammatory due to its depiction of marriage between
Algerians and foreigners.
Morocco, which had been particularly strongly supportive of the Allied
cause, felt a strong sense of betrayal with the reimposition of colonial
domination. The nationalist movement rapidly grew in power and was
118 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

most clearly represented by the rise of the Istiqlal Party (The Independence
Party), which was formed in 1944 and presented the first manifesto claim-
ing Moroccan independence in the name of all Moroccan people. Sultan
Mohammed V gave his support to this movement and thus became a
symbol of consensus for all Moroccans, as well as a continuing irritation
to the French. On 10 April 1947, the Sultan delivered a historical speech in
Tangier, where he underlined Morocco’s Arabo-Islamic ties and its right of
self-determination.
In the theatre, despite constant surveillance by the French authorities,
a significant revival of activity took place following the war. New figures
like Abdellah Chakroun, Bachir El-Alj, Bouchaib El-Bedaoui, and Ahmed
El-Kadmiri, among many others, dominated the scene. The first sign of
this revival came from the capital city Rabat in 1947 when a group of
students presented Islam Omarr (Omar’s Islam), and Al–Fakih Al-Kabbani,
which according to Hassan Mniai was an adaptation of Molière’s La jalousie
du Barbouille.5 Bachir Laalaj (1921–1962) was also instrumental in developing
a popular theatre tradition in Casablanca. He was a highly respected militant
against colonialism, imprisoned in 1937 for his participation in anti-occupation
demonstrations. He founded a progressive theatre company called TILMA
that counted among its members Abderrahim Bouabid (1922–1992), who
later became the leader of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces Party, and
Abdellah Ibrahim, the first socialist Prime Minister of Morocco between
1958 and 1960. In 1948, Laalaj joined the Istiqlal Party. Laalaj had many
partners, but Bouchaib Al-Bidaoui (1929–1964) is perhaps the most signifi-
cant one. He was an actor, popular singer, and reviver of the Marsaoui Aita
(a musical tradition of the rural plains near Casablanca). Bouchaib’s theatre
is closely linked to the L’bsatt tradition of mixed comic acting and singing
described before. His admirers also called him the Louis Jouvet of Morocco.
Moroccan Radio (under French control) also played a significant role
in developing a Radiophone theatre after 1947 and familiarizing the
Moroccan public with radio drama. This thriving tradition had a strong
imprint on theatre practice in Morocco and on its reception as well. The
broadcast was a live experience undertaken by experimental actors. In May
1949, Abdellah Chakroun became the chair of Radiophone theatre and,
after independence, he became the first Moroccan director of Moroccan
Radio and Television. He served as an administrator, stage manager, play-
wright, director, and actor for the new theatre company that he had created
inside the structure of Moroccan Radio. La Troupe du Théâtre Arabe de la
Radiodiffusion Marocaine was the name given to this company. Its first tour
around Morocco was in 1953 with two performances: Molière’s Le Médecin
malgré lui, adapted by Abdellah Chakroun and directed by Georges Adet; and
Le Secret Absolu by Chakroun, a historical drama set in the distant heydays of
Moorish Andalusia. Abderrazak Hakam, Brahim Ahmed Soussi, Mohammed
Bennani, and Ahmed Ben Messaoud (Hamidou) were the backbone of
 From World War II to Independence 119

the company; supported by Mohammed Doghmi and Mohammed Bachir

Marrakchi, with others when needed. Actresses were still difficult to find,
and up until 1949, men had played female characters. But since the spring of
1949, the company had prohibited giving female roles to men.6 Faiza Al-Amri
(known under the pseudonym of Amina Rachid), Habiba Medkouri (known
as Halima Al-Hachmi), and Latifa El-Fassi were among the first feminine
voices to become established in this previously male-dominated domain.
In 1950, the colonial administration decided to render theatrical activity
in Morocco more docile and manageable – or rather apolitical – through
reproducing a Moroccan copy of the Comédie Française model. Theatre
became an important concern in the Protectorate policies of the Youth and
Sport Services. A highly respected Moroccan intellectual was appointed as its
associate director, Moulay Tayeb Ben Zidane, who was well connected in the
Moroccan cultural milieu of the time. Professional experts were called from
France in order to orient Moroccan theatre toward the direction designated
for it by the colonial administration – that is, toward an apolitical theatre
that would not go beyond representing nonpolitical social problems on
stage. Thus, André Voisin, Charles Nugue, and Pierre Richie, among others,
assisted by cultured bilingual Moroccans such as Abdallah Chakroun, Tahar
Ouaziz, Abdessamad Kanfaoui, and Mohammed Ben Said supervised the
first theatrical training in the Mamoura Center near the capital city of Rabat
between 4 and 15 August 1952.
Among the many French experts who were summoned by the Youth and
Sport Services, André Voisin was considered a visionary spiritual father and
founder of the first Moroccan professional company. A disciple of Antonin
Artaud and Charles Dullin, Voisin came to Morocco searching for new aes-
thetics rather than imposing the established Comédie Française style: “I did
not go down there as a Westerner … we are too much aware of the fragility
of our own artistic forms to have the nerve to impose them on others.”7
However, given the colonial situation, the sublimating character of being
exposed to another performance culture with all its startling differences,
and the chaotic aspect of theatre activity in Morocco at that time, it was
hard for Voisin to get rid of his occidental gaze. In “Le Crochet à Nuages,”
he describes the chaotic situation of the early1950s:

I was called to Morocco in 1950 – the time of the Protectorate – to

undertake a cultural activity deemed most necessary. Upon my arrival,
I was struck by the chaotic and inadequate nature of the small amateur
theatrical companies, which generally did not survive after their first
performances, and in addition by the necessity to promote a popular
Arabic-language theatre, essential in a country where oral literature was
of primary importance due to illiteracy. But how to solve in a few years or
even in a few months the questions that Europe itself avoids – questions
of repertory, the training of actors, audience, and theatre?8
120 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Shocked by the anarchic theatre activity in Morocco yet fascinated by the

live-performance cultures of Morocco, including their basic orality and
audiences’ eagerness for a wide variety of contemporary theatre produc-
tions, Voisin’s interventionist task was both innovative and problematic
from the start.
During the first performances he attended, Voisin meticulously studied
the audiences’ behavior and found it remarkably attentive and active in
the collective experience: “This public touched me by its attentiveness,
its freshness, its thirst to see and to learn. It is this public that made me
decide to embark on the difficult enterprise of creating a popular Arab-
language theatre.”9 Schooled in a long tradition of storytelling, Moroccan
audiences have always been quite attentive and ready to partake in the
performance event as a collective experience. Thus, after falling in love
with such audiences, Voisin found his task made even more difficult, and
his artistic vision compromised in favor of what the Moroccan public
wanted rather than what a young Artaud-influenced Frenchman aspired
to far away from the confines of the Comédie Française. It is evident that
Voisin’s performative turn in Morocco would emphasize the retrieval of
old traditions and performance cultures. Artaud’s call for a return to the
real sources of theatre had clearly impacted the young André Voisin of
the early 1950s, especially Artaud’s admiration for the highly codified
physicality of Balinese dance performance he saw in Marseilles. But still
this vision is problematic within the context of French colonial policy and
its outward civilizing zeal. Attempts at replacing Bourgeois theatre with
ceremonial experiences that, according to Artaud, liberate the human
subconscious, are out of place in a colonized country with a new theatre
history and practically no Bourgeois theatre except European theatre.
Added to this was the real intention of colonial administration: “Another
obstacle was that the official authorities were reluctant to fund an institution
that could be particularly dangerous.”10 Given the French attitude toward
Arabic-language Moroccan theatre at the time, there was no question of
promoting it, but simply of controlling it.
From the onset Voisin realized that Moroccan theatre lacked a popular
tradition, a repertoire, and a national company, and he took programmatic
measures to develop and expand theatre as a passion and a must for Moroccan
general audiences. His attempts to articulate a popular theatre tradition sought
to persuade Moroccan audiences, with remarkable success, of the reality and
truthfulness of their everyday lives as performed onstage. However, his vision
couldn’t escape colonial politics and their various essentializing tropes despite
his desperate endeavors. A decade after his departure from Morocco, Voisin
defended his somehow essentialist enterprise as follows:

There is a general tendency in Africans to drift away from traditional

performance forms, considering them as folklore with no future prospects,
 From World War II to Independence 121

a cause of backwardness or conservatism that is of no use in a militant

theatre of combat, a didactic theatre, etc. Personally, I don’t see things this
way. I think that we should not put the political evolution of a country
and its performance on the samee spectrum … because a performance is
also a political act! It is even the best political action as it contributes to
the evolution of the mental structures of a city.11

The deployment of popular theatre on the Moroccan scene was also

informed in Voisin’s vision by the impetus the term acquired with Roger
Planchon and particularly Jean Vilar after World War II. Its magic formula
was the search for a frame and a repertory accessible to all classes. Vilar’s
emphasis on the actor, detail, and appeal to the big audience are all hall-
marks that inspired the young Voisin and guided him through his Moroccan
adventure between 1950 and 1957. The inception of popular theatre
in Morocco at this particular period was highly affected by the debate in
France about the potential efficacy of le Théâtre National Populaire (TNP).
In his defense of popular theatre and by extension the whole TNP enter-
prise, Vilar wrote, “To bring the popular to the classical repertory; to fight
against bourgeois rituals; to search for an ever larger and more solid body
of intermediaries in order to connect culture as it exists today and the
popular public – these have been our objects over recent years from 1947
through 1960.”12
The theatre training program inaugurated in 1952 was planned as a first
step in a program implemented by the French colonial administration.
The idea was to gather the maximum number of young artists responsible
for emerging Arabophone and Francophone theatre companies in order to
train them in stage management, acting, dramaturgy, costume production,
mime, puppetry, and most importantly, to shift the Arabophone theatre’s
exaggerated emphasis on politicizing aesthetics. Not many showed up, but
a number of important Moroccan theatre artists were among the participants:
Tayeb Saddiki, Ahmed Tayeb Laalej, Houssin Mrini, Hammadi Amour, Ahmed
Soufiani, Mohammed Doughmi, Mohammed Ben Ayad, and all the members
of Abdallah Chakroun’s Radio-drama company, and a few others. The second
training program, in August 1953, was moved to the city of Al-Jadida because
of the disturbances surrounding the exile of Sultan Mohammed V. However,
it was more fruitful than the first one, and well attended by many emerging
artists from different regions and ethnicities as well. The successful adaption
of Pierre Beaumarchais’s masterpiece The Barber of Sevillee as M’alem Azouzz was
a clear indication of a new beginning in theatre-making in Morocco. These
first two training programs were followed by others with more emerging
artists who have become associated with this first generation. Parallel to
these experiments, the Moroccan Center for Dramatic Research (Le Centre
Marocain de recherche Dramatique) was created in 1953 as a not-for-profit
organization under the auspices of the Youth and Sport Services, with
122 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

an annual grant that was allotted from the government treasury. A new
theatrical policy was channeled through this center with the creation of
the first professional company in Morocco, Firqat At-Tamthil Al-magh-
ribi (The Moroccan Theatre Company) in 1955, which became Firqat
Al-Mamoura (The Mamoura Theatre Company) in April 1956, right after
independence. The center also created two theatre conservatoires in Rabat
and Casablanca; besides two puppet theatre companies called “Le petit
Théâtre,” and developed a network of regional and national festivals of
amateur theatre.
The simmering anti-colonial feeling in Morocco burst into violence
early in December of 1952, in response to the assassination of the
resistance leader Farhat Hached in Tunis. Protests and demonstrations
immediately followed across the Arab world from Casablanca to Jakarta,
as well as in Brussels, Milan, and Stockholm. The violence was particularly
widespread in Morocco and particularly heavily suppressed there. Forty
demonstrators were killed and many more wounded in Casablanca and
many political leaders were imprisoned. Sultan Mohammed V’s ongoing
support for the nationalists could no longer be tolerated, and in 1953 the
French sent the entire royal family into exile in Madagascar and replaced
him with the unpopular Mohammed Ben Aarafa, who was widely seen as
an imposed, illegitimate ruler. Thus began the Tawrat al-malik wa shaab
(The Revolution of King and People), a highly esteemed episode of struggle
for independence that is still celebrated every 20 August as a national
holiday.
After this coup, events moved rapidly toward independence. In Spanish
Morocco, Ahmed Belbachir Haskouri (1908–1962), extremely influential at
that court, championed Mohammed V as the legitimate ruler of the entire
country. Serious anti-French violence erupted in Oujda, on the Algerian
border, and elsewhere. In October of 1955 an official resistance movement,
the Arab Maghreb Liberation Committee, was formed in Cairo. The following
month the French allowed Mohammed V to return to power in Morocco
and negotiations for independence began almost at once. This was proclaimed
in March of 1956, and with the aid of Haskouri, the absorption of Spanish
Morocco into the new state soon followed. Thus Morocco became the first
of the Maghreb states to move into the post-colonial era.
Independence in Tunisia shortly followed that in Morocco. Tunisia
shared Morocco’s hopes for independence to rapidly follow the victory of
the Allies, a position strongly encouraged by the most prominent Tunisian
dissident, Habib Bourguiba (1903–2000), who spent the war years in vari-
ous French prisons. When the post-war French government rejected his
overtures, he moved to Cairo and traveled through much of Europe and
Asia promoting the cause of independence. He returned to Tunisia in 1949,
but his continued calls for resistance led to his arrest and imprisonment
in 1952.
 From World War II to Independence 123

During these years, the Arabic theatre scene in Tunisia drifted back into
a state resembling that before unification, with a distinctly higher level of
professionalism than in neighboring Morocco, but with less overt interest in
national and religious material. Smaller ventures again proliferated, among
them an-Nahda at-Tamtiliya (The Theatrical Renaissance), a short-lived
amateur company founded in 1946 at Hammam-Lif, a thermal station in
Southern Tunisia; Ittihad Kawakib al-Tamtil (The Planets’ Theatre Union),
established in 1947 by disaffected actors and actresses from Tunis; two
major companies, headed by Ahmed Boulayman and Safya Rushdi, Tunis
al-Masrahiya (Theatrical Tunis), founded in 1947 by Basir Al-Mithinni and
devoted to “the great classics” such as Hugo, and the feminist troupe Nujum
al-Fann (The Stars of Art), created in 1949 by the actresses Safya Rushdi and
Chafia Rochdi, former members of the Khetmi company.
As for the two older established companies, both continued to offer their
specialties, historical drama at Al-Kawkab and folkloric entertainments
at Al-Ittihad mixed with the usual adaptations of recent French authors
like Labiche and Porto-Riche and standard classics like Shakespeare and
Molière. After 1947, on the initiative of Lahbib, Al Kawkab gradually trans-
formed itself from a producing theatre into a theatre institute, the first
attempt in Tunisia to establish a professional acting school. The school
opened in 1951 and Lahbib left directorship of Kawkab to devote himself
to teaching there.
A proliferation of theatres during the 1940s resulted, as in the past, in a
division of the rather limited available talent and the quality of the work
at all theatres declined. In 1949, therefore, a congress was held in Tunis,
including most of the leading actors and directors, on the current state of
the theatre. At its conclusion, a statement was published which proposed
that “the only way to lift the Arab theatre in Tunisia out of the mediocre
state in which it finds itself consists in the formation of an official municipal
company made up of professional actors.”13 The national Committee of
Public Instruction approved this proposal, but its implementation proved
difficult. So many theatre practitioners were opposed to the proposal that
they called a general strike of theatres lasting most of 1950 and 1951. The
growing political unrest as the question of Tunisian nationalism was coming
to the fore and prominent political figures like Bourguiba being impris-
oned stopped almost all artistic activities in 1952. When the municipality
returned to the question, in 1953, they returned to the model provided
earlier by the hiring of Georges Abiad, calling upon an Egyptian theatre
professional, Zaki Tulaymat, to serve as temporary artistic director, to select
a company, and launch the venture.
Aside, possibly, from his non-Tunisian background, Tulaymat was an obvi-
ous choice. Like Abiad, he had studied theatre in Paris, at the Conservatoire,
and had an impressive record of serving as a liaison between the govern-
ment and the arts. An official relationship between the Egyptian government
124 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

and Egyptian theatre artists had begun in 1930 with the establishment of a
Division of Fine Arts in the Ministry of Education, which provided subsidies
to actors, companies, and dramatists. This six-person committee, headed by
the noted dramatist Ahmed Shawqi, contained two actors: George Abiad and
Zaki Tulaymat, then recently returned from studies in Paris. One of the first
actions of the committee was to establish an institute for theatrical training,
and Zaki was one of five professors, in charge of elocution, lighting, scenery,
costumes, and make-up. Since that time he had become a prominent spokes-
man for the theatre in Egypt.
Although at first resented by the Tunisian artists, Tulaymat soon won
general support for his project, which opened with The Merchant of Venice
in April of 1954. After launching the venture, Tulaymat returned, as agreed,
to Egypt, turning the new municipal company over to a veteran of the
Tunisian stage, Mohammed Al-Agrebi, who had begun with the as-Sahma
company in the early 1920s and continued during the following decade
with the group of actors associated with Abiad. Wishing the theatre to
develop a truly populist image, the municipality insisted that all productions
mounted there be composed in the local dialect, and so Racine, Sartre, and
Anouilh joined with new dramas in the common tongue.
In the meantime, the political scene was rapidly changing. Just two months
after the new municipal company was established, France gained a new
president, Pierre Mendes, who almost immediately upon coming to power
instituted a withdrawal policy from Tunisia in response to the continuing
violence in that colony. The independence of Morocco in November of that
year added to the momentum, and in March of 1956 Tunisia gained its inde-
pendence as well. Habib Bourguiba became the head of the new government
and the next year was made the first president of the Tunisian Republic.
The resistance to French rule in Algeria, which had been growing for some
time, finally broke into open rebellion on 1 November 1954. Like all of Algerian
society, the fledgling theatre was profoundly affected. Many companies were
disbanded as their members and audiences joined in the struggle. Dramatists
and actors known or suspected to be allied with the resistance were arrested,
imprisoned, and sometimes submitted to torture. Such was the fate of
Mohammed Touri, so badly tortured in the Serkadji prison in 1956 that he
never recovered, dying in 1959. Other artists and companies, though suf-
fering from increased suspicion and censorship, managed to continue their
operations in these difficult and dangerous times. The most prominent
remained Bachtarzi at the Algiers Opera, but even he was not immune from
harassment. His first new work after November, a seemingly innocuous
operetta called Doulet Ennissa, was banned for “subversive content” and only
allowed in early 1955 after extensive modification, and no new works
were attempted for the rest of the year. The following year Bachtarzi, still
closely associated with the colonialist regime despite his occasional con-
frontations with its representatives, closed the theatre and departed for a
 From World War II to Independence 125

five-year exile in Europe. The theatre remained closed for several years, but
was reopened and reorganized in 1962, when the new government sought
to make it a truly national theatre for the new nation.
The gaining of independence by both Tunisia and Morocco in 1956 made
that of their sister country Algeria almost inevitable, but the French were
far more determined to retain Algeria. This was not a mere protectorate, but
an actual part of France, another department whose loss would mean a
significant reduction in la Patrie itself. Algeria’s independence came at last,
but only after five more years of bitter struggle, widespread violence, and
great bloodshed.
In November of 1954 the National Liberation Front in Algeria called for
a War of National Liberation. All Algerian intellectuals were called upon to
join the ranks of the revolution, followed by a specific call to the nation’s
performing artists in November of 1957, after the independence of Tunisia
and Morocco, to establish new national troupes of theatre and song to alter
the former French-dominated cultural scene. Accordingly, troupes of musicians
and actors were established in April of 1958, dedicated to the revolutionary
cause. The most important of these, however, in a sense a national theatre
in exile, was the National Liberation Front Arts company, assembled in
1958 in now independent Tunisia by Mustafa Kateb (1920–1989). Kateb
had served as Bachtarzi’s deputy at the National Theatre in Algiers and
now, in certain measure, replaced him as the head of the Algerian theatre.
He was the cousin of the much better-known dramatist, Kateb Yacine, and
was much more openly connected with the nationalist cause than Bachtarzi
had been. Arriving in Algiers in 1934, he had immediately become involved
in the theatre there, writing his own plays of political engagement and
eventually founding his own company, El Mizhar (The Blossom) in the
Kasbah in 1948. The popular Algerian novelist Emmanuel Roblès, living in
Paris and a part of the circle of Albert Camus, wrote his first play for this
new company, Montserrat, which premiered on the same day in 1948 in
Paris and Algiers. Although set in Venezuela during the civil war of 1812, its
ties both to the revolutionary situation in Algeria and to the political phi-
losophy of Camus were clear. Montserrat is a Spanish officer who is drawn
to the revolutionary cause by the savage treatment of the native population
by his occupying countrymen. He helps the revolutionary leader Bolivar
escape and, knowing his hiding place, is locked up with six hostages who
are threatened with death if he does not speak. Although they plead with
him to save their innocent lives, he remains silent. Still, before his execu-
tion, he learns that the revolution has succeeded. Despite the great success
of this play, Roblès subsequently devoted himself to translations, novels,
and journalism, but he remained a stout supporter in France of the inde-
pendence of his homeland.
The key actors in Kateb’s theatre in exile in 1958 had been members of
his Algiers company, among them Yahia Ben Marbouk, Taha El Amiri (later
126 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Figure 5 The National Theatre of Algeria, 2010 (photo from Khalid Amine’s collection)

director of the National Theatre), Keltoum, and the leading man Sid Ali
Kouiret. One important omission was Hadj Omar, a musician/director who
had come to Kateb after working with Mohammed Touri in the 1940s, but
who had been arrested in 1956 and was now in prison. Later he would rejoin
Kateb at the post-independence National Theatre. Kateb’s main dramatist
was Abdelhalim Rais (1921–1975) who would become the leading playwright
of the new revolutionary theatre. They performed first in various Arab
countries and then in countries sympathetic to the Algerian cause, such as
China, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union; Kateb described the activities of
the company thus:

The new company launched their activities with a musical review in nine
scenes.
When we visited friendly countries, we realized the truth about the
colonialists’ lies in that foreigners used to believe that the Algerian was
created to fight and that he was born with a rifle in his hand and,
therefore, he was against peace by nature. Contrary to that, we showed,
in our activities, that the Algerian thirsts for peace, liberty, and an
honourable life.14
 From World War II to Independence 127

Mustapha Kateb and Abdelhalim Rais conceived the work Nahu an-Nour
(Towards the Light, 1958). In it a young, imprisoned Algerian soldier
dreams of the peaceful country of his youth, providing opportunities for
the company to display scenes of Algerian life and culture. The overall tone
is elegiac, however, and the piece concludes, “Imperialism has transformed
Algeria into a vast Guernica.” During a 45-day tour to China and the Soviet
Union in 1960, the company presented this work along with Rais’s more
direct depiction of combat, Al-Khaalidoon (The Immortals), presenting the
personal combat reminiscences of freedom fighters and focusing on abuses
by the colonial powers. Among his other contributions to the revolutionary
repertoire were Al ahd d (The Vow) and, perhaps his best-known piece, Alwad
el Casba (Children of the Kasbah), which dealt with the effects of the revo-
lution within a single household, where two brothers each mistrust the
loyalties of the other. This work confirmed the starring position of Sid Ali
Kouiret who, after independence, also appeared in the subsequent TV and
film versions. Also in the company, however, were two pillars of the theatre,
Mustapha Kateb and Keltoum as the father and mother. Keltoum, one of
Algeria’s most popular actresses since the 1930s, had become a central figure
during the growing resistance to French rule, representing the Algerian
woman’s desire to throw off the colonial yoke, and was often sanctioned
by the authorities for singing patriotic songs in the theatre wrapped in Arab
robes. It was this theatre in exile that after independence formed the core of
the new Algerian National Theatre, the nation’s major theatre organization
in the post-colonial era.
Another significant theatre development during the 1950s and early 1960s
was the widespread appearance of theatrical performances in the prisons,
both in France and in Algeria. Although few records exist of this work,
imprisoned theatre artists made an important contribution to spreading
revolutionary and cultural awareness among their fellow prisoners. The best
known such artist was Hasan Al-Husni (1916–1988), who became famous
for his character Bou Baqara and joined the National Theatre in 1947 where
he became a star. Often imprisoned for his political views, he utilized these
imprisonments to present satires strong on nationalism and contemporary
politics to his fellow prisoners.
Mohammed Boudia (1932–1973) was another theatre figure significantly
involved in prison performance. Incarcerated in the prison at Fresnes for
his political activities, Boudia wrote plays which he presented in the prison
chapel, converted into a theatre. A fellow prisoner, Etienne Bolo, reports
that Boudia sought to enlighten his incarcerated “brothers” both politi-
cally and culturally. “He never separated political combat from cultural
combat,” Bolo reported, “and he pursued both the one and the other in
the spirit of a progressive universalism.”15 In prison he presented Molière’s
Malade imaginaire and a number of other French plays which he had trans-
lated into Algerian dialect, and two political dramas of his own, L’Olivier
128 Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

and Naissancers. Back in Algiers after Independence, he became a leading

writer on cultural matters and co-director, with Mustapha Kateb, of the new
National Theatre.
The return to power in 1960 of Charles De Gaulle, who determined to
end the bloody Algerian conflict and concede to that country the right of
self-determination, at last opened the way to independence. French authorities
began discussion with the provisional government of the Algerian Republic
in 1960 and in 1962 agreement was reached on a national referendum
on self-determination. This was held on 1 July of 1962 and, following the
overwhelmingly positive vote, independence was declared on 5 July. At last
Algeria was able to join its sister Maghreb states in negotiating and coming
to terms with the new challenges of the post-colonial era.
Part III
Post-Colonial Theatre
in the Maghreb
12
The Early Theatres of Independence,
1956–1970

Morocco was the first nation in the Maghreb to free itself from colonial
domination. Under the leadership of King Mohammed V, Morocco became
nominally independent of France at the beginning of 1956 and officially
independent on 2 March. These developments in Morocco were echoed soon
after in Tunisia, bringing to a successful conclusion the process of gradual
withdrawal initiated by French President Pierre Mendes France several years
before. Tunisian independence was proclaimed on 20 March 1956, with
Habib Bourguiba designated both as president of the “National Constituent
Assembly”, and Prime Minister. On 25 July 1957, the Republic was declared,
abolishing henceforth the monarchy and empowering Bourguiba as President
of the Republic. While strengthening the independence of the country
and setting in motion the long process of development, during 1956–64
Bourguiba established the institutions and legislation which made Tunisia
an emerging modern nation. Algerian independence was unhappily not
so easily managed, Algeria being considered by many, both there and in
France, not as a colony but as an integral part of France. Only after a long,
bitter, and bloody conflict, lasting from 1954 until 1962, was Algeria able to
join its neighbors Morocco and Tunisia as a fully independent state.
The theatrical situation in the three countries was thus very different in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, while Algeria was engulfed in its internal
struggle and its neighbors sought to establish and nurture a new national
stage. Moreover, thanks to the relatively peaceful separation from France,
there was no clear break in terms of French influence in either Morocco or
Tunisia between the colonial and post-colonial period. French plays, French
practices, and French ideas continued to play a major role in the develop-
ment of the theatrical cultures of these countries despite their political
independence.
The influence of French director Jean Vilar was particularly significant in
the early years of independence. Between 1951 and 1963, the years that saw
the independence of Morocco and Tunisia and the first theatrical experi-
ments of the new nations, Vilar provided a major new vision of theatre as
131
132 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

director of the Théâtre National Populaire, where he sought to provide

productions of high quality to large popular audiences. Vilar wrote that
he sought “To bring the popular to the classical repertory; to fight against
bourgeois rituals; to search for an ever larger and more solid body of inter-
mediaries in order to connect culture as it exists today and the popular
public.”1
This vision of a theatre of high quality for all classes struck a very
responsive chord in the generation of young Maghreb theatre-makers of
this period and perhaps particularly in two early leaders of theatre in these
two countries, Ali Ben Ayad (1930–1972) in Tunisia and André Voisin in
Morocco. Ben Ayad was a native Tunisian who first studied theatre in
Tunis, and the Paris Conservatoire, then in Cairo, and in 1956 back in France
where he studied directing and lighting under Vilar himself at the TNP.
Back in Tunis in 1958 he joined Mohammed Al-Agrebi as co-director of the
recently established “troupe Municipale d’art dramatique Arabe.”2 He served
as sole director from 1963 until his death in 1972 and, among the various
directors of the Municipal Theatre Company, Ben Ayad is still regarded
as the founding father of a theatre tradition. Throughout his tenure, he
was not only an administrator, but a leading artistic director and a vision-
ary. Among his chief priorities, though never fully achieved, were cultural
and artistic decentralization. He followed many of Vilar’s TNP approaches,
such as lowering the prices of tickets and reaching out to new audiences.
Like Vilar’s, Ben Ayad’s repertoire was a series of original productions based
on the aesthetics of stripping down the mythical canons, and opening up
more playing spaces. His theatre practice did not simply place the company
on the Tunisian theatrical map, but exalted it, literally into the status of a
national theatre company (in the absence of an official national theatre in
Tunisia until 1983).
As a disciple of Jean Vilar, Ben Ayad put into practice a series of programmatic
measures in order to develop a popular tradition. In line with the aspirations
of an emerging state, Ben Ayad also opened up the company to distin-
guished writers, dramaturgs, and directors, encouraging them to translate,
adapt, and write dramas. Among these are Taher Lakhmiri, who translated
Shakespeare’s Hamlett and Othello; Noureddine Kasbaoui, who translated
Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Lahcen Zmerli, who translated R. Merle’s
Flaminio and A. Camus’s Caligula; Tawfiq Achour, who translated Federico
Garcia Lorca’s Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba; Azzedine Madani,
who produced one of his early dramas entitled Sahib al-himarr (The Donkey
Owner) with the company and collaborated in one of the most inspir-
ing performances of Ben Ayad called Mourad III. Between 1958 and 1971.
Ben Ayad directed and acted in more than 27 dramas; among these: King
Oedipus, Hamlet, t Caligula, Othello, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba.
On 7 November 1962, President Bourguiba gave his most inspiring and
insightful speech on the theatre situation in Tunisia.3 It was conceived of
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 133

as a vigorous analysis of the conditions of theatre practice of the time, and

a road map for the future. For the next 20 years this speech would be a
reference for all cultural policy-makers in Tunisia. The state fixed standards
for theatre practice as an art form and a profession. When the state
ministry of information and culture was established in Tunisia, theatre
became another platform in the service of “national allegories.” Ben Ayad
seemed to embody Bourguiba’s theatrical aspirations, benefiting from both
the Arabo-Islamic heritage and Western theatre traditions. With Ben Ayad,
directing drama became a fully fledged artistic activity in Tunisian theatre;
and the position of the director-manager started to appear.
During his tenure, the Municipal Theatre Company performed at the Théâtre
des Nations in Paris, in Vienna, Cairo, and other capital cities. However, Ben
Ayad’s theatre was accused of being apolitical, or rather bourgeois by the
angry young generation appearing in the 1960s. These strongly resented the
tendency to dehistoricize social contradictions and to sidestep the tensions
of an emerging capitalist Tunisia, so apparent in Ben Ayad’s quest for an
elitist theatre that strove to smooth contradictions rather than explore them
onstage. Typically, in one of his interviews he declared: “Politics is a profes-
sion which is different from the one I have chosen for myself. I really despise
those who failed in politics and pretend to practice it in theatre in order to
attract this or that party.”4 Theatre in Tunisia after independence became a site
of struggle where competing visions for a better and more equitable society
were contested, and Ben Ayad’s frustrated efforts to reach an ever-broader
audience, never sufficiently funded by the municipality, soon gave way to a
new generation of socially conscious theatre practitioners, with a very dif-
ferent idea of theatre’s function.
On 30 September, 1966, eleven French-educated young Tunisian artists
published what would later be called Bayan al-ahada Acharr (The Manifesto of
the Eleven) in the newspaper La Pressee under the title “Et si maintenant nous
parlions … du théâtre?” (And if we should now speak … about theatre?).
The signatories to the manifesto were generally under the age of 25. These
were Tawfiq Abdelhadi, Nacer Shamam, Ali Louati, Ahmed El Murrakechi,
Youssef Errkik, Abdallah Rwached, Muncef Souissi, Hadi Halioui, Mohammed
El-Gharbi, Tawfiq Jebali, and Faraj Shushan. Set against the Municipal
Theatre’s conservative yet elitist approach and the lack of sufficient con-
sciousness in most amateur theatre works, the manifesto represented a
sudden jolt that set the Tunisian theatre off in a new direction. It called for
a complete shake-up in line with the Marxist aesthetics of the time, stat-
ing that: “Theatre is a public domain and should be utilized in the service
of people; the function of theatre is incitement and praxis that leads to
changing peoples’ passivity. Theatre is a real site of debate and circulation
of social energy; decentralization of theatre practice is needed to ward off
the hegemony of the capital city.” The language of the manifesto sounded
rather pretentious and too ambitious. It was mainly a combination of
134 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

European avant-garde theatre theories of the sixties. These emerging artists

freshly coming back from Europe had little experience in Tunisian theatre
practice. It was clear from the outset that a new generation of young artists
wanted to have its say in a theatre scene mostly dominated by Ben Ayad.
The manifesto cleverly made allusions to President Bourguiba’s speech
while attacking the current theatrical scene. It offered an ideal moment
of reflection upon theatre practice in Tunisia; and it was seen as a major
turning point in Tunisian theatre history. Unlike the theory fever gener-
ated in Morocco after the appearance of the first manifesto of Ceremonial
Theatre,5 the Manifesto of the Eleven transformed the Tunisian theatrical
map in practice rather than in theory. Among its immediate offshoots was
the creation in 1967 of regional theatres in Sfax, El Kef, Gafsa, Kairouan,
Sousse, and Mahdia. An era of co-existence between state theatres and inde-
pendent theatres also started. The Sfax regional company was created in
1964, followed by El Kef in 1968. Yet, the most prominent regional theatre
company was El Kef, headed by Muncef Souissi6 and numbering among its
first members Mohammed Abdennadher, Rajah Gafsi, Christian Masurel,
Ali Mosbah, Mohammed Boujellatia, and Abdessatar El Baoundi. Between
1967 and 1975, El Kef became a prominent theatrical centre in Tunisia
different from the Tunis Municipality Company. A real congregation site for
a young generation of angry artists, El Kef attracted many names such as:
Abdellatif Hamrouni, Mohammed Driss, Fadel Jaziri, Khadija Souissi, Souad
Mahassen, Aziza Boulabyar, Kamal Alaoui, Jamil El Joudi, Ahmed Snoussi,
Muncef Sayem, Rajae Ben Amar, and Aziza Boulbyar. Fadel Jaïbi produced
his first drama with El Kef and then collaborated along with his wife Jalila
Baccar with Mohammed Rajae at the Gafsa regional theatre company.
Hafedh Djedidi rightly concludes that “the company becomes a melting
pot of artists and a new school of theatre that will be distinguished by an
intelligent treatment of the Arabo-Islamic heritage in order to dissect the
daily social and political era.”7
El Kef’s first production was Souissi’s adaptation of Molière’s George Dandin
ou le Mari confondu under the title Hani Bouderbala in July 1968. Then, the
company presented a series of performances such as Houki Wa Hrairi,
an adaptation of Goldoni’s Arlequin; Zir Salem by Alfred Farag; Achtarout
and Acts without Words, directed by Fadel Jaïbi; Hal Wa Ahwal by Ahmed
Keddadi; Alif Lachey Alik by Alfred Farag and EL Hallej by Azzedine Madani.
Some of these performances, like El Hallej, were immediately censured
by the authorities after their premières. The public of El Kef was composed
of militant intellectuals, judged by Bourguiba’s regime to be subversive.
Gafsa regional company, the second theatre pole in Tunisia in the 1970s
and a training ground for many theatre artists, was created in 1972 with
Raja Farhat, Rajae Ben Amar, Jalila Baccar, Mohammed Driss, Fadel Jaziri,
and Mokdad. The majority of these artists, freshly returned from training
in Europe, collaborated with Souissi in El Kef. However, Gafsa’s company
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 135

soon imposed a popular theatre tradition that sometimes compromised the

esthetic in favor of light entertainment.
The first decade after Moroccan independence was crucial in setting up
a Moroccan ruling class. General Mohammed Oufkir became the ruthless,
powerful interior minister after independence, reproducing a cycle of violence
until he was finally executed in 1972 after being accused of plotting a coup
d’état against the king. Between 1956 and 1966, Morocco had 11 government
changes because of lack of coherence within the political scene concerning
the appropriate programmatic measures leading to a future Morocco. After
the death of Sultan Mohammed V in 1961, Crown Prince Hassan II became the
king, and Morocco became a constitutional monarchy. But in March 1965
tension between the monarchy and the opposition led to the dissolution of
parliament in June of that year and the declaration of “L’État d’exception”
which continued for the next five years, an era known as the Sanawat
Ar-Rassas (Years of Lead) characterized by restrictions of freedom in politics,
the arts, and so on, headed by the ruthless Oufkir.
This widespread impression of post-independence violence, however, seems
today overly simplistic and open to different interpretations. The metaphor
of “deep Morocco” leads to a revelation of the intense overlapping of
moments of crisis and of tragic sublimity and utopian cultural diversity
as convivencia. Beneath this outer overlapping lie essentialist claims over
certain national allegories, historical pasts, territories, or cultural memories;
and along with them different layers of censorship. Each claim establishes
the borders of otherness and engenders some kind of violent appropriation.
Theatre practice, too, became a tool in this process.
On the ground, a more tangible battle was also taking place over the redistri-
bution of lands, estates, government posts, and so on. One million hectares of
land had been taken over by fewer than 6000 Europeans. As one modern his-
torian observes: “This land should rightly have been returned to Morocco’s
peasants after independence. Instead, nearly two-thirds of the colonization
land has passed or is passing into the hands of the Moroccan elite. Little more
than a third has been redistributed to peasants.”8 Inevitably such appropria-
tion led to protest. The Imazighen Rifians, whose resistance was a central
chapter of the Moroccan struggle against colonialism, got almost nothing.
In 1956, they rebelled against the hegemony of the urban nationalists,
mainly of the Istiqlal Party. But such rebellion was immediately quelled by
the royal army under the direct command of Crown Prince Hassan. Further
provocation was provided by the aggressive Arabization measures that were
taken by the new government to eradicate all traces of the French colonial
past in Morocco. These were by no means essentialist attempts at restoring
a pre-colonial underground Moroccan self in all its complexity. On the
contrary, even deeply rooted aspects of Amazigh cultures were eclipsed in
the process of an enforced oblivion. Nevertheless, the cultural memory of
Amazigh cultural traditions survived despite all attempts at suppression and
136 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

assimilation, and these have been impressed and performed upon bodies as
sites of agency or cultural resistance.
The Moroccan Theatre Company operated within this complex and tur-
bulent socio-political context for almost two decades, and became in effect
Morocco’s national company. King Hassan II invited the company many
times to perform inside the Royal Palace in Rabat; he even suggested some of
Molière’s plays for adaptation, as well as narratives from Arabo-Islamic history.
Its focus was socio-educational in tendency, with the aim of correcting the
follies of Moroccan society by holding them up to scrutiny and exposing
them to ridicule. Scripts borrowed from other traditions were Moroccanized
and expressed in the common language of the people. The moral dimen-
sion behind the emphasis on flawed characters was highly informed by the
traditions of the Comédie Française and commedia dell’ arte and their rich
gallery of stock characters and situations. Indeed, the Comédie Française
tradition provided a new aesthetic frame for the Moroccan age-old dynamics
of popular entertainments and performance traditions. Inspired by André
Voisin’s distrust of the literary approach to theatre and his focus on craft

Figure 6 Mamoura’s production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhommee (photo courtesy

of the Moroccan Ministry for Youth Archives)
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 137

and performance, the company embarked on a whole series of collective

free adaptations, mainly from Molière, Beaumarchais, Shakespeare, and
others. The dramaturgy workshop implemented by Voisin at the Mamoura
constituted a real opportunity for building up, or rather creating, a reper-
toire not only for the company, but also for Morocco as a nation. Moroccan
folk dialects, rejected in the previous theatre of resistance in favor of the
highly exalted rhetoric of classical Arabic, became established as the common
medium of a popular theatre tradition in the making. The Trio of Ahmed
Tayeb Laalaj (b. 1928), Taher Ouaziz, and Abdessamad Kenfaoui (with the
pseudonym ATAWAKEL) became collaborative co-writers in the company
under the supervision of Voisin, who served as its artistic director and
manager. Laalaj dominated this trio, and his popular poetics and mastery
of traditional comic style earned him the title of the Moroccan Molière.
Mohammed Kaghat rightly acknowledges the phenomenon of Molièrization
in Arabic theatre, including in Morocco: “If Maroun An-Naqqash is the Arab
Molière, Syria too knew its Molière in Abi Khalil Al-Kabbani, Egypt in
Yacub Sannou, and Morocco in Ahmed Tayeb Laalaj.”9
In May 1956, in the immediate aftermath of the declaration of Moroccan
independence, two of the company’s productions – namely Amayel Juha,
a collective adaptation of Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin and A-Chattab,
another collectively written work in the spirit of Molière – were presented
in the International Festival of Paris at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, now
the Théâtre de La Ville. A-Chattab (The Sweeper) is a collective drama
that emerged from Voisin’s dramaturgy workshop, but it was Ahmed
Tayeb Laalaj who wrote its dialogues and songs. Since then his name has
been associated with Moroccan popular theatre tradition as has that of
Hossin Mrini, who played the leading role in this production. In fact,
Laalaj already gained prominence in the second training class of Al-Jadida
in 1953. As Taher Ouaziz and Abdessamad Kenfaoui were struggling to
Moroccanize Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville, Laalaj surprised Kenfaoui
with his linguistic skills and artistry. He was immediately made part of the
team. The project began with images that Voisin drew on a blackboard,
requesting the dramaturgy group to extract a story from them: images of a
luxurious home and a miserable one on opposite sides, a water source, a palm
tree, a lion, and a desert. After two weeks of collaborative work, A-Chattab
was born, a musical comedy in Moroccan dialect. It centers on two main
characters who look very much the same physically, but have completely
different temperaments and mindsets: Al-Haj Abdel-Adhim, an arrogant
merchant who owns the big house, and Omar Laghchim, the poor yet generous
sweeper who lives in the shabby dwelling, two essentialized representatives
of Moroccan culture. The contrasts between the two characters, their social
relationships, and the intrigue are all comic. The play’s music contributes
to the visual contrasts. These two productions (with almost 50 actors and
actresses) presented a Moroccan Molière and were hailed with great enthusiasm
138 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

by the French public and press reviews. Though they couldn’t understand
the language, the Parisian audiences were clearly delighted by the way
their highly esteemed national dramatist was performed and negotiated by
Others, a gratifying example of cultural assimilation. The warm welcome
extended to the newly independent Morocco made a striking contrast to the
current situation in Algeria, which was at this time moving into the darkest
years of its bloody War of Independence. In 1958, the company performed
again at the Théâtre des Nations of Paris, this time with an adaptation of
Molière’s The Imaginary Invalidd under the title Mrid Khatro. And a third visit
to Paris took place in 1961 with Al-Balgha Al-Mashoura. In 1958, the com-
pany also performed Mrid Khatro at the World’s Fair of Brussels, and Hamlet
at the Carthage Festival in 1967.
Soon after the historic visit to Paris the Mamoura theatre company was
reorganized, although still very much under the continuing French policy
of containment and assimilation. The aim of this policy continued to be the
absorbing of the nationalist subversive actions that were manifested in the
early theatre of resistance, and to establish, instead, a mystifying theatrical
apparatus that would smooth conflict and resolve social tension. Thus the
Mamoura was considered as an official theatrical company despite the fact
that legally speaking, it was an NGO, an association like any other amateur
association.10 In January of 1959 Jean le Veugle, another French expert who
now directed the office of cultural affairs, renewed the Moroccan Centre for

Figure 7 Mamoura’s production of Shakespeare’s Hamlett (photo courtesy of the

Moroccan Ministry for Youth Archives)
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 139

Dramatic Art and entrusted its direction to Pierre Lucas, whose report about
the Mamoura company this year is quite revealing: “From 1959 up to 1960
the company gave a total of 108 performances, to 245 spectators, in 37
different cities.”11 It was the mother of Moroccan theatre. Ouzri describes
the Mamoura theatre group in the following terms: “Al-Mamoura is an
official company; it is there, politically, to present Moroccan theatre in the
image desired by the state. To this end the philosophy, which directs its
work, aims to give our forms of expression contents far from all that upsets
our political and social life.”12
Tayeb Saddiki, who by the end of the century had emerged as Morocco’s
leading director, followed his training at Mamoura in the mid-1950s with
several years of further study in France – two years in la Comédie de L’Ouest
with Hubert Ginioux at Rennes, then a workshop in Jean Vilar’s Théâtre
National Populaire in Paris. Upon returning home in 1958, he founded Al-
Masrah al-Ummali (Workers’ Theatre) under the auspices of the Moroccan
Union of Labor. The need for addressing the daily suffering of the laborers
was a central concern. However, this task failed, for Saddiki was still so
deeply affected by what he saw in Europe that he reproduced some 30 adap-
tations from the Western repertoire – including Aristophanes’s Parliament
of Women (1959), Jonson’s Volpone (1960), Molière’s School for Wives (1961),
and Ionesco’s Amédée (1964) – that did not correspond to the taste of a
largely illiterate working class. In 1964 he served briefly as artistic director
of the new National Theatre Mohammed V in Rabat, but then settled in
Casablanca, which remained his base of operations. He served as the direc-
tor of the Municipal Theatre there from 1964 to 1977 and founded several
small experimental theatres, including the Worker’s Theatre (Al Masrah
Al-Ummali) in 1964 and the Café-Théâtre in 1970.
Saddiki’s approach to theatre underwent a distinct change in the mid-1960s,
reflecting his growing consciousness of the tensions of creating theatre in
the post-colonial world and in coming to terms with the hybrid condi-
tion of the colonial subject resulting from the traumatic wounds that were
inflected upon him/her by the colonial enterprise. Saddiki began to consider
the implications of the Moroccan post-colonial subject, on the borderline of
two narratives, the European and the Maghrebi, in creating his 1966 drama,
Diwan Sidi Abderrahman Al-Majdub (The Collection of Master Abderrahman
Al-Majdub). In speaking of its inspiration, he writes:

After adapting about thirty plays, I was overwhelmed by the idea that this
is a transplanted theatre that does not reflect the inner self of Moroccans.
Then, a new journey started along with people, their surroundings, and
collective imaginary … I enjoyed people’s stories and myths … It was in
this context that I discovered the sixteenth-century poet “Almajdoub.” His
poetry was not written, but transmitted orally amongst people in every
Moroccan home. Then, I started assembling his verses and rewriting them
140 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

in a dramatic way. That was the birth of the play entitled Sidi Abderrahman
Al-Majdub, a drama that won an exceptional success in Morocco.13

In this shift from Western to post-colonial hybrid drama, argues Hassan

Mniai, Saddiki “was suddenly transformed into a proponent of a Moroccan/
Arabic theatre that would benefit from the potentialities of Western theatre,
on the one hand, and construct its own form through an appeal to heritage,
be it history or a theatrical form, on the other hand.”14
Saddiki’s Al-Majdub thus represents the emerging theatrical enterprise in
post-colonial Morocco. For the first time in the brief history of Moroccan
theatre, Saddiki transposed al-halqa as an esthetic, cultural, and geographical
space, from a theatre building as the space of the Western Other (transplanted
into Morocco as a subsidiary colonial institution); Al-Majdub is conceived
in an open public place. Its opening refers us to its hybridized formation
through its persistent self-reflexivity. The poetry of Al-Majdub becomes both
the subject of performance and narrative. The play’s structure is circular
rather than linear. It is situated in Jemaa-el-fna as an open site of orature and
a space of hybridity itself. Al-Majdub is more a devised performance than the
mise-en-scène of a traditionally linear play. Its elaborate poetic prologue sets
up the background details of the performance space and calls our attention
to the making of al-halqa and its circular architecture. Onstage actors tran-
scribe the circular form of al-halqa through a series of comic acrobatic games

Figure 8 Al-Majdub, by Tayeb Saddiki (photo from Tayeb Saddiki’s personal archive)
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 141

and mimetic body language. They play audience to each other while the
two main storytellers prepare to present the halqa of Al-Majdub, which estab-
lishes itself from the outset as its own subject. It represents the Moroccan
popular poet as a Shakespearean fool, giving voice to wisdom in a corrupt
social order.
The performance begins and ends with an encounter between present and
past. These do not seem to belong to the text of Al-Majdub, and yet they
shed light on it as a liminal space. A young Moroccan artist appears at the
beginning of the play and at the end in search of ancestral traditions:

The First Storyteller: So our dearest guest from the twentieth century, why
are you so quiet? Are you sleeping?
The Young Man: Sleeping! I have never been more awake than today.
The First Storyteller: Enlighten our darkness then, and eliminate our igno-
rance.
The Young Man: That was a fascinating journey, whereby I learned some-
thing of world affairs. I was drawn by the great master
and impacted by his poetry.15

Saddiki’s two storytellers illustrate both the importance and performative

powers of narrativity. Their narration conveys to their audiences how the
present is constructed from the past, and how signifying practices structuring
the world around them bear witness to this inextricable connection between
past and present. Saddiki’s reconstruction of Al-Majdub as cultural memory
fuses the memory site of the famous square Jemaa-el-fna along with memory
narratives. His artistic intervention that exploits traditional Moroccan per-
formance cultures contemporizes our perceptions of a remote past that has
become so alien to us because of the colonial rule. Saddiki’s special tribute
to Jemaa-el-fna, as an ongoing site of performativity and an ever-lasting
agora, also projects a public space of intensive civic interactions and circula-
tion of social energy. The text and theatrical production of Al-Majdub, then,
are major indices of a paradigm shift that has occurred in Moroccan theatre
practice since the late 1960s. In fact, 1967, the date Al-Majdub was first
performed, marks the beginning of Morocco’s performative turn. Al-Majdub
is still a landmark of Moroccan theatre, as it has opened a new field of
research possibilities and experimentation.
Although after the mid-1960s, Saddiki moved away from his strongly
European orientation, the classic European repertoire, headed by the works of
Molière and Shakespeare, continued to exert a strong influence in Morocco,
as elsewhere in the Arab world. One outstanding example is Nabil Lahlou’s
Ophelia n’est pas Mortee (Ophelia is not Dead) written in 1968 and remaining
popular in Morocco through to the end of the century. Lahlou (b.1945), one
of the leading Moroccan authors, actors, and directors of this generation,
wrote his first play, Al-Sa’aa, in Morocco in 1965, then left to study theatre in
142 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Paris, where he wrote his Ophelia during that turbulent year of student unrest.
He returned to Morocco the following year, when the work was performed
by the University Theatre Company, supported by the Ministry of Culture.
The play can be considered as a rereading of Shakespeare from the position of
post-coloniality. It is also a strong statement about the lack of artistic free-
dom in the newly independent states of the post-colonial Arab world, with a
particular focus on Morocco.
Lahlou brings together two Shakespearean plays, Hamlett and Macbeth, in
which the two tragic characters become paralyzed actors, thrown into a situa-
tion of diminished human faculties. Lahlou’s stage directions at the beginning
of the play set forth this existential condition: “Hamlet and Macbeth are the
only characters of the play. They are the two voluntary actors. The acting can
be either on crutches or in wheelchairs. The action can take place in a room,
in a hospital, in a prison cell, or on a theatre stage.”16
The actors, voluntarily paralyzed, are confined in a prison-like space very
much like Ham and Clove in Beckett’s Endgame. Lahlou transforms the original
Shakespearean texts in several ways: Hamlet and Macbeth are brought together
in a single play and the two Shakespearean characters are transformed into
actors living in a state of impasse and enacting distorted fragments from
their past roles as real actors. Hamlet is paralyzed because of his acting a
rebellious Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. In the Mousetrap play-within-a-
play, Lahlou’s Hamlet condemned Claudius and his own mother as murderers,
and for this reason he has been paralyzed. Ophelia in Lahlou’s version is
an absent actress/character that is spoken about, yet not present physically
on the stage. She is an actress who has been transformed into a servant/
prostitute. Lahlou’s play is composed of two acts that repeat each other with
slight differences. Lahlou’s use of obscene language is also different from
Shakespeare’s.
The two acts of the play are each composed of micro-dramas and chats
between the two actors/characters who, although they chose to be paralyzed,
still long for change and better lots in life. Their awareness of their condi-
tion is communicated through their sarcastic comments on their situation
along with a persistence to enact such paralysis. Even their use of language
is marked by dissatisfaction, contempt, and bitterness. Hamlet coins a new
verb, “thinksay,” in order to voice his inability to act that is also manifested
in his paralysis. In fact, the verb expresses the absurdity of the Third World
predicament, which is the lack of freedom of speech:
Hamlet: I thinksay: enough contempt, enough flatteries, enough hatred,
enough killing, I want to speak out my desire to love, to embrace,
to hold, to run, to laugh, to feel, facing up to rot and die.17
The coined verb, then, is a hybrid suspended construct presupposing think-
ing inwardly without having the ability to express an opinion. “Thinksay”
implies that there is always an obligation to express oneself, yet without the
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 143

ability to do so for fear of being hanged the next morning, a fear that is close
to the fear of castration. Hamlet’s dream is interrupted by Macbeth’s call for
a pause, a fact that foregrounds the theatricality of their acting. The pause
is also structural, since it marks the end of a micro-play only to embark on
a second one. Between each game/play, Hamlet and Macbeth are reminded
of their situation.
In July of 1962, after a long, bitter, and bloody struggle, the independence
of Algeria was proclaimed. Those who had worked for the establishment of a
significant Algerian theatre in the years before the war faced a new challenge,
creating a new theatre for the new nation. The leading figures in this project
were Mohammed Boudia and Mustapha Kateb, both well known for their
theatrical support of Algeria during the War of Independence. They drew
up the first manifesto after independence calling for the establishment of a
national theatre to promote national cultural consciousness, and the decree
establishing such an organization, adopted by the state on 6 January 1963,
essentially followed the recommendations, and even the wording, of this
manifesto called De l’Orientation. The National Liberation Front Theatre
returned from exile and was rechristened the Algerian National Theatre
(TNA), housed in the 800-seat Algiers Opera. During the 1970s major
branches were also established in Constantine (1973), Oran (1973), Annaba
(1973), and Sidi Bel Abbés (1976), with lesser (and less stable) branches in a
number of smaller centers.
A national theatre school was established alongside the system of national
theatres. It grew out of a school of drama founded in the small coastal town
of Sidi Frej in 1964 which moved in 1965 to Bordj El Kiffan, just to the east
of Algiers, where it remains today. In 1970 this venture was transformed into
a National Institute of Dramatic and Choreographic Arts, which remains the
leading center for theatre training in Algeria. In 2004 it officially expanded
its mission, becoming the “Higher Institute for Training in the Theatrical
and Audiovisual Arts” (ISMAS).
The question of repertoire was not so easily settled and was the source of
continuing discussion, and indeed controversy, during the turbulent years
between 1963 and 1965, when the theatres were closed in the wake of the
army coup that installed Colonel Boumedienne as the new national leader.
There was general agreement that the new repertoire should be “decolonized,”
but sharp debate over exactly how this was to be done. The figures most
prominently associated with the major positions in this confrontation were
Mustapha Kateb and Ould Abderrahmane, whose stage name was Kaki.
Kateb, who assumed direction of the newly formed National Academy of
Drama and Dance, championed a much more international repertoire than
had yet been seen in the Algerian theatre. He himself translated Calderón’s
Life is a Dream, and he encouraged the production of seven other inter-
national works at the TNA between 1963 and 1965: Molière’s Don Juan,
translated by the distinguished scholar Mohammed Belhafaoui (who also
144 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

translated Brecht, Beckett, and Hauptmann into Arabic), Shakespeare’s The

Taming of the Shrew, Brecht’s Señora Carrar’s Rifles, O’Casey’s Red Roses for
Me, Egyptian Tewfik Al-Hakim’s The Sultan’s Dilemma, Molière’s Rogueries
of Scapin, and The Dogs by the Belgian dramatist Tone Brulin, directed by
Kateb’s former colleague from his original company, Hadj Omar.
Considering his professional background, one would have every reason
to expect Kaki to be strongly sympathetic to this orientation. He became
involved with the theatre very early, joining a company, El Saydia, in 1949,
when he was 15 years of age. Two years later he helped to found the company
El Masrah (The Theatre) for which he wrote his first play, Tarikh Essahra (The
Legend of the Rose, 1951). He was working at this time for the government
department of education, teaching theatre, and between 1955 and 1958,
when topical and political drama was strongly favored on most major stages,
he directed such classic and international works as Plautus’s The Handbag, g
Gozzi’s The Green Bird, and Ionesco’s the Bald Soprano. In 1958, when Kateb
was establishing the best known political theatre of the Algerian war, the
FLN, in Tunis, Kaki established a very different exile theatre in Lyon, far more
devoted to artistic experimentation than to political action. Nevertheless,
when Kaki returned to Algeria in 1962 and became associated with the TNA,
he placed himself in direct opposition to the internationalist project of
Kateb, insisting that the new Algerian theatre’s primary responsibility was the
encouragement and presentation of the work of native Algerian authors. The
attempted blending of modern approaches with the work of earlier periods
and styles in the Algerian theatre Kaki characterized as “heritage” theatre.
The problem with this vision was that the young Algerian theatre had so
far produced very few plays that had sufficient depth and ongoing interest to
make them attractive for revival in the new era. In the event, only five earlier
works were included among the more than 20 plays presented at the TNA
between 1963 and 1965. These were Bachtarzi’s return to the theatre with
a revival of his 1938 Ma Yenfaa ghir Essah, Deux-pièces-cuisine (Two Kitchen
Pieces) by the actor Abdelkader Safiri, two Molière adaptations by Touri:
Sekkaj el Wahline, based on Scapin and Le comédien malgré lui, and Roblès’s
Montserrat. This last production was the first directing assignment for an
artist who would become one of the main house directors at the theatre
as well as a leading actor, Allel El-Mouhib. The rest of the productions
presented, approximately half of the total, were new Algerian works.
Among the new plays presented during this period, most fell into one or
the other of two categories, represented in general by the work of two of
the period’s most popular dramatists, Kaki and Rouiched. Rouiched (real
name Ahmed Ayad) was already a popular actor before the war of independ-
ence, three years of which he spent in prison. Released in 1960, he returned
to acting but began playwriting as well. Like Ksentini and Touri, he was the
center of his own plays, creating a comic character, Hassan Terro, a rogue
and trickster in the Djeha tradition. He became the most popular comic
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 145

actor in Algeria and was widely considered the heir of Ksentini. In reflection
of the changed times, however, his Hassan was a much more revolutionary
figure than Djeha. In his first appearance, in Hasan Terro, later a popular
film, he was imprisoned and tortured by the colonial authorities, an experi-
ence which converted him to the revolutionary cause. It was plays like this
that apparently inspired Che Guevara, who visited the Algerian National
Theatre in the mid-1960s, to comment: “I beheld the revolutionary theatre
itself in the land of Algeria.”18
Kaki, as his background and training would suggest, was, despite his
earlier expressed interest in “heritage” theatre, in fact much less close to
the popular tradition than Rouiched and much more influenced by inter-
national work, which he sought to adapt to Algerian themes and concerns.
Diwan el Garagouez in 1965 and El Guerrab wa Essalhine (The Water Bearer
and the Marabouts) in 1966 were clearly Brecht-inspired parables with
a strong Algerian flavor and Kaki was instrumental in introducing both
Brechtian and absurdist techniques to the National Theatre. He was also
very much interested in the documentary theatre developed by Piscator and
his German followers, which he applied to the Algerian experience in works
like 132 Sana (132 Years) and Afriqya Qabl al-Aam Waahid d (Africa before the
Year One), both presented at the new National Theatre in 1963 and both
dealing with the history of French colonialism. This interest in European
experimentation did not, however, lead Kaki away from indigenous forms.
On the contrary, his first play at the National Theatre, Sha’b uth-Thulma
(The People of the Night, 1962) and 132 Sana were done in a distinct folk
style, with interspersed tales, snippets of crude verse, local folklore, songs,
dances, and funeral orations. Even more significantly, both El Guerrab in
1966 and Koul Ouahed ou hukmou (Each According to His Own Judgment) in
1967 utilized for the first time in modern Maghreb theatre two major elements
of traditional performance in that region – the gouwâl, or storyteller, and the
halqa’s circular arrangement of the audience. Both of these contributed to
the new style of theatre he helped to popularize, called the ihtifali (festive
or carnivalesque) theatre. These styles, and the specific devices of the gouwâl
and the halqa, become key elements in the work of a number of younger
dramatists, most notably Kateb Yacine and Abdelkader Alloula in Algeria
and Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco. The originality and influence of El Guerrab
caused a jury of Algerian critics in 1999 to name it the most important
drama produced in that country since its independence.19 In these two plays
Kaki also utilized the talents of the actor Sirat Boumedienne (1947–1995)
who became especially associated with his works, and subsequently with
those of Abdelkader Alloula.
The coup d’étatt in which Houari Boumedienne seized power in 1965 was
not fatal to the developing new theatre, but nevertheless dealt it a severe blow.
Many theatre artists were opposed to the new regime. Some were imprisoned
and others, including the director of the National Theatre, Mohammed
146 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Boudia, forced into exile.20 For a number of years even the best established
Algerian theatres, lacking personnel, audiences, and finances, struggled simply
to survive. Yacine’s La Cadavre encirclé, the single work produced at the
National Theatre in 1968, attracted only 508 spectators to its eight perform-
ances, by far the worst year in the National Theatre’s history.21 Fortunately
the next year saw two more substantial successes with European classics,
Bachtarzi’s adaption of Molière’s Imaginary Invalid d and Hadj Omar’s adap-
tation and staging of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, and 1970 saw two
even larger successes of new Algerian plays. The first was Bliss Laouer Kayen
Mennou (The Blind Devil Truly Exists), an adaptation of a Turkish play by
Nazim Hikmet, the first dramatic work by the actor Mohammed Benguettaf,
who had joined the company in 1966 and who went on to write, adapt, and
translate more than 25 dramas, most of them for the National Theatre. The
other was El Bouaboune (The Concierges), a series of 11 short scenes castigat-
ing various social evils such as greed and pride, which became a modern
classic in the Algerian theatre, and was considered the crowning achieve-
ment of its stars Rouiched and Keltoum, who were also its authors. Still, the
Algerian sociologist Wadi Bouzar described the general theatrical situation
during this time in these dark words:

From the 1960s and into the 1970s the theatre experienced a certain dis-
affection from the public, due in part to the irregularity of production
and even more to the scarcity of works of quality, in part due to a certain
dispersing and even the abandonment of theatre artists who turned their
efforts to the cinema, and most of all to the almost total overwhelming
of (non) cultural life by television …. The working conditions in the theatre
were deplorable. Sometimes material had not be refurbished for fifty
years. Craftsmen, artists, and technicians were all lacking.22

During the 1970s the theatrical scene in Algeria distinctly improved, due in
significant measure to the emergence of three major new dramatists, who
dominated that theatre for the next two decades – Kateb Yacine, Abdelkader
Alloula, and Slimane Benaïssa.
Although all three began their careers during the 1960s, only Alloula
gained much visibility in Algeria during that decade. Born in 1939 in the
village of Ghazaouet, he studied at Sidi Bel Abbès, then at Oran when, in
1956, he stopped his studies as a part of the general student strike called by
the FLN. No longer a student, he joined a company of amateur actors, El-
Chabab d’Oran, and decided to pursue a career in theatre. In 1960, he went
to France to study at the Théâtre Nationale Populaire under Jean Vilar, the
inspiration of so many theatre figures of the Maghreb in the late twentieth
century. He returned to Algeria in 1962 when independence was declared,
and joined a newly formed company, El Aras, in Oran, where he acted
in several plays and created his first staging, an adaptation of Plautus’s
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 147

The Captives. Before the end of the year he was invited to become one of
the first members of the newly formed Algerian National Theatre. His first
acting success was in one of the major political plays of the revolutionary
years, Fouzia El-Hadj’s Awlad al Qasaba (Children of the Kasbah), directed
by Abdelhaim Rais, who had also directed the premiere of this strongly pro-
FLN work in 1958. As an actor Alloula appeared both in Algerian plays, such
as Raïs’s Le Sermentt and Rouiched’s Hassen Terro, and in such international
works as Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Molière’s Don Juan, O’Casey’s
Red Roses for Me, and Calderón’s Life is a Dream. He made his directing debut at
the National Theatre in 1964 with Rouiched’s El Ghoula, a social satire about the
exploitation of farm workers. The following year he directed the Algerian
première of a major work by the contemporary Egyptian dramatist Tewfik
Al-Hakim, The Sultan’s Dilemma, premièred by the National Theatre in Egypt
just four years earlier, in 1961. Although set in Mamluk times, its “dilemma”
posed the timeless question of whether society should be ruled by force or
law, and thus provided an important contribution to the ongoing interest of
the Algerian National Theatre in social drama.
During the 1960s Alloula’s range of dramatic activities continued to
expand. He began to act in films as well as on stage, and took his first steps
toward playwrighting by adapting works from Sophocles, Shakespeare,
and Aristophanes for Algerian radio. In 1965 and 1966 he participated in
the founding, and was for a brief period the director, of the new National
Institute of Dramatic Art, established in the Algiers suburb of Bordj El
Kiffan. For the remainder of the century this Institute served as the primary
training center for theatre artists in Algeria. As a director, he contributed
importantly to the National Theatre’s commitment to international theatre
by staging Cervantes’s allegorical The Siege of Naumantia in 1965 and in
1967 his own adaptation of a Chinese Play, Monnaies d’orr by Chu Su Chen,
a Brechtian sort of study of two judges with contrasting views of the same
case. After a year in France, studying theatre in Paris at the Sorbonne and
at the University of Nancy with Jack Lang, he returned to the National
Theatre, where he performed in a number of plays directed by Kaki. He also
made his debut as author in 1969 with his first original play, Laalaq (The
Leeches), which he also directed. Set in the first days after independence, it
showed the rapid emergence of an unfeeling bureaucracy with little regard
for the real needs of the people. Although only a modest success, it estab-
lished features that would be central to his subsequent work, dealing in an
ironic mode with contemporary social and political issues and also utilizing
traditional Algerian performative devices, in this case the traditional story-
teller, the gouwâl.
The 1950s and 1960s, the years of the War of Independence and its after-
math, Yacine spent primarily in Paris, and traveling internationally, and so
remained largely unknown in his native country. He established an interna-
tional reputation with his first novel, the Faulknerian Nedjma, in 1956.
148 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

That same year Le Cadavre encircléé (The Encircled Corpse) which takes
some of the characters from Nedjma into the Algerian War, was first pro-
duced by a student company at Carthage in Tunisia, which was becoming
a refuge for Algerian theatre artists driven out by the war. The French
director Jean-Marie Serreau, whose Théâtre de Babylon was a center for
the new French avant-garde, including the 1953 premiére of Waiting for
Godot,t proposed presenting the work in Paris. With the war for Algerian
independence at its height, the authorities refused to allow this sympa-
thetic portrayal of 1945 uprisings, and Serreau was forced to present it in
Brussels and then, secretly, at the tiny and obscure Théâtre Lutèce in Paris.
Two years later it was published as Le Cercle des représailles (The Circle of
Reprisals) with two other Yacine plays, Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité
(The Ancesters Redouble Their Fury) and La Poudre d’intelligence (Powder
of Intelligence). The first continued the characters, subject matter, and
abstract poetic style of Cadavre, the two together forming a kind of
nationalist history play dealing with the Algerian War from 1945 until
1962. La Poudre d’intelligence struck a very different note. This, Yacine’s
first comic work, was a satiric farce. Its protagonist, the peasant Nuage
de Fumée (“Cloud of Smoke”), is clearly a reincarnation of the shrewd
Algerian folk hero, Djeha, here recruited into the 1950s agitation against
colonial rule. Much of the play concerns tricks the wily Nuage plays on
the gullible Sultan, such as convincing him that a donkey produces gold
instead of dung. The play takes a serious and contemporary turn near the
end, however, when Nuage encounters Ali, the son of Nedjma, the central
character of the other plays, who has joined an army of liberation. Nuage
helps Ali abduct the Crown Prince, who is then killed in a badly executed
attempted rescue by the Sultan’s cavaliers.
During the 1960s, Yacine became extremely active in the international
leftist movement. He visited Vietnam, dedicated several theatrical scenes to
the memory of Ho Chi Minh at the 1969 Soviet Writer’s Conference, and
created a play on the Vietnamese struggle, his longest, L’Homme aux sandals
de caoutchoucc (The Man with Rubber Sandals), in 1970, featuring Ho Chi
Minh as a protagonist and grotesque villains from the CIA and American
and French politics (under thinly disguised names such as the bloodthirsty
Nique-sonne (French slang for screw and kill). In the meantime Serreau and
others continued to produce his work in some of the leading experimental
theatres in Paris, Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocitéé in early 1967 at the Salle
Gémier of the TNP (directed by Serreau) and later that same year La Poudre
d’intelligence at the Théâtre de l’Epée de Bois, directed by Alain Olivier. That
same year these same two plays were produced in Cairo, but their translation
into classical Arabic proved unattractive, and they were not well received.
Fortunately, however, Yacine gained a sensitive and successful champion in
fellow dramatist Slimane Benaïssa, who brought him his first major successes
in his native country.
 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970 149

Benaïssa was born in Guelma in eastern Algeria in 1944. He studied

mathematics and in 1965 served in the army, stationed at Cherchell, site
of the Roman theatre of Mauritania. Perhaps that famous theatre engaged
his interest, since after leaving the army in 1967, he took up a theatre career,
writing his first play, Boualem zid el Gouddam (Boualem, Go Forward), a
subtle critique of Algerian obscurantism, and assuming the directorship of a
small regional theatre at Abbaba. He founded the first independent theatre
company in Algeria, “Théâtre et Culture,” with which he was associated for
several years and which toured both at home and abroad. During his early
years, however, he became best known for the translation (into Arabic) and
directing of Yacine’s plays, who was then writing in French in Paris. This
interest culminated in the production of Yacine’s L’Homme aux sandals de
caoutchouc, translated and directed by Benaïssa, which gained a consider-
able success at the Algerian National Theatre in 1968, bringing attention to
Yacine and encouraging his return to Algeria and its theatre scene.
13
Developing National Traditions,
1970–1990

During the 1960s, under cultural minister André Malraux, the French
government had pursued a major program of decentralization of the French
theatre, developing major new theatres in the working-class suburbs of Paris
and also in provincial cities and towns throughout the nation. The influ-
ence of this French enterprise was soon felt in Algeria and Tunisia, which
undertook their own, much more modest programs of decentralization.
The Algerian National Theatre remained based in the capital, but seven
regional branches were established, spread across the country, in Annaba,
Constantine, Oran, Tizi Ouzou, Batna, Bejaia, and Sidi Bel-Abbès. Thus a
reasonably stable national theatrical culture was able to develop. Algerian
theatre enjoyed its first major flourishing, as a new generation of actors,
directors, and playwrights responded to these much improved conditions
and created a significant post-independence Algerian theatre. The new
decade was launched with an unprecedented series of important works by
the five dramatists who would dominate this new period and bring the
Algerian theatre to international attention: the already established Kaki
with Beni Kelbounee (1972) and Benguettaf with Bab el Futouh (1973) and three
newcomers who would surpass them both in popularity: Kateb Yacine, with
Mohammed prends ta valise (1971), Abdelkader Alloula with Homk Salim
(1972), and Slimane Benaïssa with Boualem zid el-gouddam (1975).
Central to the work of each was a major post-colonial concern – a search
for a way to combine productively the hitherto dominant European tradition
with indigenous approaches and forms. Algerian theatre historian Amed
Cheniki suggests that each of these leading dramatists approached this con-
cern in a different manner:

Kateb Yacine recreated and reinvested the legendary character of Djeha

with new meanings. Abdelkader Alloula transformed the structure of the
gouwâl (storyteller) and of the halqa (circle). Slimane Benaïssa undertook a
plunge into everyday language, while Ould Abderrahmane Kaki explored
the poetic horizons of Maghreb popular culture.1
150
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 151

Significantly, none of these new leading dramatists were developed or

indeed much encouraged by the Algerian National Theatre, which on the
whole continued a colonialist orientation toward adaptations and transla-
tions, especially from European authors. More than half of the productions
offered there between 1963 and 1985 were, in fact, adaptations, primarily
of European works.
Yacine’s first play written for the National Theatre, Mohammed, prends ta
valise (Mohammed, Take Up Your Suitcase, 1971; see Figure 9), a satiric con-
sideration of the problems of emigration and diaspora, was not successful,
even though Yacine for the first time attempted to connect to his audience
by writing in a mixture of French, Algerian Arabic, and Berber, as they were freely
combined both in Algiers and in the emigrant communities. Yacine was in fact
the first dramatist to reflect the three languages and cultures of Algeria in his
theatre, since he was born in Constantine, to a family of Berber descent, but
at home in both French and Arabic culture. Yacine defended his departure
from traditional theatre language by arguing that: “There is a dead Arabic
and a living Arabic. Living Arabic is popular Arabic, since the major creator
of this language … is the entire people, who alone know how to give lan-
guage its flavor.” He went on to compare classical Arabic with Latin in the
late Middle Ages and popular Arabic with the then emerging new languages
like French.2 Although production at the National Theatre gave Yacine some
protection from censorship, his criticism of official policy on emigration
and the exploitation of Algerian workers in France outraged conservative
critics and offended the somewhat conservative supporters of the National
Theatre.
Fortunately the Cultural Commissioner at the Ministry of Labor, Ali
Zamoum, a hero of the revolution with a keen interest in the arts, strongly
supported Yacine, and after the indifferent reception of Mohammed, prends ta
valise at the National Theatre encouraged Yacine to take his work to a more
sympathetic producer, Kadour Naimi, the director of the experimental com-
pany Théâtre de la Mer. Naimi’s company was far more compatible with the
goals and ideals of Yacine. Inspired by the work of the Living Theatre, which
he had encountered in France, Naimi had returned to Algeria convinced
that a truly experimental and politically engaged theatre could only exist
outside the normal system of state-subsidized theatre on the European
pattern. To pursue this ideal, he founded the Théâtre de la Mer in September
of 1968. The venture in almost all aspects reflected the international leftist
experimental theatre of that revolutionary year. Its manifesto called for a
“popular theatre, directed toward Algerian realities,” created for “those citi-
zens who do not know or do not like the state theatre companies, factory
and farm workers, students, and intellectuals interested in non-conventional
theatre.” Its favored places of performance were to be “factories, farms, open
courtyards, and schools” where they would utilize the traditional non-
proscenium arrangement of the halqa, with audiences surrounding the
152 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

action (for their single production at the National Theatre, in 1971, director
Kateb allowed them to place the audience in a circle on the stage, leaving
the auditorium an empty, dark space). The group looked to four inspirations
for its productions: traditional Algerian popular performance; Western tradi-
tion, Greek and medieval production plus the Living Theatre; the theatres of
Vietnam, China, and Bali from Asia; and “Griot” performance from Africa.
Among the established figures in the Algerian theatre, the group looked
favorably only on Kaki, whose interest in traditional Algerian popular forms
and European experimental political drama was close to their own.3
When Zamoum introduced Yacine to the group they had already produced
four collective creations, on the whole quite compatible with Y Yacine’s con-
cerns: Mon corps, la voix et sa penséee (My Body, Voice, and Thought, 1969), a
“history of humanity from its origins to the advent of religion”; La Valeur
de l’accord
d (The Value of Agreement, 1969), concerning “technology as an
instrument of repression”; Forma-Révolution (1970), dealing with the conditions
of factory workers; and La Formi et l’Elephantt (The Ant and the Elephant,
1971), a comic allegory about the Vietnam War. His Mohammed d in 1972,

Figure 9 Kateb Yacine, Mohammed, prends ta valise (photo courtesy of Rajae Alloula)
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 153

directed by Naimi, was thus their fifth production and the first by a single
author. Nevertheless, Yacine’s willingness to allow his works to remain
open-ended, incorporating new material according to changing situations,
repeating passages from earlier plays, and even responding within the work
to critical attacks on it, quite suited the company’s flexible attitude toward
dramatic texts. In an interview in 1979 Yacine insisted that when a script was
written down, creativity ended, and that Mohammed d and similar works nec-
essarily remained only “rough texts, because the situation is changing and
evolving.” Political theatre, he insisted, “implies this ceaseless change.”4
Although in many respects the aims of Yacine and Naimi were very similar,
there were also important differences. While both were strongly devoted to
using theatre to awaken national, political, and civic consciousness, Naimi
remained much more the anarchist in the Living Theatre tradition, pas-
sionately devoted to amateur theatre and convinced that any operation
organized from above would eventually find its revolutionary purity cor-
rupted. He and some other members of the Théâtre de la Mer viewed
Yacine’s close ties to the Ministry and his openness to the Ministry’s plans
to sponsor company tours to encourage contact with Algerian workers at
home and abroad with great suspicion. When Yacine, in Naimi’s opinion,
softened the anti-government tone of Mohammed d before taking it on tour,
this caused a permanent break between the two, with Naimi charging Yacine
with attempting his “brutal elimination” from the group.5 With the strong
political and financial support of Zamoum, the backing of most of Naimi’s
actors, and in collaboration with his strong supporter Benaïssa, Yacine then
established a new organization, the Action culturelle des travailleurs (The
Worker’s Cultural Action, ACT), located in Bab El Oued, a strongly working-
class quarter of Algiers, which was generally considered a larger and more
ambitious development of Naimi’s group but which actually essentially
supplanted it. The Théâtre de la Mer presented only one production after
Mohammed, an inspirational work directed toward Algerian youth, Et à
l’aurore où est l’espoirr (Toward the Dawn, Where Hope Lies) in 1973, and then
disappeared, some of its members bitterly complaining that Yacine had sold
out their vision to the establishment.
In fact, ACT in many respects fulfilled the social and political dreams of
the Théâtre de la Mer. Yacine dedicated himself to building a populist audi-
ence, which became larger than any other in North Africa, or for that matter
in the third world,6 and the company expanded its influence by enormously
successful tours of Mohammed, prends ta valise, first through Algeria, then to
France, then elsewhere in Europe. During their five-month tour in France
they performed primarily for Algerian immigrants in the Renault and other
factories, attracting a total audience of more than 70,000. Back in Algeria,
the company continued to tour for the next five years, attracting some-
times as many as 10,000 people to each performance.7 Often the company
performed out of doors, utilizing the traditional circular performance space
154 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

of North Africa, the halqa, on the importance of which Yacine carried over
from the focus of Naimi. The repertoire was devoted to engaged theatre in
the popular tongue, headed by the trilingual Mohammed, and Yacine also
continued the Théâtre de la Mer interest in collective creation, through
which process in 1974 his company created La Guerre de 2000 ans (The
2000 Year War), a kind of political review written in celebrations of Algerian
independence.
One of the most important and distinctive aspects of Yacine’s theatre was
its clear indebtedness to the Berber language, not only to reflect the actual
linguistic situation in Algeria, where a mixture of French, Arabic, and Berber
was spoken, but also to help avoid what Yacine called the two traditional
“ghettos” of Algerian literature, Arabic-Muslim and French.8 A recent artistic
and political biography of Yacine has suggested that he “often appears to
be going back in time, moving from French to Algerian Arabic, to Berber,
as if stripping away layer after layer of oppressive culture.”9 One might also
describe this as a personal voyage of discovery, beginning with French, in
which the young Yacine discovered his literary calling, moving on to his
native Arabic, and then to the Berber of his ancestors. In any case, Yacine’s
incorporation of Berber elements into his work in the early 1970s led to
translations of his work into Berber and a gradual recognition by the Berber
community of Yacine as their first dramatist.
Each wave of occupiers of the Maghreb, from the Phoenicians onward,
have in some measure sought to marginalize or suppress the native Berber
people, and the history of the Maghreb has been dotted with uprisings and
resistance from them. During the twentieth century the struggle of the
Berber tribes against the French colonial regime reached an early peak in
1912, when widespread uprisings followed the announcement of the treaty
making Morocco a French protectorate. Even more widespread was the
emergence of a strong movement immediately after World War II demanding
linguistic and cultural independence for the Berber peoples. It was at this
time that the leaders of this movement began to demand to be no longer
known as “Berbers,” a name derived from the Roman and Arabic conquerors,
but as “Amazigh,” their own word for themselves, originally meaning “free
man.” It is this term that will be used henceforth in this narrative to refer to
these people, although it was not adopted by the Algerian authorities until
much later in the century. In the 1940s the leaders of the growing Algerian
independence movement denounced this movement as divisive and aided
the French authorities in suppressing it. After independence they continued
this suppression, still in the name of national unity.
The desire for such independence continued, however, especially in the
schools in predominately Amazigh areas and in rural communities where the
central authority, always interested in working toward a more monolithic
society, was weak. Yacine, the first major Algerian literary figure to give
serious attention to the Amazigh language and culture, was seen as a highly
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 155

significant representative for the Amazigh cause. As early as 1972 a Kateb

Yacine theatre was founded in the city of Tizi-Ouzou, a center of Amazigh
culture. Despite difficult times, the theatre still operates today and remains
dedicated to political avant-garde theatre in the Yacine tradition. Of course,
as Yacine began to be recognized by the Amazigh community as their repre-
sentative, this led to difficulties with the authorities, who frowned on such
expressions of cultural variety.
Mohammed, prends ta valise was the focal point of one of the first serious
expressions of this tension. Students at the Lycée Amirouche in Tizi-Ouzou
had already attempted to present plays in Kabyle, the local Amazigh language,
but were prevented by school authorities. Several of them, going on to
the University of Algiers, formed a performance group there, the Cercle
des etudiants de Ben-Aknoun, devoted to the same project, and managed to
mount an Amazigh version of Yacine’s Mohammed. It proved so popular
that they planned to enter it in some of the official theatre festivals. They
were forbidden by the school authorities to do so until they mounted a
version of the play in Arabic, which was approved for the Carthage Festival
in 1973. At the festival, however, they unexpectedly presented their Kabyle
version, Ddem abaliz-ik a Muh. Although the Festival judges considered
the production worthy of a first prize, the Minister of Culture intervened
and insisted on the prize being given instead to a visiting company from
Palestine. Privately, he congratulated the Cercle company on their work,
but forbade them from any further performances, on the grounds that they
had betrayed his confidence. Nevertheless, the play and the performance
entered the history of modern Amazigh culture, and the following year
the play became one of the first published in that language, in the recently
established organ of the movement, the Bulletin d’Etudes Amazighs. Yacine
also created a short dramatic text at this time, Kahena, dealing with the
Amazigh queen of that name and her struggle to preserve her homelands
from the Arab invaders. Most of Yacine’s works are fluid and flexible, and
Kahena was designed to be inserted into any performance when a need was
felt to stress Amazigh history. Such expressions of Amazigh separatism were
viewed with suspicion by the authorities in Algeria, and in Tunisia such
performances had to be almost secret.
As Yacine and his group continued to travel nationally and internation-
ally, they continued to produce new Yacine works, primarily directed by
Benaïssa, which experimented with such avant-garde concerns as uncon-
ventional performance spaces, open dramatic structure, and choric delivery,
but which were also deeply concerned with the key political issues of the
day, such as the position of women in Algeria in La Voix des femmes (The
Voice of Women, 1972), Le Roi de l’ouestt (The King of the West, 1975), which
bore the provocative subtitle “Against Hassan II” (the reigning imperialistic
King of Morocco), and La Palestine trahie (Palestine Betrayed, 1976). The
latter, with its apparent message of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, was
156 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

presented at the National Theatre in 1977, the sponsors apparently unaware

of its more basic message of condemnation of the Arab states for their lack of
unity on this matter. The outspoken political messages of this work offended
some in the government, however, which was not a problem so long as
Yacine’s supporter, Ali Zamoum, remained in power at the Ministry of Labor.
In 1976, however, a new minister was appointed and almost at once the
theatre’s subvention was withdrawn. Yacine reports how crucial Zamoum’s
departure was for his work:

Our second phase started with the change of Minister. The creation and
existence of the company were dependent on the director of professional
training at the Ministry of Labor. We were given wholehearted support.
With the appointment of a new Minister, everything fell apart. Often these
things are the work of just one man. The next day we were thrown out.10

For almost two years, Algeria’s best known dramatist and theatre company
managed somehow to survive without work or support, until at last the
government relocated them in a former stronghold of the French Foreign
Legion, Sidi bel Abbès, some 50 kilometers from Algiers. The French had
built a colonial theatre there in 1935, which had enjoyed a modest success
as a municipal theatre under Saim Lakhdar, a follower of Bachtarzi, in the
years following World War II. For many years, however, the theatre had
stood empty, and a generation had passed without ever seeing it in use.
Yacine himself asserted that the authorities, in sending him and his com-
pany from Algiers to this cultural backwater, hoped that this would be the
end of his enterprise.11 In fact, however, matters turned out very differently.
Sidi bel Abbès was home to a dedicated group of socialists, with strong links
to the international Communist movement during the occupation, and the
political orientation of Yacine was perfectly in line with their own vision.
His company thrived, soon began touring again, and within a few years was
recognized as a major regional center of political and cultural activity, with
national influence. Yacine’s achievements at Sidi bel Abbès, more than any
other single factor, changed the Algerian theatre from being a rather artificial
upper-class entertainment to becoming a significant part of Algerian com-
munity life. What came to be known as the “Katabian theatre,” profoundly
changed the national attitude toward this cultural form.
In Sidi Bel Abbès, far from the central cultural scene of Algiers, Yacine in
fact had a freedom in his operations and repertoire that he had not previ-
ously enjoyed. In addition to developing his own company and his own
work, he could also present authors, like Mohammed Bakhti, whose work he
liked, but who had not gained acceptance in the rather closed world of state
theatres. Bahkti had tried in vain for years to gain a hearing in Algiers, or
even in Oran, but Yacine presented, and directed as his third offering (after
his own Palestine Trahie and Roi de l’Ouest)
t Bahkti’s Anti oua Ana (You and I)
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 157

in 1980. This was followed by Ya Ben Ammi Ouine (Oh, Cousin, Where Are
We Going?) in 1984 and Djelssa Merfoua (Getting-Up Session), directed by
the author, in 1985. All dealt with the sort of contemporary social concerns
favored by Yacine himself.
During an interview in 1986, Yacine was asked to comment on the general
situation of theatre in Algeria at that time. “One cannot say that it is doing
badly,” he responded, “to the extent that it exists. There is a living theatre. But
in fact it is not doing well because it lacks a necessary conceptual foundation.
There is no real political culture for theatre in Algeria.” He did note, however,
that the previous year (1985) had seen the creation of the first national
festival of professional theatre in Algiers and that a second was scheduled for
1986. “This is already something, and will permit regional theatres to meet
together since all the companies will be in Algiers at the same time.”12
The second such festival was indeed held in 1986, in Oran, not in
Algiers, but did bring together companies from all of Algiers, with 14 pro-
ductions in all. The same year saw the establishment of the first official
theatre company for children in Algeria, the Théâtre pour enfants, directed
by Azzaddine Abbar at the Regional Theatre of Sidi Bel Abbès. The year
1987 inspired many celebrations of the first quarter-century of Algerian
independence and gave special luster to the third National Festival which
featured a number of works with a strong political orientation, such as
Tahar Wattar’s a-shuhadaa Ya’oudouna Hatha al-usboue (The Martyrs are
Returning this Week) and a stage adaptation of the subversive novel by
Rachid Boudjedra, Al-Halazoun al-A’need d (The Stubborn Snail). This dramatic
monologue continued to be a standard performance piece into the new
century. The National Festival itself, however, fell victim to the growing
political unrest of subsequent years, and was not revived as an ongoing
project until 2006.
While Yacine and his company were working their way through these
difficult
f transitional years, important developments were also taking place in
the Amazigh theatre, to which the experiments of Yacine and the presenta-
tion of his play in the Amazigh language at the prestigious Carthage Festival
had given unprecedented encouragement. Despite Yacine’s prominence,
the key figure in this movement during the 1970s was Mohya Abdeall
(1950–2004). Mohya studied Amazigh culture at the University of Algiers
and began writing poetry there. He went to Paris in 1972 where he began
translating modern European plays into Kabyle, Sartre’s The Victors and The
Respectful Prostitute and Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule, along with a
major preface arguing for the importance of developing a dramatic reper-
toire in Kabyle. Moreover, he assembled a group of fellow Kabyle speakers at
Vincennes to form the Groupe d’études berberes (GEB) to present plays in
that language. Their first production was the Kabyle Mohammed. During the
mid-1970s they appeared at the Bouffes du Nord and on other French stages,
performing Mohya’s translations of Sartre and Brecht.
158 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

In Algeria, however, the situation for Amazigh theatre was much less
encouraging. Tizi-Ouzou remained the center of Kabyle cultural expression, and
the inauguration of a state university there in 1977 by President Boumedienne
encouraged many to hope that this would provide a major new encouragement
for such activity. A student dramatic company was formed which presented two
Yacine plays in Kabyle, but the death of Boumedienne in 1978 was followed
by a period of renewed repression of Amazigh culture, and further perform-
ances were forbidden. Measures like these, which were repeated throughout
the Amazigh areas, led in 1980 to a wave of general strikes, called “the Berber
spring.” These protests inspired others, equally dissatisfied with the current
social conditions in Algeria. In 1981, women’s groups successfully demon-
strated against new restrictive legislation, and continuing protests for reform
reached a crisis point in October of 1988, when thousands of people demon-
strated in Algiers and were fired upon by the army. The regime fell, and a new
constitution allowing a multi-party system was adopted.
Although most of the ACT company followed Yacine to Sidi bel Abbès,
Benaïssa remained in Algiers, established a new independent company,
and resumed the writing and staging of his own plays for this group.
These included Youm el Jem’a (Friday), El mahgourr (The Scorned), and his
most popular work, Al-Babour Ghraq (The Ship Sinks), in 1982. The title
itself betrays the political orientation of the play and one phrase from
the work has been widely quoted “Either you pursue politics or politics will
pursue you.” It was given several hundred times in Algeria before it was
banned in 1985, by which time it had already established an international
reputation, with several hundred performances in France and Belgium.
Benaïssa was in excellent company, however. Another play banned at almost
the same time was Sophocles’ Antigone, and in both cases the reason the
authorities gave for the ban was the same: the play “dealt with the question
of power.”13
During the momentous events culminating in the change of regime in the
late 1980s, Yacine was working on his final play, the only one of his later
works written in French. This was Le Bourgeois sans culotte, commissioned to
celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Despite its language, it
was very much in the Yacine tradition, a free-flowing meditation on revolu-
tion and oppression which moved from the court of Louis XVI to contem-
porary Indochina, to colonial Algeria, and to the speeches of Robespierre
on slavery in Martinique. It was staged at the Avignon Festival in 1988 and
revived in Paris the following year, shortly before Yacine’s death. The Algeria
he knew died with him. The reforms of 1988 were short-lived; 1990 issued
in a period of violence, much of it directed against artists and intellectuals.
Benaïssa continued to create new works at his theatre, but in an increasingly
unstable and dangerous country. The assassination of the moderate presi-
dent Mohammed Boudiaf early in 1992, followed by a terrorist bomb attack
on the Algiers airport and continuing attacks on an embattled police force
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 159

caused many academics, professional people, and artists to flee, primarily

to Paris. Among them was Benaïssa, in 1993, who has since that time pur-
sued his theatrical career abroad. This left, of the great trio of new Algerian
dramatists who emerged in the early 1970s, only Alloula, who fell from an
assassin’s bullet less than a year later.
Alloula, like Yacine, did not establish his reputation at the National
Theatre, but at the more hospitable Regional Theatre of Oran, which he
directed from 1972 until 1975. Here he gained his first major success, in
1972 directing his own El Khobza (Bread or Subsistence). In this work, a
public writer, touched by the agony of his clients, closes his shop and writes
a book, Khobza, on their suffering. This was followed the same year by Homk
Salim (The Madness of Salim), adapted from Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, a
satire on bureaucracy and power, and El Meida (The Table), two works that
mark a significant new direction in Alloula’s work.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s many leading experimental com-
panies with strong political concerns in Europe and America, such as that
of Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris, turned from the traditional autocratic
director’s theatre to develop collective creations, written and performed
by the group. This form of creation also enjoyed a great vogue in Algeria
during the 1970s and 1980s, especially in the regional branches of the
National Theatre and in the work of smaller experimental companies. The
regional theatre of Constantine, under the director of Jadj Smain from
1978 to 1994, was especially dedicated to collective work. Smain brought
into this theatre a local amateur group, the Groupe d’action culturelle,
headed by Ahcène Boubrioua, who was committed to exploring such work,
and during the 1980s their experiments dominated the repertoire there.
Boubrioua led the group in such collectives as Rih Essamarr (The Wind of
the Attorneys, 1980), Nass El Houma (People of the Neighborhood, 1981),
Errafdd (The Refusal, 1982) and Lahal Idoum (Time Past, 1983).
In like manner Alloula worked with the Oran theatre collectively to create
Homk Salim and El Meida. These were by no means simply Algerian imita-
tions of European experiments, however. Although Alloula shared the social
consciousness of a number of his distinguished European contemporaries,
his focus remained on Algerian concerns, and his approach owed at least
as much to Algerian as to European influences, a sophisticated blending of
elements from these very different traditions.
When European-style theatre was developed in the European-dominated
Arab world in the late nineteenth century, there was a conscious effort,
often on the part of both the colonizers and the colonized, to ignore or
suppress indigenous performance forms, which were considered at best
crude and primitive, and at worst subversive. In Algeria public storytelling, a
popular form that dates back, here as elsewhere, at least to the Arab Islamic
conquest, was viewed with such suspicion by the French that both stories
and storytellers were heavily censored.
160 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Although European-style theatre today remains an important part of the

drama of the Arab world, many of the leading Arabic dramatists, among
them Yacine and Alloula, began, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, to
seek inspiration from the hitherto scorned or neglected popular forms, often
mixing them with certain European experimental techniques to create new
blends that reflected the new political and aesthetic needs of their societies.
Alloula, like Tayeb Saddiki in Morocco and many others, found particular
inspiration in the tradition of public storytelling and the traditions of the
halqa and the narrating gouwâl, a central figure in almost every play Alloula
created from 1972 onwards.
In a 1982 interview, Alloula spoke of the discovery of the dramatic potential
of the traditional storyteller:

Traditionally, this is a single, solitary person who tells a story making use
of mimicry, gestures, and intonation. This allows us to reconnect with
a type of theatrical activity interrupted by colonization. From now on,
we can think of a type of theatre that our people need, and this is a very
important thing.14

Homk Salim was created as a one-person narrative, following the gouwâl

tradition, a device hitherto never used on the European-oriented Algerian
stage. The author/director himself performed the piece. Alloula also per-
formed the storyteller role in the collectively created El Meida, this time with
a supporting company utilizing a space consciously based on the traditional
halqa. Alloula himself explained:

Our work departed from theoretical reflection to be tested on the ground.

The spectators welcomed us on the stage. We performed in the open air;
we made our changes in public. The spectators were seated around the
actors, which recalled a halqa. This reality forced us to gradually suppress
the elements of stage decoration.15

Alloula often stressed the importance of the halqa in the conception of

his later work and in the process of anchoring that work within Algerian
culture. In a 1985 interview conducted at the Oran theatre by journalist
Abdelmadjid Kaouah, Alloula elaborated on this influence:

In effect, I use the halqa as a foundation, considering the functions of

the halqa to be those of a theatre totality. To the degree that this is a
theatre complete unto itself. It is an activity which has its performers,
interpreters, its proper means of expression, its public, its economic con-
ditions, its territory, and it takes place without any intervention from the
state, without subsidy, living by itself, developing according to its own
patterns and possibilities. What do I do then? I proceed by analyzing
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 161

the characteristics of this theatrical activity and moreover to assimilate

them into my work. This is not at all an undertaking in the mode of an
anthropologist. The fundamental concern for me is that this theatre (the
halqa) functions extremely well for its public, for its culture, and there
are quite specific characteristics which constitute this theatre. Thus for
me the fundamental challenge is to discover these characteristics, to
understand these performances, and to elevate these performances to an
aesthetic level. That, in sum, is my mission. The more I reflect on this,
the more I observe the “storyteller” in the halqa, and the more, in this
way, I rediscover the art of the theatre. It may be that these expressions
are less rich, but still the theatre is there. And unfortunately we have
been practicing a type of theatre which, in my opinion, is inadequate,
for presenting the characteristics of our popular culture and of the way
we live out our culture. My goal is to make my contribution to the crea-
tion of an Algerian theatre which can display its own characteristics and
in turn provide new elements for the universal theatre. We presently
practice a theatre which is not ours, or which is not yet ours. It is not a
question of becoming narrow, it is a question of putting forward and of
developing theatrical forms which draw upon elevated tonalities and yet
at the same time are tied to our lived experience, to our culture.16

The subject of the play has strong echoes of the first work directed by
Alloula, Rouiched’s El Goula, dealing with farm reform, although Alloula’s
piece is firmly anchored in the community his actors knew, a small farming
village in Western Algeria.
In 1975 Alloula left the Oran theatre to return to the National Theatre
in Algiers, this time as its director. Although his directorship lasted only
11 months, it was a period of significant achievement for him and for that
institution. As director, he cleared up 90 percent of the theatre’s accumu-
lated debts, achieved a new level of cultural activity by establishing confer-
ences and addresses, invited young companies to perform, reached out to
universities, artists, and journalists, and established a library at the theatre.
On a personal level, Alloula premièred his next work during this year at the
National Theatre, Hammam Rebbi (The Baths of Bon-Dieu), which continued
to explore problems of the agrarian reforms of the new Algerian govern-
ment, but here in a more darkly comic vein, following the strategies of the
wily peasant Mokhtar to evade the problems of bureaucracy. His political
agenda seemed too disturbing for the authorities, however, and he was
removed for leading the institution in “a direction unsuitable to the goals
of the institution.”17
Alloula returned to direct the theatre in Oran, where he remained until his
death and where he created his most ambitious works. In 1980 Al-Agouwâl
(The Sayings) appeared (see Figures 10 and 11), the first of the three plays
that, as a loosely related trilogy, have become the best-known of Alloula’s
162 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Figure 10 Abdelkader Alloula, Al-Agouwâl, 1985, Performers: Alloula and Haïmour

(photo courtesy of Rajae Alloula)

works, called the “generous” trilogy after the second work in the series
El-Ajwad d (The Generous Ones). As its title suggests (neither the French
translation, Les Dires, nor the English makes this clear), Al-Agouwâl is based
on the sorts of stories offered by the traditional gouwâl. The action is made
up of a series of such stories, illustrating the life and the struggles of the
“little people” of contemporary Algeria, told in the traditional manner by
narrator figures. There was no attempt in this play to create an overarching
action. Each story was complete in itself, seeking to reflect the traditional
material presented by storytellers in village squares, and the emphasis was
on the act of storytelling itself. The trilogy was continued with El-Ajwad
(The Good People or the Generous Ones) in 1984 and completed by El-
Litham (The Veil) in 1989. In these works Alloula’s humor, innovation, and
humanity reach their fullest expression. The French critic H. M. Kahina, in
a 2004 tribute to Alloula published in La Nouvelle Republique, wittily tied
together these three titles in stating their common project. In these plays,
he said, “‘The sayings’ of the gouwâls are presented in halqas to audiences
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 163

Figure 11 Abdelkader Alloula, Al-Agouwâl, 1985, Performers: Alloula, Haïmour and

Belkaid (photo courtesy of Rajae Alloula)

composed of ‘The Generous or Good’ people, who are both the subjects of
their stories and their public. These stories are designed to remove ‘The Veil’
of silence that covers centuries of oppression of these people by colonizers
and others.”18
El-Ajwad, the central work of the trilogy, provides an excellent illustra-
tion of Alloula’s dramaturgical approach. It is composed of three stories,
separated by songs. These elements have no narrative coherence, although
each of the stories is introduced by a storyteller who could be (and was in
the original production) the same actor. The stories and songs all share a
common concern, however, somewhat in the manner of Brecht’s Private
Life of the Master Race, although their method of presentation is much less
realistic. Each song or story deals with a member of the “Good People,” the
oppressed underclass. The first song deals with a particularly Brechtian char-
acter, the raffish street-sweeper Allal Elzabaal, who dares to speak openly
of governmental corruption and warns “Beware, when workers organize,
bosses go hungry as well.” The first story tells of a worker in a municipal
164 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

factory, Elrabouri the Blacksmith, who surreptitiously feeds animals in the

public zoo whose supplies have been appropriated by corrupt officials. The
second song tells of a worker, Qadour, who dreams of a weekend of relaxa-
tion with his family, only to find his financial and personal woes increasing
each week. The second story concerns a school janitor, Aqui, who, possess-
ing almost nothing, leaves his skeleton behind with his friend Mnequar,
the school cook, with instructions to give it to the impoverished school so
that its science students can have something to study. The third song tells
of a retiring worker, Elmansour, who bids an affectionate farewell to the
machine that has been his companion and sometime enemy for so many
years. The third story is that of Jeloul Lefhaimi (Jeloul the intelligent), a
hospital worker who is “a great believer in social justice” but who, as the
storyteller’s refrain keeps repeating, “has a weakness.” He is “impatient, he
gets excited; when he’s angry he spoils everything.” A number of instances
of these closely related positive and negative qualities are given, involving
the arousal of Jeloul’s anger by a variety of religious and political incursions
into the rights of individuals. Of all of these “generous people,” the most
fully developed is Jeloul, whose combination of anger and social conscience
clearly appealed to his creator.
The final play of the trilogy, El-Lithem, opens with an evocation of Jeloul,
“the worker, my brother,” presumably the same worker whose story was the
last in El-Ajwad. The opening song in El-Lithem, like those in the previous
play, involves characters that are not dealt with in the rest of the play, but
are clearly part of the same world and concerned with the same issues. If this
is the same Jeloul, however, he has progressed beyond his anger and frustra-
tion by making common cause with his brother workers:

In the cradle of their movement he finds confidence.

He views society with a fresh eye and sees how it is organized:
One class in frustration and pain, selling its strength,
And another, living at its expense, in ease and comfort.

The main body of the play is presented in a mixture of narrated text and brief
scenes, but unlike El-Ajwad, it tells a single story, that of Berhoum the Timid,
fishmonger, house painter, mason, and ironworker. Skillful in mechanics, he
is asked by a worker’s delegation to repair a broken boiler in a local factory, but
forbidden by the administration to go near it because he does not have the
proper license for such work. Sneaking in in the dead of night, he succeeds
in repairing the boiler but is surprised by the security police. A fall from the
boiler and the beating of the police put him in the hospital. Eventually his
wounds heal, but he has lost his nose and is forced to wear a veil to cover
his disgrace. He leaves the factory and attempts to avoid politics, but the
police continue to treat him with suspicion, finally leading him, like Jeloul,
to righteous anger and radicalism. In prison he lectures on Ho Chi Minh and
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 165

once released he shuns society and joins a group of outcasts and dissidents
who inhabit the Christian cemetery. As the play ends, the police sur-
round the cemetery and demand the surrender of Berhoum and his fellow
renegades for defying national and international order.
Alloula himself viewed these works as a trilogy and moreover as an evolving
experiment in what he called the modern halqa theatre, a non-Aristotelian
form rooted in Algerian culture. In his last interview, given to a reporter from
El Watan just a month before his death, he explained how each play of the
trilogy carried on a different step of his dramatic experimentation:

Clearly it was impossible to experiment with everything at once, so each

play was concerned with achieving its own goals. In Al-gouwâl this was
above all to discover the impact of speech. Of totally pure speech, without
elaboration, dense and autonomous. In Al-Ajwad d the experimentation
focused upon the dramatic construction of a play. There, we presented
a series of theatricalized scenes and songs. The stories had no evident
or immediate relationship but were tied together by deeper bonds. This
is a bit like the situation in the halqa when the storyteller recounting
the Saga of Banou Hilal [the story of the wanderings of a ninth-century
Arab tribe, the inspiration of many poems and tales] introduces poems
about it or the work of contemporary poets because these can be placed
in dialectical relationship by the public. In the mind of the Algerian,
such parentheses are quite admissible. It is an accepted mode of putting
things together. And we have worked precisely on this mode of showing
agency, different from the Aristotelian mode, or the academic one. This
no longer has anything to do with the European theatre. For El-Litham,
the major element is character, and here we concentrated on the central
character. In the Aristotelian mode, there is a psychological construction
of character and this in a way is felt to be the basic material of theatrical
representation. It is through this device that the performance captures
the spectator and implicates him in a kind of identification, often at the
gut level, because psychological construction is the spinal chord of repre-
sentation in the Aristotelian mode. We want to break this pattern and
no longer relate everything to himself and thus send him unchecked out
into society. At any given moment he is naturally several characters, and
the spectator understands this perfectly.19

Despite the increasing threat to artists and intellectuals in Algeria after

1990, Alloula continued to pursue a highly public career, even though his
prominence in theatre, seen by many as an irreligious and decadent
European diversion, made him a particular target. His final production
amounted almost to a defiance of this antagonism, a colorful and spirited
rendition of a European classic, Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, presented
in 1993 at the National Theatre. He had just begun work on an adaptation
166 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

of Molière’s Tartuffe when, on March 10, 1994, he was assassinated in front

of the theatre in Oran by a religious fundamentalist.
Alloula’s search for a new dramatic form drawing not only upon Western
sources, but upon such local performance traditions as the storyteller or
the halqa reflect a central post-colonial tension and has parallels through-
out Maghreb theatre. The most complete theoretical articulation of this
concern may be found in the writings of Abdelkrim Berrchid, generally
recognized as the most prominent contemporary theatre theorist in
Morocco and the Maghreb. Somewhat surprisingly given that Berrchid
had a strong interest in Shakespeare, his theoretical writings have been
primarily devoted to finding an appropriate theatrical form that would
reflect Moroccan/Arab cultural identity better than the implanted Western
model. This concern was most fully articulated in his 1977 foundational
manifesto Al-Masrah Al-Ihtifali (Ceremonial Theatre). Hassan Mniai reports
that Al-Ihtifalia occupies a significant space within the Moroccan post-
colonial theatrical map: “There is no doubt that Al-Ihtifalia was the first
theory in Morocco that attempted to satisfy the need for ‘authenticating’
theatrical phenomena. Through its manifestos and writings, Al-Ihtifalia
announced a new departure by asking questions related to Moroccan theatre’s
problematics and subordination to the West.”20 Al-Ihtifalia, then, is the
first Moroccan attempt to come to terms with the post-colonial condition
within the field of theory. Whether it was a premature intervention or not
remains an open question.
The ideological import of Ceremonial theatre, as Berrchid points out in
hududu Al-kaini wal-mumkini fi al-masrah al-Ihtifali (The Limits of the Given
and the Possible in Ceremonial Theatre), is to change social relationships
and liberate the individual from a state of reification through addressing all
his human potentialities (intellectual, physical, emotional, imaginative).21
The achievement of such liberating stimulus is effected through a transfor-
mation of the theatrical apparatuses including playscript, actor, director,
scenography, and audience. On this basis, change and social praxis constitute
key concepts in Ceremonial theory. Theatrical festivity, then, is primarily an
aspiration for a better future and an action of persistent change as opposed
to fixity and stillness. This dynamism, according to Ceremonial theory,
should be manifested from start to finish in the theatrical chain. The
dramatic script should be active and alive rather than a closed ensemble or
sub-text that imposes its authority and closure on its materialization upon
the stage. For Berrchid, a dramatic script is only a project that is to be ful-
filled within a theatrical festivity; it is therefore an unfinished product that
needs completion through another writing, stage inscription. In support of
Berrchid’s conception of the dramatic script, Mustapha Ramadani adds that
a dramatic work “exists a priori as a text, and would not exist as a real event
until it is presented on the stage.”22 A dramatic script contains action, yet it is
in the festive performance that this action is released and liberated. Also, it
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 167

is in that release that the ceremonial play finds itself distinct both from its
preliminary inscription on the page and from other narrative fictions that
remain bound to the page.
In the Ceremonial theatrical enterprise the actor also becomes the main axis
of theatrical happening as s/he mediates between the playwright, director,
and audience. The actor should be free, creative, and spontaneous. The festive
actor is not confined to the playwright’s text or the director’s instructions, but
s/he is a creative mediator insofar as s/he is allowed to improvise. There is
always an element of surprise in her/his acting. In this way, s/he is like the
one-wo/man show of the halqa, for her/his acting is constantly refreshed
and refashioned through spontaneity and improvisation. Meanwhile, if the
dramatic script is dynamic and the actor is free, the ceremonial theatrical
performance is informed by the same spirit of dynamism. It is not a pas-
sive representation that the audience sees in performance, but the festive
performance event with all its multiplied participatory energies. Berrchid’s
notion of performance is a collective game wherein stage and auditorium
combine together to constitute a unified platform of collective ceremony,
bringing about a blurring of the long-standing division between stage and
auditorium. Admittedly, many revolutionary theatre-makers around the
world have rejected the fourth wall, with its hypnotic spellbound fields
that separate stage and auditorium. However, the ceremonial revulsion
is mostly motivated by cultural factors besides the esthetic and discur-
sive ones. For most Moroccans, a theatre building in general is a Western
edifice/apparatus that was implanted by the colonial administration in a
number of newly organized cities. Thus, the return to the circular form,
even inside the building, implies more than an esthetic choice: it is also
a manifestation of the post-colonial condition, which is characterized
by liminality. It is in this sense that Ceremonial theatre can be seen as a
third space that emerges out of complex negotiations. Return to al-halqa’s
circular architecture is a paradigmatic example of the ongoing ceremonial
theatrical activity.
In sum, Ceremonial theatre availed itself of past tradition not to embark on
a hazardous yet essentialist quest for purity, but rather to confront the present
predicament of the Moroccan individual. Through projecting the past upon
the present, Ceremonial theatre tends to bridge over the damage that was
inflicted upon Morocco during the colonial era, only to suggest a new vision
of the future. The quest for a lost tradition, therefore, does not always imply
a movement backwards; rather it is a boundless negotiation whereby past,
present, and future are interwoven. Berrchid argues: “It may be said that
Al-Ihtifalia is fundamentally a group in search of a theatre. However, the
reality is different, for Al-Ihtifalia is a people and a nation, a nation in quest
of its culture, identity, and reality.”23
It is in this context that Berrchid’s reworkings of Shakespearian material
must be viewed. Western and Arabic material are clearly mixed in his Otayl
168 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

wal-Khayl wal-ba-rudd (Otayl, Horses, and Gunpowder),24 first performed in 1975–6

(at the same time Berrchid was developing his theories of Ceremonial theatre)
by the amateur theatrical company (At-ta’sis Al-masrahiya’) of Casablanca
and directed by Ibrahim Ouarda. Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona, and
Iago (re)appear in Berrchid’s drama as Otayl, Maymuna, and Iago but the
character of Shahrayar refers us to the Arabian Nights. Al-Bouhou is another
literary reference that reminds the reader of a famous character in l-bsat
performance tradition. In the present festivity, Al-Bouhou remains the
spokesman of the lower classes who is admitted into the palace and granted
license to perform in the lights of topsy-turvidom.25 Sayid Ghamud is
another character from the l-bsatt tradition that reminds the reader of this
indigenous theatrical form.
The literary allusions that permeate the text emphasize the drama’s
awareness of the heterogeneity of mimesis itself as it turns the mirror on
its own medium. Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud d brings together Shakespeare’s
Othello and Iago, on the one hand, and Shahrayar and Haroun Arrachid,
on the other. All these characters are loaded with some kind of mythical
grandeur and historical presence, at least in the imagination of people.
However, Berrchid’s festive methodology demythologizes these characters’
mythos. At the end of the play, they emerge as new human beings, festive
characters who are free and emancipated from previous confines. The
play, then, seeks to deconstruct the mythical proportions attributed to
Shakespeare’s Moor as well as the victimizer of the Arabian Nights, offering
a double demystification. The first demystification concerns Shakespearean
representation of the Moor, and the second one examines local historical/
imaginary figures. This double demystification is also an attempt at relo-
cating the demystified dramatis persona in a new and different con/text;
this new con/text is manifestly the post-colonial hybrid space that is often
referred to by Berrchid as the Festive space. All characters are transplanted
into a Moroccan context and by the end of the play, their ‘Moroccanness’
becomes a dominant feature. Shakespeare, then, is brought to the fore only
to be backgrounded rather than mythologized.
Imruu al-qays fi bariz26 is another Berrchid drama derived from Shakespeare.
Unlike Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud, that offers a way of coming to terms
with Shakespeare’s representation of the Moorish Other, Imruu al-qays fi-Bariz
is a projection of the present state of the Arab world with a particular
reference to the situation of Hamlet, another favorite character for Arab
dramatists. Berrchid describes the link between Hamlet and Imruu al-qays
in the following terms:

I was always fascinated by Imruu Qays not only as a poet but also as a
dramatic persona who has strong affinities with the character of Hamlet,
the Prince of Denmark. Both of them are princes; they both lost their
fathers and kingdoms. Each of them strived to avenge his father and
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 169

restore his proper kingdom. Hamlet’s knowledge of his father’s death –

that he performs on stage – constitutes a moment of transition between
two periods and two characters; and so is the case of Imruu al-qays.27

Obviously, what attracts Berrchid to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the tragic

predicament of bewilderment, hesitation, and procrastination besides
the loss of the father and the kingdom. The play draws attention to the
similarities between the well-known Arab poet and prince and the mythical
Shakespearean character.
Imruu al-qays is transposed to a different time and space in order to suggest
the predicament of the post-colonial Arab subject: “Do not search for Imruu
al-qays beyond the relation between East and West, past and present, the
possible and the impossible. The new Imruu al-qays cannot be but the spirit
of this new age that is the age of homesickness, murders, military coups
d’état, and the migration of intellectuals and laborers in search of bread and
dignity.”28 Hamlet’s tragedy of delay and procrastination are reappropriated
by Berrchid so as to become a collective tragedy rather than an individual
tragedy. Imruu al-qays is a tragedy of a whole nation that is lost between self
and other. It is informed by the new relationship between East and West
within the space of the post-colonial turn. Othello, Imruu al-qays (who is a
shadow of both Hamlet and the real Arab prince), Ibnu Roumi, or Shahriar
become significant iconic figures with historical, cultural, esthetic, and discur-
sive dimensions. The choice of a given character is never a random activity;
“why Ibn Roumi and not another character?” Berrchid declares, “Is this choice
an innocent act? I don’t think so, for Ibnu Roumi is a ceremonial character
who admires life with all its colors, forms, tastes, and beauties.”29 The recasting
of traditional material involves both content and form.
Besides the Ceremonial theatre, other theories have shaped today’s Moroccan
theatre. Masrah a-naqd d (The Theatre of Criticism) is perhaps the most signifi-
cant among these other theories. Generally characterized by the dominance
of improvisation and the actor’s potentialities to create the theatrical event.
The Theatre of Criticism is informed by the principles of double negation
and dialectical materialism. It foregrounds contradictions only to confirm
the various discursive fields that are contested within a given context. As an
example, Mohammed Meskini, the founder of the Theatre of Criticism, in his
play Ashour,r represents the conflict between illusion and reality as a means
of drawing the audience’s attention to the carnivalesque ambiance of “top-
syturvidom” through the use of both the Moroccan masquerade of Sultan
Tulba and the Shi’a ritual drama, the Ta’ziyeh. Through his persistence in
marking the period of confrontation (the now), Meskin insists on presenting
a ceremonial performance with local fields of reference. For him, Moroccan
dramatists are living within a period of search for theatrical identity, and this
task can only be fulfilled through a clear intellectual stand within the given
historical period. According to Meskin, Molière rather than Al-Naqqash wrote
170 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the first Arabic drama, and this fact created a burden on Arab dramatists for
many decades.30 The Molièrization of the Arabic stage is part of the colonial
corporal conquest and its so-called civilizing mission. The task of Moroccan
dramatists today is to rid theatrical practice of that colonial hegemony. In this
context, Meskin proposes a dramatic writing that is based on contradiction
and the foregrounding of the visual and the kinetic. This practice implies an
overall shift in priority from the vocally predominant space of theatrical rep-
resentation to a visual inscription that foregrounds the expressive potential
of body language. Meskini’s theatrical practice is informed by Artaud’s and
Brecht’s views, yet his originality lies in his insistence on separating his work
from the European tradition and on confronting the Moroccan audiences
with their own daily life problems.
The political situation in Morocco during the 1970s was unstable, char-
acterized by tension between king and opposition, on the one hand, and
frequent coups d’état attempts by the military, on the other. This led to a
heavy suppression of political dissidents, as well as firm, yet coercive control
over the ideological state apparatuses, including theatre. A semi-democracy
was established during these “years of lead” (sanawat ar-rassas), but freedom
of expression was always limited by three taboos: no criticism of the sacred
institution of the Crown, the integrity of the nation, and Islam as the official
religion of the kingdom. Theatre played its part in the struggle, utilized by
conflicting parties as a means of empowerment or indoctrination of the
oppressed classes.
The state strove, with only partial success, to control both the emerging
professional and amateur theatres. The dissolution of the Mamoura com-
pany in 1974 marked the end of an era and the beginning of another that
was less monopolistic. Professionals such as Tayeb Sadikki and Ahmed
Tayeb Laalej, who performed many of their plays inside the king’s palace,
established a popular, yet moderate rather than subversive theatrical
tradition that deployed the inherited André Voisin’s theatrical framework,
weaving together old dynamics and new imported ones. However, even
these politically moderate projects were subtly critical of the national
situation. Tamrin al-Akbach (Sheep’s Rehearsals), written by Laalej and
directed by Saddiki, infuriated King Hassan II and was immediately cen-
sured in Morocco in 1969 for its inference that Moroccans are unjustly
treated like cattle by their king. The two artists had to apologize to the king
and seek his forgiveness.
A full-fledged counterculture that was, however, highly sensitive to Pan-
Arabism emerged as a painful process of renewal that grew out of attribution
and contention, a post-colonial struggle affected by sometimes violently
conflicting aspirations for a better future. Yet, the period of crisis that fol-
lowed 1948 (the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict) was the catalystic stage
for the emergence of the seemingly irreconcilable struggle between political
necessity and the creative imagination. Theatre in Morocco, especially the
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 171

amateur theatre movement, has been at the heart of this counterculture.

It strictly defined itself as the theatre that thinks for the emerging Moroccan
nation – and by extension, the Arab world – though some theatre practi-
tioners have capitulated to the regime, accepting the preservation of a
hypocritical facade behind which the wheels of a despotic machine keep
turning, since the amateur theatre movement was very much dependent
on the state to survive. Subsidized by the Ministry of Youth and hosted in
Youth Centers all over the country, this movement was affected by politi-
cally overriding objectives. There were already a hundred such companies
in 1973; 72 of them received grants from the ministry. Selected productions
were performed each year at the national Festival of Amateur Theatre, a real
platform for a theatre movement in the making.
Political satire became a favorite motif in this amateur theatre, a break-
through in both subject matter and style. This subversive tendency pushed
audiences not only to laugh at that which is unhappy (the mirthless laugh
in Samuel Beckett’s terms), but it also prompted them to act. Conflicts
were highlighted in order to force the audiences to make decisions, and
not only to laugh at their miserable conditions. Generally, the moderate
and redemptive tendency is manifested in popular theatre that deploys
situations of conflict in order to simulate contradictions by laughing at
them. This strategy recalls Brecht to mind, whose political theatre was intro-
duced in Morocco during the politically difficult times of the 1970s and
early 1980s. While the European stage was experiencing a certain “Brecht
fatigue,” Brechtian aesthetics became highly influential on the Moroccan stage.
In order to evade various forms of censorship, most influential amateur
theatre practitioners distanced their dramas in the past, or in allegorical
frames. Scripts borrowed from past Islamic traditions provided a politically
symbolic variation on the present situation. The tendency to distance the
drama in theatrical parables is clear from titles such as: Adafadie Al-Kahla
(The Black Turtles) by Mohammed Sharamane, Les Tortus (Turtles) by Nabil
Lahlou, Le Rhinoceros by Driss Tadili, A-Zawiya by Abdelkrim Berrchid,
Assatir Muassira (Contemporary Myths) by Mohammed Kaghat, No Man’s
Land d by Mohammed Kaouti, and Urss Al-Dib (The Wolf’s Wedding) by
Mohammed Timoud. The first conference in Morocco devoted to pro-
fessional theatre was organized in 1973 by Mohammed Mekki Naceri,
Minister of Endowment, Islamic Affairs and Culture of the time. Among
its recommendations was the creation of an institute for theatre practice.
In 1986–7, the High Institute of Dramatic Art (ISADAC) opened its doors
to the first generation of students of theatre. Offshoots of this institute
would influence the theatre scene from 1990 onward. Among this new
generation of artists are Bouhssin Massoud, known for his revival of the
Ahmed Tayeb Laalej repertoire; Bouselham Daif, famous for his fragmented and
daring representations; and Latifa Ahrar, whose obsession with overcoming the
shame of nudity onstage is highly controversial in Morocco.
172 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

After the sudden death of Ali Ben Ayad in 1972, the Municipal Theatre
in Tunis was headed by a series of directors, the popular actors Mohsen
Ben Abdalla and Muncef Souissi during the 1970s and then Béchir Drissi,
primarily remembered for introducing the operetta and the mega-spectacle
to Tunisia with a series of productions beginning with Al Ghoussoun al
Homrr (The Red Branches, 1978), boasting 100 characters on stage, a ballet,
spectacular scenery, and large-screen projections. The newly established
regional theatres, however, generally overshadowed the Municipal Theatre
after 1970. In the early part of the decade the most prominent of these
was El Kef, a real congregation site for a young generation of angry artists.
The company presented many adaptations from the European and Arab
repertoires, as well as new Arabic productions of Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Sadallah
Wannous, and Tunisian plays such as Azzedine Madani’s El Hallaj, Ezzenj,
and Samir Ayadi’s Atchan ya sabaya. In fact, most of Madani’s dramas were
performed by El Kef. Among the many Arab dramatists who have called for
a return to the Arabo-Islamic heritage, Azzedine Madani (b.1938) is unique
in his insistence on a deep understanding of old ways without falling into
the essentialist trap of worshiping the past. Throughout his career, he has
longed for the construction of an Arabic theatre that would benefit from
Western theatre without losing Arabic specificity. His revival of jamaliyaat
al-estitraadd (the aesthetics of digression), an important feature of Arabic
literature, became a trademark of his dramaturgy. Madani’s texts were ideally
adapted for the stage by El Kef and gained great momentum during the
seventies. After 1972, El Kef’s pre-eminence was followed by the regional
company in Gafsa, co-founded that year by Fadel Jaïbi (b.1945),31 a former
member of El Kef, and Mohammed Rajae, who became its first director.
Gafsa became the second theatre pole in Tunisia, and welcomed many
important contemporary theatre figures, such as Rajae Ben Amar, Jalila
Baccar, Mohammed Driss, Fadel Jaziri, and Abdelkader Mokdad, who became
director in 1974 and attracted a large pubic to the theatre. The company’s
most successful production was Ammar Bouzouorr (1979) with 800 perform-
ances. In time, the El Kef and Gafsa regional theatre companies took different
trajectories. The former was considered by the authorities as a militant and
revolutionary enterprise, whereas the latter favored a popular tradition that
sometimes compromised their aesthetic in favor of light entertainment.
Jaïbi served as director of the National Center for Dramatic Art in Tunis from
1974 to 1978. In 1976, along with other leading Tunisian theatre artists – Fadel
Jaziri, Jalila Baccar, Mohammed Driss, and Habib Marouk – Jaïbi established
the “New Theatre” in Tunis. The limitations imposed on regional theatres
working under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture and the Safeguard of
Heritage paved the way for the significant development of both a venture
and a movement, called Al-masrah al-jadid d (“The New Theatre”). In keeping
with the desire to fill the vacuum left by the decline of state-owned theatres,
the new theatre movement represented itself as an alternative that could
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 173

discuss social problems with a higher degree of creative freedom, seeking a

new relationship with the spectator by breaking with the proscenium tradi-
tion. Jaïbi’s ‘New Theatre’ was the first independent professional company
in Tunisia, composed of artists educated in Europe and deeply influenced
by the French and German Independent Theatre movement. The emerging
Independent Theatre in Tunisia has been deeply committed to rewriting
contemporary Tunisian history, filling gaps that prevailing ideology or offi-
cial discourse has edited out.
Jaïbi’s ensemble produced a number of plays, including La Noce (The
Wedding) in 1976, an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Petty Bourgeois Wedding.
The production was seen as a politically subversive reflection of the griev-
ances of an exploited working class. The Motherr was another production
by the ensemble, banned shortly after it was put on stage. The production
attempted to deconstruct the forces of hegemony and manipulation in
Tunisian society through the partnership of a bourgeois young woman
and her chauffeur. The new “game” is exposed and the “new bourgeoisie”
shown explicitly guilty. The chauffeur is fired as a result of the affair he has
with his mistress. The play reveals that the idea of a struggle in which the
rising bourgeoisie in modern Tunisia pretends to cooperate with the down-
trodden is an illusion. Arabs, another collective collaboration, devised by
Fadel Jaïbi and Fadel Jaziri in 1987, dealt with Beirut under siege and the
Palestinian cause through the story of a flight attendant who gets pregnant
by a Tunisian freedom fighter who disappears and takes refuge in a church
in the Tunisian capital. Although the independent theatres continued
to present important work, a lack of permanent funding and the strong
dependency on decision-makers in the capital put the regional theatre
increasingly on the defensive. After the opening fervor, they were literally
deserted by the mid-eighties.
During that decade the center of the TTunisian theatre shifted to the newly
created National Theatre of Tunis.32 It follows the same regulations as other
government-owned public institutions, yet is the only one specializing in
theatre practice. In February 1988 it was provided with a home in an old pal-
ace, Khaznadar Palace in the Halfaouine quarter in the heart of the old city.
Its main objectives are artistic creation, the discovery of new talents, the
valorization of the national heritage, and the development of a universal
repertory. The budget of the National Theatre comes directly from the presi-
dency. It receives almost 40 percent of the total budget for the culture sector.
Hafedh Djedidi describes the belated arrival of TNT as “a child born adult
because of the delay in giving the country an official showcase theatre that
fully engages the Tunisian state to support theatrical production at a high
level.”33 Since its inception in 1983, TNT has made its mark in the Tunisian
theatre community by producing a diverse offering of original plays,
adaptations, and monodramas. The TNT organizes training workshops,
in parallel to the permanent theatre program. It is also home to the only
174 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

school of circus in Africa, called The National Center of Circus Arts and Live
Performances. Its first director was Muncef Souissi from 1983 until 1987, who
brought to TNT with him a number of actors and actresses from El Kef. During
his tenure at TNT, Souissi produced a number of productions, most notably
Azzedine Madani’s popular political satire Ala al-Bahr al-Ouafirr in 1986.
Since 1987–8 Mohammed Driss has been TNT’s director. He is a Tunisian
writer, actor, and director. He began his career in 1961 as an actor in both
amateur and professional theatres, a student in Tunisia and France, and then
a producer and director. From 1969 to 1972, he was an actor and stage assist-
ant at the Théâtre de la Tempête with Jean-Marie Serreau. After his return
to Tunisia, he became one of the founding members of the Gafsa regional
company and the “New Theatre” ensemble in 1976. That same year Driss
created, along with Tawfiq Jebali, a production L’Héritage (The Legacy) at
the National Theatre (see Figure 12). Since then, Driss has attempted to cul-
tivate a popular tradition that is simple but well researched. His philosophy is
“l’ethique et l’esthétique” and his longing for a popular theatre that would
resonate with the soul of the masses is well reflected in productions such as
Ismail Pacha in 1986; Long Live Shakespeare, co-produced with the Hammamet
International Theatre Festival and opening the twenty-fourth Festival in July
of 1988; Le Compagnon des cœurs in 1989; Noces de Pétrolee in 1991; Don Juan

Figure 12 Mohammed Driss and Tawfiq Jebali, L’Héritage, at the Tunisian National
Theatre, 1976 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National Theatre Archive)
 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990 175

in 1993; Al Moutachaâbitoun in 2005; and Othello in 2007. Driss sums up the

cultural policy of TNT as follows: “What is important for me is to keep the
independence of initiatives going in order to make TNT a dynamic institu-
tion that responds to the real needs and expectations of the public. I invest
my proficiency, passion, and the confidence of my public so that TNT can
be the best place for creativity.”34 Mohammed Driss’s experimental vision
deeply permeates the aesthetic choices of TNT. This makes it another site
of innovative and daring theatre productions in Tunisia rather than serving
simply as an artistic façade for the regime. After a series of renovations and
expansions, TNT has become a real cultural apparatus for Tunisian intel-
lectuals, though directly affiliated with the presidency.
Another important development in the Tunisian theatre during the 1980s
was the opening in October 1987 of El Teatro, the first private cultural
space in the country, founded by Tawfiq Jebali in the Rue Ouled Haffouz
in Tunis. The edifice is divided into a main theatre house with a capacity
of 250 seats, a mini-studio called Carré d’Artt of 80 seats, and an Art Gallery
of 111 square meters. In an interview at Al-jazeera in 2005, Jebali admitted
the extreme difficulties in managing such a theatrical space that was already
constructed “due to the negative cultural conditions rather than the result
of a choice.”35 Mémoire d’un Dinosaure was its inaugural production, an
adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Interview with an Exile.36 It was revived again
in 2007 to celebrate 20 years of El Teatro by the same actors: Tawfiq Jebali
and Rajae Ben Amar. The text was directed by Rached Manai and authored
by Jebali, a renowned orator, dialogist, actor, and director famous in Tunisia
for his ingenious wordplay. Brecht’s Interview with an Exile offered Jebali
an ideal opportunity to reflect freely upon theatre practice in Tunisia and
social change. The play depicts a fleeting encounter between two exhausted
Beckettian figures, Ziffel and Kalle, who seem to have lost all but the desire
to share memories with each other during a journey made fabulous by
the power of their words and the ecstasy of their melodies. Mémoire d’un
Dinosauree was not only a successful theatrical experience, but also a serious
critique of social contradictions in contemporary Tunisia. The play made
it clear that behind the Tunisian theatrical crisis lurk social, political, eco-
nomic, and cultural ones too. From the outset, Jebali made El Teatro an
independent cultural enterprise.
14
Entering a New Century, 1990–2010

In December of 1991 the National Liberation Front, which had in effect ruled
Algeria since Independence, challenged by the rising power of the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS), cancelled the scheduled elections. The army seized
control, ousted President Bendejedid, banned the FIS and arrested many of
its members. The result was a bloody civil conflict which claimed between
150,000 and 200,000 lives, many of them non-combatants, during the next
decade. All civil society, including the theatre, suffered a painful disruption.
In 1992, as terrorism was coming to dominate social and political life in
Algeria and every month saw new murders, assassinations, and bombings,
it appeared to many that the Algerian theatre, so involved with social life,
might disappear altogether. The dramatist Ould Abderrahmane Kaki at that
time issued a bold manifesto, stating:

The theatre never dies, though there are moments when the intellectuals
must put forward there the sufferings and fears of an entire people. At
this moment writers are born who know how to say things better than
anyone else.1

Kaki’s courageous pronouncement seemed to have little relevance, however,

to the actual situation in Algeria in the early 1990s, as assassinations and
terrorist attacks grew in number and violence, and artists like Benaïssa and
intellectuals continued to flee the country. Among the victims were two of
the most prominent remaining theatre artists in the nation. First came the
assassination of Alloula in 1994 and then, less than a year later, that of
the director Azzedine Medjoubi. Although Alloula was only one of many
theatrical artists killed in the dark years of the early 1990s, he was the best
known in the international community, and his tragic loss was marked
by an outpouring of memorial events and publications across France, in
Tunis, Cairo, Spain and Portugal. His theatre in Oran was renamed in his
honor and in 1999 his widow, Raja Alloula, established the Abdelkader
Alloula Foundation to carry on his work and his memory. The foundation
176
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 177

has established a theatre research center and encouraged the work of both
scholars and young artists.2
Although less known internationally than Alloula, Medjoubi was among
the leaders of the Algerian theatre during the 1980s. He rose to prominence
as a film and stage actor during the 1960s and 1970s and was especially associ-
ated with the director Ziani Chérif Ayad. In 1989, in the midst off growing civil
unrest, Ayad and Medjoubi, along with director/author Mohammedhamed
Benguettaf, actress Sonia (Mkio Sakina) and Sirat Boumedienne, a leading
player for both Kaki and Alloula, formed Masrah el Qalla (the Theatre
of the Citadel) one of the most highly honored producing groups during
those turbulent years. Benguettaf’s El Ayta (The Cry, 1989; see Figure 13)
was their first and most famous offering, but it was followed by other
Benguettaf successes, Fatma (1990), Baya (1992). and Le dernier des prison-
niers (The Last of the Prisoners, 1992). In 1993 Medjoubi left the company
to assume the directorship of the small regional theatre of Batna. His
work there and in Bejaia the following year gained him an invitation to
become director of the National Theatre in Algiers, but he had scarcely
assumed this position when he was assassinated, on the steps of the theatre
itself, where a memorial plaque has since been placed near the entrance
(see Figure 14).
This shocking action, so similar to the death of Alloula only a year before,
accelerated the departure of leading theatre practitiossners. Medjoubi’s fre-
quent co-workers, Ayad and Benguettaf, departed together for France soon
after their colleague’s murder. Kaki remained in Algeria, but in declining
health. Both he and Sirat Boumedienne, the actor who had contributed so
importantly to the dramas of Kaki and others during the past two decades,
died in 1995. Civil unrest was now at its height, with many thousands
killed, thousands more disappeared, public massacres in dozens of cities and
villages, and artists and intellectuals often among the particular targets.
With this wave of deaths and departures, Kaki’s vision of a renewed Algerian
theatre seemed an almost hopeless utopian fantasy.
Yet even in 1995, the lowest point in the history of the modern Algerian
theatre, there were indications, especially in the smaller regional theatres, of
a determination not to allow the theatre to be overcome. Indeed, in March
of 1995, the regional stage in Constantine organized a “Theatre Spring,”
looking forward, like Kaki, to a renewal of Algerian theatre in better times.
These hopes were this time not disappointed. Although violence continued
in many parts of the country, the years after 1995 saw it gradually diminish,
and 1999 witnessed significant new legislation on civil peace under the new
president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Some of the leading theatre artists who had
fled to France in the mid-1990s, such as Ziani Chérif El Ayad and Benguettaf,
now returned to the National Theatre in a more tranquil capital. Ayad took
up the position of his assassinated colleague Medjoubi in 2001 and he was
followed two years later by Benguettaf.
 178
Figure 13 Mohammed Benguettaf, Le Cri, 1989 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National Theatre Archive)
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 179

Figure 14 Medjoubi memorial plaque next to the entrance of the Algerian National
Theatre (photo from Khalid Amine’s collection)

Although the generation of Kaki, Yacine, Alloula, Benaïssa, and their

contemporaries is primarily known for its contributions to Algerian play-
writing and acting, this was also the generation which established the
importance of the stage director in the European style, a phenomenon that
would become more clearly apparent in the Algerian theatre after the trou-
bled early 1990s. To the names above might be added those of Mustapha
Kateb, Hadj Omar, and Allel el-Mouhib, all at the National Theatre, and a
few others. Although even into the new century placing a play on stage
primarily concerned itself only with such basic matters as entrances and
exits, the artists mentioned above, mostly under European influence, also
occupied themselves with the entire production apparatus, creating a model
of directing that continues to inspire younger artists. The dramatic institute
at Bordj el Kiffan, although primarily a training school for actors, has
produced some directors as well, such as Ziani Chérif Ayad (1948– ), one of
the leading Algerian directors of the late twentieth century.
Ayad enrolled in the TNA School in 1966, studying with Ould Aberahmane
Kaki, but from the beginning resisted the almost exclusively European orien-
tation of his instruction: “I was taught the history of world theatre, but not
a word about Arab theatre. There existed the unquestioned conviction that
180 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the theatre was a Western invention and that we could only create theatre
if we were wedded to Western forms.” Clearly, in Ayad’s view, this orientation
was incompatible with post-revolutionary Algerian culture, and he joined with
other authors and directors who, though grounded in the Western theatrical
tradition, sought to find a way to develop a performance tradition more
related to their own culture. For Ayad this meant “a theatre orality, inspired
by popular culture and inscribed in public space.”3 Nevertheless, his first
directing project, at the TNA in 1980, was an example of the European
repertoire still favored by that institution, Maiakovski’s The Bathhouse. For
several years he remained at the TNA, directing some twenty plays, with
his reputation steadily growing. In 1983 he won first prize for direction
at the Carthage Festival for his production of Syrian dramatist Mohmed el
Maghout’s Galou laarab galoubutt (So the Arabs Said). Still, he became increas-
ingly dissatisfied with the conservatism of its repertoire and its audiences.
In 1989, a year that saw a major drive toward democratization in Algerian
society, Ayad, in collaboration with Azzedine Medjoubi, launched his own
theatrical company, the highly esteemed El Qalaa (The Citadel), for which
he directed seven productions.
The promise of this new company, which was hailed throughout the
Arab world, was cut short by the upheavals in Algeria during the 1990s,
but with the return of stability, Ayad was asked to return in 2000 to head
the National Theatre. Given his previous experience there, Ayad naturally
hesitated, but accepted when he was promised a free hand in running the
theatre and, moreover, the supervision of the upcoming Year of Algeria in
France. He accepted and indeed brought back to life the theatre, which had
literally been closed for several years. For the first time in its history the
theatre announced a full season of plays. Dozens of directors, actors, artists,
and dramaturgs were hired, and enthusiastic audiences appeared to support
the new venture. True to his promise, Ayad built a repertoire of national
drama, headed by Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma, created by young actors from
the Institute, who performed it throughout Algeria and eventually even
at the prestigious Comédie Française, as part of the 2003 Year of Algeria.
In the middle of this triumphal year, however, the Algerian authorities
decided that Ayad was in fact showing too much initiative and independ-
ence, and he was removed from the directorship of the TNA. He returned
to independent directing, primarily in France, and in 2005 founded a new
company in Marseilles, El Gosto, dedicated to presenting plays “on both
sides of the Mediterranean.” Its first production, presented in France and
Algeria, La Machina (The Train), an adaptation of the third scene of Les Dires
by Abdelkadar Alloula. In 2009 Ayad created for El Gosto a dramatic celebra-
tion of Kateb Yacine on the twentieth anniversary of his death, L’étoile et la
comète (The Star and the Comet).
Another important director who trained at Bordi el-Kiffan is Ahmed
Khoudi, who built his career at the regional theatre of Bejaia, which in the
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 181

late twentieth century played a particularly important role in the national

theatre culture. Khoudi’s first play, which he also directed was Le Kassem
(The Oath, 1986), and was also the first work presented in this colonial thea-
tre after its conversion to a national house. He also directed the second work,
Fetmouche’s Harf B’harff later that year. He organized a collective creation by
members of the company and directed an additional play of his own and
an adaptation of St Exupery’s The Little Princee later in the 1980s, and served as
general director of the Bejaia theatre from 1989 to 1992. He then became
an associate director at the TNA, where he presented Algerian plays and, most
notably, a series of European classics, including Shakespeare’s Midsummer
Night’s Dream (1994), Ibsen’s Doll’s Housee (2000), Sophocles’s Electra (2004), and
Lorca’s House of Bernarda Alba (2007). He has also occasionally returned to
direct at the theatre in Bejaia, most notably Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum,
adapted by Omar Fetmouche.
Omar Fetmouche, the author of the first play directed by Khoudi, has
spent most of his career in Bejaia, primarily as an author and adapter, but
also as an actor, occasionally as director of individual works, and since
2004 as general director of the theatre. Two of his most successful adapta-
tions of European plays, Kataev’s Squaring the Circle 1987) and Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros (1989), were both directed by another leading figure of the
Bejaia theatre, Malek Bouguermouh. Bouguermouh in fact was Khoudi’s
immediate predecessor as director of the Bejaia theatre. He came to this
post having studied directing at the Mayakovski Theatre in Moscow and
began his Algerian career with a production of Brecht’s The Measures
Taken in Algiers in 1975 and Benaïssa’s newest work, El mahgourr (The
Despised), in the regional theatre at Annaba in 1978. In Bejaia his pro-
ductions of Fetmouche’s adaptation of Kataev’s Squaring the Circle in 1987
and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1989 brought him and this theatre to national
attention. Tragically, he died in an automobile accident that same year, at
the age of 33.
As the careers of the Bejaia directors suggest, Algerian directors trained in
that country today almost invariably come, like Ayad and Khoudi, from the
TNA Institute, but most of the new directors of this previous generation, like
Bouguermouh, received their training abroad and a number of these went
back abroad during the upheavals of the early 1990s. El-Hachemi Nourredine,
trained in Germany, achieved great success in the mid-1970s with Arabic
translations of such German works as Max Frisch’s The Firebugs and Brecht’s
Good Person of Setzuan, starring Amina Medjoubi, a former leading member
of Alloula’s company in Oran, but towards the end of the next decade he
returned to settle in Germany, while Amina Medjoubi remained in Algeria,
remaining at the National Theatre for over 20 years, where she created roles
for Hadj Omar, Rouiched, Ayad, Alloula, Mustafa Kateb, and others. Allel
Kherroufi, trained in England, directed for several seasons at the TNA, then
emigrated to Canada.
182 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Among these foreign trained directors were the first women to work
professionally as directors in the Algerian theatre, the sisters Hamid and
Faouzia Ait el Hadj. Faouzia took her university degree in agronomy in
Algeria and her sister Hamid in literature in Paris, but both developed a
strong interest in theatre, leading them to go together to study theatre and
film in Kiev in the early 1980s. They then returned together to Algeria where,
beginning in 1986, both directed at the National Theatre in Algiers. In 1987
Faouzia Ait el Hadj’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was
one of the major successes of the decade, and her triumph, aided by the
leading Algerian actress Keltoum as Mrs Loman, marked for many a new era
for women artists in the Algerian theatre. Perhaps the best-known produc-
tion by her sister was Hissaristan at the TNA in 1991, adapted from Gogol’s
Story of a Madman and turned into a dark fable all too relevant to current
Algeria, with a hero who killed, one by one, those about him and ended by
turning on the audience. The star was the leading Algerian actor Azzedine
Medjoubi, himself assassinated in the growing Algerian violence just a year
later. The author was Boubekeur Makhoukh, an actor/dramatist based in
Annaba, who studied mime in Paris, created a series of popular children’s
plays there (The Wolf and the Sheep in 1982, Galileo in 1988, Aladin in 1989,
and Ali Baba in 1993), and later turned to European adaptations (Lope de
Vega’s Fuenteovejuna and Chekhov’s Swan Song, both in 1996) and to provid-
ing texts for the growing number of Algerian solo performers.
Shortly after Medjoubi’s assassination, Hamid joined the many Algerian
artists fleeing into exile and settled in France, where she continued her
successful career. There she revived Hissaristan in French in 1994 and subse-
quently directed a new piece, Un couteau dans le soleil (A Knife in the Sun),
inspired by the contemporary carnage in Algeria. Its basic story concerned a
fanatic young man who killed his sister for dancing in the theatre, but more
basically the text was a collage memorial to victims of Algerian killings, con-
taining texts from several assassinated poets. Still in Paris in 2001, Hamid
directed her first play in Tamazight (the Berber language), adapted from a
novel by Fathma, At Mansour Amrouche. Like a number of her colleagues,
Hamid returned to Algeria in the early years of the new century, where in
2004 she presented Souk El Ansaa. Since that time she has contributed a
number of important works to the Amazigh theatre movement. Her sister
Faouzia has become an even more important contributor to that move-
ment, especially since her appointment in 2006 to the directorship of the
regional theatre in Tizi-Ouzou, the second largest Amazigh town in Algeria
(after Bejaia). Her Amazigh work there will be discussed later, but she has
also continued to direct Arabic works, most notably Douaa el hamam (the
Prayer of the Doves) with the Tizi-Ouzou company in 2006, a choreographic
work in seven scenes showing a woman struggling against various forms of
oppression, and in 2007 at TNA, Laachia, Aaouicha wa el harraz (The Lover,
Awicha and the Charlatan), a musical drama based on the lyric love poem
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 183

by Moroccan El Mekki El Korchi with music by the popular Algerian lutist

Mohammed Boulifa.
The turbulent 1990s took a major toll on the theatre. In Algiers, Benguettaf
inherited a national theatre in 2003 which consisted of only six actors
under contract and produced only a few plays a year. In a 2009 interview
Benguettaf said that this decade had caused a rupture between the genera-
tions: “All those who built the Algerian theatre are no longer in this world,”
he observed. “The young are left to their own resources. There is no one to
train them. They must struggle along on their own. Those who are promoted
from the Institute of Bordj El Kiffan have nowhere to go.” In response to this,
Benguettaf has rebuilt the TNA company to 25 full-time members, and plans
to once again make the National Theatre a solid and ongoing cultural insti-
tution. Its company “will be well-trained academically and know what they
are doing and talking about. We want to allow them to present at least two
plays a year, at least sixty-five times each. We hope to give the same oppor-
tunity to directors.”4 Few national theatres around the world would consider
two productions a year, playing a total of 130 nights, an acceptable offering,
but the fact that Benguettaf has stated this seemingly modest achievement as
his immediate goal indicates the depth of the crisis he inherited as the new
director of the TNA.
As an expression of the improved cultural situation in its former colony,
the French government decided in 2002 to name 2003 “Djazir, A Year of
Algeria in France.” From the beginning the project was plagued with difficul-
ties, many of them a result of the long and troubled relationship between
the two countries, others resulting from personalities, bureaucracy, and
competing goals and agendas. In Algeria, Commissioner Hocine Snoussi
aroused widespread protest for in general favoring French artists over Arab
ones and specifically for favoring personal acquaintances and even relatives
over others. Snoussi was dismissed in February of 2002 and his adjunct,
Mustapha Orif, a gallery owner in Algiers, soon after. They were replaced by
Mohammed Raouroua, president of the Algerian Football Federation. Many,
both in France and Algeria, felt that, in the words of François Gèze, the
prominent French editor, the project had been “taken hostage by those who
wish to reconstitute the image of a badly tarnished regime.”5 Opponents
pointed out that the celebration ignored the continuing suppression of the
Amazigh population, the more than 200,000 dead since the interruption
of the electoral process in 1992, and the crushing poverty of millions of
Algerian citizens.
Yet, under a cloud of controversy, the organization of the Year of Algeria
continued, with ultimately more than 2000 events scheduled. Ziani-Chérif
Ayad, the current director of the Algerian National Theatre, was named
commissioner in charge of live performance for the festival and so Algerian
drama was naturally given a prominent position in the celebrations. Such
well-established names (especially in France) as Alloula, Yacine, Kaki, Rouiched,
184 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

and Benaïssa were naturally featured, along with some almost unknown
dramatists, such as Tahar Ouettar, well-known as a novelist but also the
author of two plays, and Haja Bali Dhalila, a professor of mathematics in
Algiers who was also a dramatist. The pride of place went to Kateb Yacine,
by far the best known Algerian dramatist in France, whose Nedjma, directed
by Ayad, was performed at France’s premier theatre, the Comédie Française.
A number of commentators remarked on the symbolism of Yacine’s trajec-
tory, beginning as a dramatist banned in France, whose 1955 Cadavre encirclé
had to be presented in Brussels, and ending in the French national theatre.
At the Institut du Monde Arabe, Ayad also directed Mohammedhamed
Benguettaf’s stage adaptation of Tahar Ouettar’s novel, Les Martyrs revien-
nent cette semainee (The Martyrs Return this Week), which Ayad had originally
staged in Algiers in 1987. The distinguished company was headed by the
noted actress Sonia. Sonia also created another project, La Pluie (The Rain),
a restaging of Benguettaf’s Journal d’une femme insomniaque (Diary of an
Insomniac Woman), a one-woman show created for her in 1992 and a
production that helped establish the subsequently very popular form of
the one-women show in Algeria. For this revival a younger Algerian film
actress, Malika Belbey, performed the role created by Sonia. Ahmed Khoudi
also staged, in both Algiers and Paris, an Hommage à Aït Menuellet,
t a musical
theatre performance of songs and poems of that popular Amazigh artist
written between 1969 and 2000 so as to form a narrative of Algerian life
across those years.
One of the central events of the Year of Algeria was a seven-month tour
across France of Alloula’s The Veil by El-Ajouad, a company composed of
actors from Alloula’s theatre in Oran who took their name from his best-
known drama. The tour concluded with the first production of this play
at the National Theatre in Algiers. On this occasion the play’s director,
Kheireddine Lardjam, remarked: “For us, the theatre has always been a
form of resistance. Even during the most difficult years, when daily life was
marked by terror and the theatres were closed, we still performed every-
where, even in the ‘triangle of death’ [the violent suburbs of Algiers].”6 In
2001, as part of the preparations for the Year of Algeria, Alloula’s widow,
Raya Alloula, director of the Abdelkadar Alloula Foundation, suggested
that El-Ajwad, with which the Foundation had worked closely since both
were founded in 1999, develop an association with a French company, to
develop programs for the Year of Algeria and beyond. She suggested the
Caen company La Mauvaise Graine, founded in 1997 by Arnaud Meunier
and dedicated to the work of contemporary dramatists. In 2002 Lardjam
was invited to Caen to direct Pylade by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a dramatist who
is a particular favorite of Meunier and one who, incidentally, Meunier feels
is closely akin to Alloula in his theatrical experimentation and political ori-
entation. Following Lardjam’s visit, Meunier and his actors were invited to
Oran where they prepared two productions together for the Year of Algeria.
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 185

The first was The Veil, created and performed by the El-Ajwad company but
utilizing a bilingual French-Arabic adaptation prepared by the two com-
panies working together. The second was a staging of El-Ajwad, Alloula’s
masterpiece itself, utilizing members of both companies and directed by
Meunier. Its appearance in France marked the first professional French stag-
ing of an Alloula work in French.
Although the two companies have each continued their separate programs,
they have also continued to collaborate. In 2005, in both Algeria and in France,
they presented a co-production of Noureddine Aba’s 1980 play, La Recréation
des clowns (The Clowns’ Recreation). The clowns of the title are three French
torturers in 1958, who derive their entertainments from their abuse of their
Algerian prisoners. Despite its dramatic form, the play is in fact a kind of
docudrama, as its author stressed in his introduction: “The characters in
this play are not imaginary. They existed. The facts about the torture are
exact. I have made only a few modest adjustments that the reader will easily
recognize.”7 In these collaborative productions, Algerian actors from El-Ajwad
played the French roles and French actors from Meunier’s company played
the Algerians. The production was directed by El-Ajwad’s Kheireddine
Lardjam.
The Abdelkader Alloula Foundation continues its work in Oran, and recently
supported the establishment of a second young company, El-Ibdae. This com-
pany grew out of a performance in 2004 of Alloula’s monologue, Homk Salim,
interpreted by four young actors and directed by Jamil Benhamamouch, the
dramatist’s nephew. The success of this experiment, which toured through
Algeria and to festivals in France and Portugal, encouraged the group to
create an ongoing program. This officially opened in 2005 with two televi-
sion scripts by Alloula, El Wjb el Watani (The National Duty) and Chaab Faq
(The Awakening of the People’s Conscience), written in 1990 but censored
shortly after and never before presented on stage. In the agglutinative spirit
of Alloula himself and of the El-Ajwad company, El-Ibdae combined these
two texts with other Alloula writings to form an evening of theatre entitled
La Générale, which toured widely in Algeria and in Russia. Recently the com-
pany has again toured to Russia.
Beyond the showcase performance of Yacine at the Comédie and the tours
of El-Ajwad, the great majority of the most significant theatrical produc-
tions of the Year of Algeria were by French artists and presented only in
France, although of course all had Algerian themes, and most took a strong
anti-colonial position. The only major production to be presented both in
France and Algeria was Richard Demarcy’s Les Mimosas d’Algérie, which told
the story of Fernand Iveton, the only French citizen guillotined during the
Algerian War for his support of the anti-colonial cause. Written in 1992, it
was first performed at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Bordj el Kiffan
in 2001, starring the current director of the Institute, the well-known actress
Sonia. Richard Demarcy himself was then invited to create a new staging for
186 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the Year of Algeria at the National Theatre in Algiers. This production was
then performed in several major French cities. A more modest effort was
Filles de silence (Daughters of Silence) adapted for the stage from a prize-
winning 2001 novel, Cette fille-là by the Algerian author Maïssa Bey. Aside
from Paris, few French cities participated in the Year of Algeria by the pres-
entation of relevant theatre. In Romans, the Théâtre de la Presle presented
Alloula’s Le Pain. In Grenoble, one of the most active participants in the
Year of Algeria, Algerian-born playwright Aziz Chouak, staged his own El
Maestro and in two much more authentically Algerian offerings, Abdou Elaïdi
presented the classic monologue Fatma featuring the leading Oran actress
Fadela Hachemaoui, and Alloula’s own El Ajwad company from Oran pre-
sented his Le Voile. The central event of the Lyon participation came out of
a visit of the Lyon theatre director Nathalie Veuillet to the National Institute
of Dramatic Art in Algiers, where she was invited in 2002 to direct a new
play, Les Adieux by the Algerian novelist Habib Ayyoub. There she became
acquainted with members of the young Algerian experimental company,
Chrysalide, and with their dramatist Hajar Bali. Back in Lyon later that
year, Veuillet mounted two short plays by Bali, Le Détourr and the mono-
logue, Le Testament.
Most of the theatrical productions forming part of the Year of Algeria in
France dealt with the French experience in Algiers, especially during the war
for independence, and were created by French artists and performed only in
France. Alger-Alger, for example, was created especially for the Year of Algeria
by Gérard Cherqui. The work was based on the novel La Guerre des Gusses by
George Mattei, who had served in the Kabyle area of Algeria and actively cam-
paigned against French colonialism before and after. The two leading roles
were a young French soldier, played by French film star Mathieu Amalric,
and a young Algerian soldier, played by Sam Bouajila, actually of Tunisian
ancestry. L’Epée de bois, a leading experimental theatre in Paris, presented
Dans les ténèbres gîtent les aigles (Eagles Dwell in the Shadows), a new play
by Alloula’s friend and translator, Messaoud Benyoucef, dealing with Abane
Ramdane, the companion of Frantz Fanon, who was assassinated in Morocco
in 1957. Another Algerian-born dramatist honored in the Year of Algeria was
Jean Magnan, who came to Paris to study drama in his twentieth year and
never returned to his homeland. He was assassinated in his Paris apartment
in 1983, having just completed the first play in a projected trilogy on modern
Algeria. This first section, though bearing the title of the whole, Algérie 54-62,
in fact covered only the years 1954 to 1958. The work had never been pre-
sented in Algeria, though it had received several stagings in various French
cities before its selection for the Year of Algeria, when it was shown in Dijon
and, for the first time, in Paris, at the Théâtre National de la Colline.
Even when the French celebrations in fact featured actual artists from
that country, critics still complained, with some justice, that the selections
favored the Algerian theatre of the past and the now entrenched, bureaucratic,
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 187

and on the whole backward-looking official national theatres, while giving

little attention to the new generation of theatre artists who had appeared
with the new century, and whose work in general broke fairly sharply from
that of their predecessors. While the names of Yacine, Alloula, Kaki, and
others remain honored, and theatres across Algeria bear these names, their
style of theatre, concerned with the dynamics of social life and with a strong
political orientation, has been little seen in the new century. Instead a much
more varied theatre scene has appeared, including more classic revivals,
and a more poetic, personal, and psychological theatre, often with traces of
Ionesco or Beckett. Plays with small casts, with two or three characters in
psychological conflict were favored, and solo performances have become a
particularly important new sub-genre. The most innovative of such work has
taken place in the smaller regional theatres, in young independent troupes
and collectives. Most of the regional theatres in Algeria are surrounded by
eight or ten such collectives, who are increasingly aware of each other’s work
through a network of annual national, regional, and local festivals. A look at
some of the groups surrounding the regional theatre of Sidi Bel Abbès, a very
active location, will suggest something of the range of such activities.
Unfortunately a group that led such work at the beginning of this century,
Tin Hinan, is currently inactive. The background of Tin Hinan goes back
to 1980 when a group of young amateurs, most of them already associated
with local companies, came together to form L’Atelier, one of the first col-
lectives in Algeria devoted to theatre for children. Their director was Kada
Bensmicha, who over the next several years created a number of works that
enjoyed success both locally and on tour, among them Le Rossignol et l’oiseau
méchaniquee (The Nightingale and the Mechanical Bird), inspired by a Chinese
tale, and three works conceived by Bensmicha himself, L’Oeuf bluee (The Blue
Egg), Les Clowns, and a “marionette spectacle,” M’kaidech. In 1988 the group
reorganized as L’Art Scénique, which opened with an adaptation of Gogol’s
The Nose. The prize-winning production of Bensmicha’s Adell (1990) brought
prominence to its star Azedine Abbar, a founding member of L’Atelier. His
work as assistant to director Bensmicha led to him directing the best known
production of this group, Destination cratère de Chicago, adapted from Ray
Bradbury, which won the prize for best production at the International
Theatre Festival in Tunisia in 1993 and which Abbar designated as present-
ing his vision of “concrete theatrical poetry.” This same artistic vision could
be seen in Abbar’s revival of the children’s theatre piece from L’Atelier, Les
Clowns.
Abbar moved into the professional company of the regional theatre at Sidi
Bel Abbès in 1995 along with several other members of L’Art Scénique, direc-
tor Bensmicha and actors Abdelkader Blahi and Niddal El-Mellouhi. Blahi and
El Mellouhi were both founding members of L’Art Scénique and had worked
with Abbar on the Bradbury piece, Blahi winning the prize for best actor as
the Old Man in that production at the T Tunisian Festival. In 1997 these same
188 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

three artists, along with the journalist and author M’mida Ayachi founded a
new professional company, Tin Hinan, dedicated to “producing, promoting
and circulating creative artistic work.” This became one of the best known
small professional Algerian theatres, both at home and abroad. Among their
prize-winning productions have been Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, created by
Abbar in classical Arabic in 2003, another Bradbury adaptation, La colonne
de feu (The Column of Fire) in 2004 and an adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s
The Suicide in 2005. Since 2005 Abbar has continued to work in Sidi Bel
Abbès, but as the leading director of the regional theatre there. Blaha and
El-Mellouhi have both moved to France and the house author Ayachi has
devoted himself to a new journal in Algiers. In effect the theatre of Tin
Hinan has ceased to exist.
Another local cooperative well known throughout Algeria is Masrah Eddik,
whose origins in fact overlap those of Tin Hinan. When Abbar and others
left the regional theatre of Sidi Bel Abbés to form Tin Hinan, their former
colleague, Benshmicha, remained behind to direct at the National Theatre.
Within a few years, however, he found the offerings there too thin to satisfy
him and so in 2000 he established his own cooperative, Masrah Eddik,
whose first members were his son, Hocine, and two technicians. They fitted
out a 50-seat theatre in the basement of his home where the new company
presented theatre for children on Mondays and Thursdays, building upon
Benshmicha’s own earlier works such as l’Oeuf blue (now directed by Hocine,
with a company of nine), new plays such as Ulysse (2006), with Hocine
in the title role, and even adaptations of European works, most notably
Brecht’s Herr Puntila (2007), which toured to festivals in the Netherlands,
Spain, and Tunisia, winning a number of awards.
Unique among the cooperative groups is Al-Halqa, founded in 2005 by
Driss Gargoua, a professor at the University of Sidi Bel Abbès. Its expressed
goal has been to study and develop in contemporary ways the performance
patrimony of the nation, hence its name, referring to the traditional North
African staging practice that has inspired so many major Algerian dramatists.
Its first major production was an epic performance based on the character of
Jugurtha, the Berber king who opposed Roman occupation and has become
a symbol of Algerian resistance to colonial domination. In addition to
such projects, Al-Halqa is also unique in establishing a festival to which are
invited other productions with a similar interest in this traditional form
and scholars to discuss its history and application. In an interview follow-
ing the first such festival (October 2009), Driss called it, “a great experience,
very rich in instruction. We hope that this national forum will become an
institution and an annual cultural event. We also hope that this forum will
be organized in the future in other towns in the country, to reinvigorate this
popular art form which has recently been in decline.”8
Other official cooperative groups perform in significant measure for chil-
dren. One which evenly divides its offerings is Kateb Yacine, organized in
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 189

Sidi Bel Abbès in 2004. It has so far created four productions each year for
adults and four for children. Another local troupe, Aladin, headed by
Douila Nordine, performs only for children and developed out of a popular
marionette theatre. One could find a similar range of small groups, usu-
ally with eight to 15 members, some amateur, some professional, in Oran,
Mostaganem, Annaba, Constantine, Setif, Bejaia, or other Algerian theatre
centers, and their number is steadily increasing. Much of the most interest-
ing work in current Algerian theatre is found in these small, but dedicated
organizations.
Looking back on the contemporary Algerian theatre as it has developed after
the grim hiatus of the early 1990s, two manifestations stand out as distinctly
different from those of the earlier Algerian stage. These are the increasingly
popular solo performances and the rise of the indigenous Amazigh theatre. Solo
performance began to appear as early as the mid-1980s, in the work of such
performers as Tawfiq Mimiche playing a victim of society, Chérif Ezzouali
(Chérif the Poor) in Hafila Tassirr (The Bus Thief) by Boubekeur Makhoukh,
and El-Tarous (The Hunting Dog), written and performed by Hamid Gouri,
playing a man seeking to find a simple life amid the distractions of the city.
Both productions were presented in 1985 at the National Theatre. Both of
these actors continued to gain success both as solo performers and in more
conventional plays. In 2006 they appeared together in a production from the
regional theatre of Annaba which moved on to the National Theatre, El Houb
fi bilad el hidjara, adapted by Gouri from a work by the Egyptian dramatist
Mahmoud Teymour. In this fairy-tale play, with a cast of 15 and spectacular
scenery, a princess defies the manipulations of an evil merchant (Mimiche)
and inspires a successful revolution supported by divine intervention. Fellag,
a regular member of the National Theatre Company, created the first of
several one-man shows, Les Aventures de Tchop, in 1987.
Azzedine Medjoubi developed a particular interest in such work, perform-
ing it himself and encouraging other author/performances, most notably
those of Djamel Hamouda, who began performing in Medjoubi’s influen-
tial Masrah el Qalla company and then followed Medjoubi to the regional
stage of Bejaia in 1994. The following year Hamouda created his first major
success, the solo show Khabat Kraou, performed by Hakim Dakkar. One
Algerian newspaper reported this year that this was “the era of the solo per-
formance,” the “most beloved dramatic form” of the time, devoted largely
to satiric presentations of contemporary society.9 At the regional theatre in
Oran, now named for Abdelkader Alloula, Samir Bouanani has presented
popular one-man shows with a strong local flavor such as Nassine oua salatine
(2003), based on the work of Alloula, and Metzeouedj Fi Otla (A Husband on
Vacation, 2006) by Mourad Snouci, an Oran dramatist who has created several
works for that theatre. This latter production toured to the United States in
2009 as part of the Arabesques Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington
and also to Paris.
190 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Women solo performers equaled or surpassed men in popularity almost

from the beginning. Here again the Medjoubi company established the
vogue, in the solo performances Fatma (1990) and Journal d’une femme
insomniaque (Diary of an Insomniac Woman, 1992) written by Benguettaf
for performance by Sonia. She was followed in 1993 by another actress in
the company, Dalila Helilou, who in Baya presented the trials of Algerian
women in old age. In 2000 Hamouda created a highly successful solo piece
for Helilou, Djamila, based on a character she had played earlier opposite
Medjoubi. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the monologue was so
well established as part of the current theatrical scene in Algeria that several
regional theatres began to hold regular festivals devoted to this form. The
first was held at the regional theatre of Constantine, which by 2005 had
organized three such celebrations. In that year 11 monologists performed,
most from Constantine itself or the near-by Eastern Algerian towns of Sétif,
Biskra, and El Eulma, but some from the far west of the country, from Tiemcem
and Mostanagem. The regional theatre of Annaba established an annual
festival devoted to this form in 1995, opening with a solo meditation
on a woman’s experiences in modern Algerian society, Zbida Ezzel, written
by Djamal Hamouda, long one of the leading dramatists for this theatre,
directed by Ahmed Khoudi, and performed by Rym Takchout. After this,
Takchout turned to film work, but returned to solo performance in 2009
to tour Algeria with another text by Hamouda, Zbida Show, about a naïve
woman undone by her confidence in her knowledge of life. Both the practice
of solo performance and gatherings devoted to it continue to spread in Algeria,
a recent example of the latter being the Monologue Festival established in
2005 at Sétif, inspired by the festival at Constantine attended by several
Sétif artists. This festival featured a classic of Algerian solo performance,
Benguettaf’s Fatma, created in 1990 by the noted actress Sonia (see Figure 15).
For this event Sonia herself directed the play, performed now by a popular
young actress of Sétif, Nesrine Belhadj. Belhadj subsequently revived this
production at Constantine and at the National Theatre in Algiers.
One of the most striking developments of the Algerian theatre as a meas-
ure of stability returned at the end of the century was the increasing impor-
tance of the Amazigh stage. During the troubled 1980s and early 1990s this
stage existed largely underground or in exile. Mohya, in Paris, continued his
ambitious translation work, including plays by Pirandello, Molière, Mrozek,
Erdmann, and works from classic Greece. Most of these were published or
distributed as audio cassettes, but only a few could be performed in Mohya’s
troubled homeland. A rare exception was the presentation in 1991 of Mohya’s
Sinni (Those Two) adapted from Mrozek’s The Emigrants and presented by
Mohammed Said Fellag in the Kabyle city of Bejaia. This bold production
has been generally considered the beginning of the Amazigh theatre.10
Fellag was an ideal artist for this work, but the organization of the theatre
in Algeria prevented him from pursuing it for many years. He was born in
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 191

Figure 15 Sonia in Mohammed Benguettaf’s Fatma (photo courtesy of the Algerian

National Theatre)

1950 in a small Kabyle coastal village, Azzefoun, about half-way between

Algiers and Bejaia. He attended college in Tizi-Ouzou, later the center of
Amazigh theatre. While he was there a Madame Aouche, French but married
to an Amazigh, began a course in theatre, taught, of course, in French and
reading only classical French texts. Fellag was accepted into the theatre
academy of Algiers in 1968 on the basis of his excellent delivery of material
from Corneille’s Le Cid. There he followed a typical course of theatre instruc-
tion, adding the classic Greek dramatists and the contemporary absurdists to
his basic knowledge of the French classics. Of course, he studied no Arabic
dramatists and the first Amazigh drama was yet to be created.
Upon graduation he worked as an actor in various Algerian theatres, in
1985 joining the National Theatre, where his European-oriented training was
quite welcome. His first important success there was in The Art of Comedyy by
the contemporary Italian, Eduardo de Filippo. During the late 1980s the one-
man show was developing as a popular form in Algeria, and after gaining suc-
cess with his first venture in this form, Les Aventures de Tchop, in 1987, Fellag
192 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

created his most popular such work, Un bateau pour l’Australia (A Boat for
Australia), at the Bejaia theatre in 1991. The work was based on actual events
in Algeria in 1987, when a rumor swept the country that Australia was wel-
coming unemployed Algerian workers with jobs, housing, and a kangaroo.
The mobs that descended upon the Australian embassy demanding visas indi-
cated the extent of discontent in the country. Fellag’s work was performed
more than 300 times in Algeria and often revived later, its author/performer
widely compared with Dario Fo and Charlie Chaplin. Ahmed Khoudi, then
director of the Bejaia theatre, provided Fellag with his first opportunity,
indeed the first for any Algerian artist, to direct a play in Kabyle, his native
language. Mohya’s translations from Paris were now available, and in the fall
of 1991, in Sinni, Kabyle was heard for the first time on an Algerian stage.
Unhappily, the rapidly deteriorating political situation in the country
provided no opportunity at this time for this new direction to be pursued.
Just a few months after the première of Sinni, in December, legislative
elections were annulled and the military seized control of the country.
Violent protests followed, and these in turn stimulated mass arrests and
imprisonment in desert concentration camps. In June of 1992 President
Boudiaf was assassinated on the steps of the theatre of Annaba, four days
before Fellag was scheduled to perform Un Bateau pour l’Australie in this
very theatre. The wave of assassinations that followed included many jour-
nalists, intellectuals, and artists, including, as we have seen, some of the
most prominent names in the Algerian theatre. Like many others, Fellag
took refuge first in Tunisia, then in France, where he became an important
member of the Algerian theatrical community in exile.
The initiative begun by Sinni did not disappear, however, even in the
darkest days of the early 1990s. Other directors remained in Algeria, despite
considerable danger, and continued to develop a tradition that would
become an important part of the Algerian scene in the new century. The
first national festival of Amazigh theatre, “Amezgun N Jerjer,” was held in
Tizi-Ouzou a early as 1993, when internal violence was near its height. Tizi-
Ouzou is near the center of the part of Algeria where the Amazigh language
Kabyle is most widely spoken. Speakers of Kabyle have been the inevitable
leaders in the battle for recognition of these languages. Two dramatists
were featured in this festival, Mfouke Arezki and Mokrane Hammar. The
association that established this festival, under the leadership of Mokrane
Hammar, has continued its work since, growing steadily in range and impor-
tance. In October of 1995 the organization presented another Amazigh
festival at Tizi-Ouzou. The festival was held again in Algiers the following
May and has taken place almost yearly since that time. The eighth festival,
held in February of 2009, was the largest to date, presenting ten productions
in five days to an audience of over 5000. The festival was fittingly dedicated
to the memory of Kateb Yacine and included one of the best known works
of the contemporary Kabyle stage, Hammar’s Imehbas (The Prisoners).
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 193

The ongoing success of this festival has not only inspired the performance
of Amazigh plays elsewhere in Algeria, but, more recently, in Morocco
as well, which saw festivals of Amazigh theatre in Agadir in 2001 and
in Casablanca in 2006. In 2006 the well-known director Faouzia El-Hadj
was named the director of the Tizi-Ouzou theatre and under her leader-
ship the reputation of the theatre has grown and its commitment to
Kabyle theatre continued. In 2008, Business is Business, a satire about
a scheming and exploitative landlord written and directed by El-Hadj,
was premièred at Tizi-Ouzou and subsequently moved to the National
Theatre. Bejaia, a more important theatre center than Tizi-Ouzou, is also
located in the Kabyle-dominated part of Algeria. Here Sinni, the first
major Amazigh performance, took place in 1991, and the community
has maintained, with some difficulty, its commitment to that language
and culture. A new director, Arezki Tahar, was appointed at the theatre in
1993, at the height of the disturbance that took the lives of a number of
theatre artists and drove many others into exile. The historic Bejaia thea-
tre itself narrowly escaped destruction by a mob in 2001 not for artistic,
but political reasons, because Kabyle groups favoring dialogue with the
central government were reported to be meeting there. Tahar managed to
preserve his operation, and went on to produce two major productions
in Kabyle the following year, Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves
Favourr and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.11 Strikingly, the two Ait el Hadj
sisters have come to occupy a central place in the Amazigh drama move-
ment. In 2006, as Faouzia was assuming the directorship of the theatre
in Tizi-Ouzou, her sister Hamida also returned to Amazigh drama, staging
an adaptation by Omar Fetmouche of Rachid Minouni’s popular 1982
novel La Fleuve detourné, later presented at the TNA. She next presented
an Amazigh version of Benguettaf’s popular one-woman play Fatma,
updated to reflect more contemporary women’s concerns, premièred at
the TNA in 2008. It was performed by Razika Ferhan in a dazzling first
stage appearance. Although the language was understood by few, the
production was a great success. Mohammed Mahieddine noted that, “It
is the first time in history that such an enchantment has been recorded
on the part of the inhabitants of this region, despite the handicap of a
language which was not understood by most of those present.”12
The rise of Amazigh theatre in Algeria has been to some extent paralleled
by a decline there in theatre created in French, with drama in the Algerian
Arabic dialect now being the most common form. Nevertheless French,
classic and dialectal Arabic and Kabyle not only remain common theatri-
cal languages but also continue to be employed within a single play, as
was seen in the works of Kateb Yacine. As the 2008 success of Fatma at The
National Theatre demonstrates, the Algerian theatre-going public is increas-
ingly becoming willing to accept all these linguistic variations, providing an
unusually rich language base for future dramatists there.
 194
Figure 16 Tayeb Saddiki, Al-fil wa sarawil (photo courtesy of the Center for Performance Studies Archive, Tangier, Morocco)
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 195

Probably the most significant development within the Moroccan theatre

in the closing years of the twentieth century was the increasing use by
Moroccan dramatists of such traditional performative approaches as the
halqa and l’bsat. Tayeb Saddiki, as usual, was an important pioneer in this.
His 1995 Al-fil wa sarawil13 (The Elephant and Pants) was a landmark, a
bsatt performance conceived within the parameters of “Peoples’ Theatre”
in permanent search of an adequate tradition. Saddiki’s appeal to universal
theatres at the onset of the play is part of the strategy of writing-back, but
it is also an openness towards the Other and an invitation to egalitarian
interweaving between worldwide performance cultures. In Al-fil was-sarawil
(see Figure 16) Saddiki makes space for a new theatrical tradition in Morocco
that retrieves l’bsatt as an old Moroccan performance behavior that incor-
porates much of al-halqa’s performative techniques, and transposes it not
only into the present but also to the stage building. Saddiki’s negotiation of
l’bsatt is remarkably hybridized with other universal performance traditions.
He invokes international theatrical traditions and figures, bringing to the
fore a universal theatrical genealogy wherein he incorporates his present
practice of l’bsatt that is based on a fusion of dramatic representation and
epic narrativity:

Offering our obedience

Offering our obedience to those who precede us
Offering our obedience to those who taught us
Hamadani’s Maqamas, and the wise Majdub
The ears attended to their melodious asset
Sophocles and Shakespeare
Gogol and Molière
From famous to renowned
They cleared up the pathway
We’re following their footsteps
Partaking of their water
The brothers in charge of Peoples’ Theatre
The brothers in charge of l’bsatt Theatre.14

Here, Saddiki acknowledges the contributions of international figures from

theatrical history; yet at the same time, he foregrounds l’bsat’s
t tradition as a
legitimate performance culture that has been practiced by Moroccans since
the seventeenth century. Of course, the hybrid formation of the perform-
ance itself resists any claim to originality and authenticity even on the
part of Saddiki himself, for it is a blending of Western theatrical methods
and local techniques of l’bsat. The presence of archetypal comic characters,
such as L-mssiyah (who is very much similar to Harlequin of the commedia
dell’arte), becomes a great source of entertainment. They are transposed from
past to present, and from popular culture to theatrical space.
196 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Maqamat Badia Ezzamane El-Hamadani is another l’bsatt experiment that

was written and directed by Saddiki in a series of performances throughout
the 1990s. All these performances are subtitled as bsat tarfihi (Entertaining
Bsat). This project constitutes another turning point in Moroccan theatre
as it restores the performative qualities of maqamat’s narrativity15 back
to the Moroccan and Arab stage. In the prologue, Saddiki asserts that his
present performance practice is no other than a restoration of a deeply
rooted tradition:

In my endless quest for an original Arab and particularly Moroccan

theatrical form, I’ve found in Badiaa Ezzamane’s maqama written a thou-
sand years ago, dramatic structures, and intrigues. As to dramatis personae,
Issa Bnou Hicham leads them … Abdul Fath who is all in one: the Arab
Juha, the Turkish Nasreddine, Commedia dell’arte’s Harlequin, Molière’s
Scapin, Plautus’s Milphion, and even Beaumarchais’s Figaro.16

The play takes place in an open public square. At the outset, Saddiki’s
narrator announces that it can be any of the famous Arab squares: it can be
Al-Halfaouin of T Tunis, or Harun Arrachid’s square in Baghdad, or the Green
Ataba of Cairo, or more likely, “our magical Jemaa-el-fna” in Marrakesh.
Then the two prominent bsatt personae playfully call the attention of audi-
ences. Other actors play audiences too while preparing to take on one of the
roles. Like most halqas of the bsatt tradition, the performance lacks an organic
thematic unity, for it is fragmented into little furjas (performances) or halqas
that have only one common aspect: that is, the master narrator. In the
first furja, Issa Bnou Hicham tells the story of his friend, poet Abdoul Fath
Al-Iskandari whom he surprisingly runs into in one of the halqas of Baghdad.
Abdoul Fath justifies his present situation as a performer and condemns the
decadent spirit of his society. The second furja is composed of five maqamas
wherein the two friends Issa Bnou Hicham and Aboul Fath Al Iskandari have
more stories to perform. All these stories are derived from the maqamas, yet
theatricalized as fragmented little performances following the dynamics of
the halqa and its fluidity of subject matter. The most recent bsatt perform-
ance in Morocco was a play entitled Lbsaytiya (The bsatt People), performed
at the National Festival of Theatre, July 2006, by one of Marrakesh’s most
prominent theatre companies, Warchat Ibdae Drama. Lbsaytiya also repro-
duces the fragmented form of the furja and is presumably staged in the
famous square of Jemaa-el-Fna.
Ahmed Tayeb Laalej, who has been called the Moroccan Molière, has also
employed al-halqas in many of his theatrical performances. His use of the
rhymed language of the popular nawadirr (plural of nadira, an extraordinary
tale) is highly influenced by the age-old al-halqa’s dynamics of narrativity.
His theatre has been established since the 1950s as a popular form that
draws upon French comedy, commedia dell’arte, and most importantly,
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 197

the rich repertoire of al-halqa. In Juha wa chajarat a-tufah17 (Juha and the
Apple Tree, 1998), Laalej uses al-halqa’s techniques of telling/showing, and
a story that stems from deeply rooted orality. The techniques deployed by
Laalej mix storytelling with epic devices represented by the Rawi’s narra-
tion and comments on the action taking place onstage, and a dramatic
line that unveils the events to an onstage audience as well as to those in
a possible auditorium or outer ring. Laalej’s figures of speech involve witty
plays on words and explore themes of corruption and social injustice. Juha
and the Apple
A Tree, for example, is an ironic representation of the deeply
rooted corruption of elections in Morocco. The egocentric and hypocritical
Juha uses whatever means are available in order to win over his potential
voters. Once elected and raised to the top of the fruitful apple tree, he
disregards his supporters. Laalej’s name is known all over the Arab world,
although his intriguing dramaturgy has been widely influential only within
Morocco. Saddiki, on the other hand, has become the leading dramatist
of Ceremonial theatre on all Arab stages. The reason for this is that Laalej
writes in extremely subtle rhymed colloquial Moroccan Arabic that is hardly
accessible for non-Moroccan Arabs.
Abdelhaq Zerouali is another important contributor to the revival of
halqa performance, a solo actor who has been performing his monodramas
for more than four decades now in the most remote corners of Morocco.
Deeply informed by the tradition of storytelling, Zerouali’s theatre (Figure 17)
is a real experimental site for the re-invention of the halqa’s potential as a
performance space. Kidtu Arah18 (I Was about to See) is an exemplary halqa-
inspired solo performance. It is an adaptation of the Book of Standings (Kitab
al-Mawaqif) and Addresses (Mukhatabat) by the tenth-century Sufi mystic
Mohammed an-Niffari, a fascinating collection of visionary poems divided
into 77 “standings,” each in the form of a brief divine revelation addressed
to the sincere seeker on the path of a spiritual quest. These two mystical
texts are in fact very theatrical in nature, given the dialogic nature of the
Addresses, where the voice of God is utilized. Zerouali seizes these moments
of intensity and explores them onstage. The play opens with the divine words:
“if you cannot see me, you are not with me, if you see an other-than-me, you
do not see me.” Zerouali uses Sufi reflections on veiled reality as tools for tell-
ing and showing within the frame of narrative theatre, though sometimes
he runs the risk of disrupting the process through his signature digressions,
full of witty jokes and sexual innuendo.
By being attentive to Niffari’s poetic formulations pertaining to the psy-
chological obstacles that confront the seeker, Zerouali seems to perform the
paradigmatic dialectic between self-scrutiny as an introverted journey deep
within the innermost recesses of his being and ascetic forms of spirituality as
a strict adherence to the Islamic shari’a. The interplay of divine instruction
and human response constitutes the basis of the solo performance. However,
it is made far more explicitly pedagogical and overtly symbolic in structure
198 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Figure 17 Kidtu Arah by Abdelhaq Zerouali (photo from Khalid Amine’s collection)

and tone than in the more palpably experiential, directly expressive work of
Niffari. Reaching back into Sufi history, Zerouali takes Niffari’s verse, “Why
do you seek for knowledge when you could know the knower?” as his guiding
principal throughout the performance. Also, in this particular performance,
Zerouali’s use of spiritual music and Sufi body movement are made integral
elements of his journey to unlocking the mysteries hidden within those
forms. Inspired by the Sufi tradition, particularly the whirling dervishes, who
use dance to access the higher levels of consciousness, Zerouali sets out in
search of God. His journey advances by slow stages called maqamatt in the
Sufi lexicon, with Niffari’s Mawaqiff and Mukhatabatt acting as spiritual guide,
to the goal of union with reality where attention blissfully turns inward and
spiritual ecstasy is performed as a state of intoxication.
Mohammed Derham, a founding member of Morocco’s renowned music
group Jil Jilalla, composed the music for the performance, which weaves
together themes of creation and various forms of spiritual journeying.
The scenography of Kidtu Arah is another strong factor in the success of
this performance. Carried out by a young laureate of the High Institute of
Dramatic Art19 named Youssef El-Arkoubi, the scenography was recognized
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 199

as the best of the year and won first prize at the National Theatre Festival
of Meknes in 2003 (along with the prize for the best text and best actor
given to Zerouali). The principle governing El-Arkoubi’s scenography is the
metaphor of sailing as a journey and climbing, or rather reaching out beyond
oneself and embracing divinity.
Sghir El-Meskini’s bu-jma’ l-faruj20 (Bu-Jma’ the Rooster, 2004) is yet
another drama that makes use of the space of al-halqa. The performance
invites audiences to join the circle of a group of hlayqiya (professional
comic entertainers). The whole halqa is orchestrated by the famous hlayqi,
Lmqadum bou-jma’ l-faruj, who narrates along with the other hlayqiya the
story of the multi-faceted Ghul (an evil spirit that changes its form), that
of the people of the village, and that of ‘Azri d-duwar, the reluctant hero.
The play rapidly develops its events using musical and dance rhythms that
encourage the audience to reflect upon the various contradictions that
constitute the core of Bu-jma’s story. Sghir makes use of a very simple
story, yet within an intricate plot and a rather non-linear structure. In this
story of a village people who have been exploited, terrified, and robbed by
a multi-faced Ghul, their major weaknesses are exposed: hypocrisy, fear,
and lack of team spirit. All these are treated in a comic way that ironically
comments on the true vices of such a small community.
Bu-jma’ l-faruj is a play that is informed by a complex self-reflexive network
involving a series of meta-theatrical devices such as the play-within-a-play,
role-playing within the role, ceremony within the play, and literary and real
life referents. The play’s stage directions insist on the playing of different
roles by the same actor. As a result, Bu-Jma’ plays the role of the leader of
the halqa, the main narrator of the story, and the policeman; Moulay Bih
plays Zineb, one of the village people, a policeman, and the son of the
buried; Al-hrash plays Al-Ghul, the butcher, the respectful man, Abass, the
judge, and the outsider; Mimoun plays ’azri Duwar (Ahmed Bou Shama),
the disguised girl, the immigrant, and the tourist; Al-’aydi plays only one
role, yet he is transformed and transposed to different settings as the story
develops. All these devices draw attention to the mechanisms of playwrighting,
acting, and directing in a self-reflexive, yet comic way. Sghir’s play, then,
insists on representing representation itself through foregrounding theatrical
semiosis to the extent that the audience becomes implicated in the making
of the representational act in a conscious way.
The play also manifests a subversion of conventional hierarchical struc-
tures in the theatrical mode of representation through the contrary effects
of double distancing between stage/auditorium, actor/character, illusion/
reality, and dramatic/epic. Throughout the text and the performance, frag-
mentary little dramas, clusters of images, and snatches of actions function
as metaphors for a theatrical reality, access to which can be gained only sub-
jectively. The most significant features of the play involve its subjection of
theatrical representation to scrutiny. Dramatic language in Bu-jma’ lfaruj is
200 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

permeated by a subtle obscenity and the colloquial jargon of Darb Sultan (an
over-populated poor neighborhood of Casablanca). Such verbal wit consti-
tutes a major comic element. However, the use of slang and jargon is part
of Sghir’s strategy to emancipate language and free it from everyday life’s
restrictions. This “third language’ (Arbadajiya) that is constructed between
the formal and informal variations, articulates an inner cultural violence
against the language of the halqa performance. Through the deployment
of an in-between language, Sghir negotiates a new space for dramatic writ-
ing that strives to retrieve all that used to be seen as inferior and low and
exalt it into the realm of the sublime. It is another way of reconciling the
Moroccan public with theatre practice, by means of rehabilitating popular
comic performances.
Since Saddiki’s Majdub, al-halqa has been a vital source in restoring tradi-
tion. Zober Benbouchta’s play Lalla J’mila (Figure 18), subsidized by the
Ministry of Culture in 2004 and 2006, exemplifies the dynamism of old
ways hybridized with new artistic venues. Lalla J’mila 21 is an act of
memory as well as a scrupulous process of excavating and stripping away
layers of little histories and fragmented first-person narratives to reveal

Figure 18 Zober Benbouchta, Lalla J’mila (photo courtesy of the Center for
Performance Studies Archive, Tangier, Morocco)
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 201

the interpenetration of space, culture, and gender. It unlocks histories of

Moroccan sexual politics within an extreme situation marked by colonial
hegemony on the one hand, and the deeply rooted local patriarchal mindset
on the other. Negotiating centrality and marginality, high culture and low
mass culture, masculinity and femininity, the play braids together local and
global issues. And it reveals steps and missteps in the women’s liberation
movements and the pervasive legends that surround the mythic city of
Tangier as an Inter-Zone.
The play is composed of seven scenes that the playwright refers to as
“lightings.” An overview of these “lightings” might be helpful to illuminate
the dramaturgical construction of the text. In the first lighting, entitled
“The Girls’ Rock,” Itto joins Lalla J’mila in her miserable cave over the
legendary Girls’ Rock. She is considered an unwelcome intruder, yet after
unmasking her identity, Lalla J’mila realizes that she has a sister. In the
second lighting, “Lalla Yennou,” Lalla J’mila and her mother are forced by
Ba’haddo to collect and thrash spines as a punishment for their joining
in Lalla Yennou’s anti-colonial song in the public bath. The Faqiha Lalla
Yennou22 is seen as a militant woman, the first to abandon her djellaba and
veil and trespass into the male domain in both the ritualistic procession
of Bouarrakia and the world of literacy. In the third lighting, “The Seven
Waves,” Itto begins to reveal her past, which is full of tension and trauma.
Her overburdened narrative is interrupted as she loses consciousness. Itto’s
narrative reaches its climax in the fourth lighting, “Liberty Avenue,” in
which she reveals that when she was a student, police arrested her because
of her participation in a student strike.
The fifth lighting, “Ould Lgllassa,” represents the most tragic moments of
the performance at large. Itto painfully dramatizes her sexual abuse and rape
by the police while in custody. Itto learns that Ould Lgllassa, the policeman
who was chosen by his colleagues to rape her, is her brother, the illegiti-
mate son of her father Ba’haddo. In the sixth lighting, “The Subterranean
Storehouse,” the focus is on Lalla J’mila, who narrates how she was forced
by her stepfather to marry a polygamous and authoritarian Sheikh, but
ran away. These tragic moments are permeated by a sharp comicality that
invokes a peculiar kind of laughter, laughter which arises from deep sadness.
In the seventh lighting, “The Winged One,” after escaping from their tragic
predicament, the two sisters are finally free from all paternalistic confines
and are ready to fly over and beyond the male domain. Flying thus becomes
a metaphorical agency.
The stories within the play frequently subvert power relations and ulti-
mately insure the triumph of the unfortunate in a fabulous utopian narrative.
Throughout her journey in the realm of storytelling, the run-away wife Lalla
J’mila tends to glorify her access to male domains: “It is simply a question of
djellaba and turban, and all doors were opened to me. If only you could have
seen me when I was a man: I used to walk in the street like a prince, head
202 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

high and feet on the ground, with firm pace, walking long distances without
fear. There was nobody gazing at me or following me with his eyes, and there
was nobody paying attention to whether I was fat or thin. There was nobody
to ask why I wore this and didn’t wear that”23 Thus, Lalla J’mila assumes full
presence until she is forced to disclose her femaleness. Within the space of
al-halqa’s storytelling, which “protects the weapons of the weak against the
reality of the established order,”24 the two sisters’ narratives become a means
of empowerment when other means are denied or beyond their reach.
Struggles of national liberation and private battles of self-assertion are
intricately linked in a variety of ways. “As a little girl,” Lalla J’mila recalls,
“accompanying my mother in her visits to the F’qiha Lalla Yennou, I used to
hear them talking about the year of hunger and Franco’s military campaign
in which he occupied Tangier in the year 1940. It is said that as soon as the
Spanish had entered the city, food supplies were cut off; the military took
everything and left people starving … and provisions were distributed by
vouchers.”25 Under such conditions, women led by the Fqiha Lalla Yennou Y
were also taking part in the national struggle for independence. In their
everyday practice, they were striving to fight illiteracy and patriarchal
power structures, as well as the repressive and ideological colonial appa-
ratuses. They turned places like the public Turkish Bath, ironically named
“Franco,” into arenas for giving voice to their discontent as subaltern and
colonized subjects: “Lalla Yennou composed a song that women started to
sing. One day, as they were accompanying a bride to Franco’s Hamam, they
started to sing”:

Oh! Poor plowman,

Overloaded with debts,
His only food is Gou’rnine,
Cooked with Rou’jla,
In every village,
Mek’hzen would swindle,
And would order a queue up,
They would be burnt with sun.26

The song, supposed to be apolitical and entertaining, turns out to be a sharp

social satire and a carnivalesque mirror of topsyturvidom. The women’s
song disrupts the authority of the colonizers as well as their Moroccan
representatives such as Ba’haddou, whose wife is part of the chorus. In brief,
Lalla J’mila performs the politics of gender in present-day Morocco with the
advent of the new family code (mudawanat al-ussra). Benbouchta’s play was
written for and co-produced by an active feminist network right after the
implementation of this new law in 2003. It is among the few feminist-
conscious writings that appeared in Morocco in response to the new code.
In its persistence in problematizing the old-fashioned division between
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 203

public and private space, the play also searches for a better correlation
between space and women’s corporeal existence; and in so doing, it calls for
a complete shake-up of paternalistic policies of the family.
Fragments (first performed in Agadir on 25 March 2008 by the Amazigh
feminist playwright, scholar, and director Zohra Makach) is another recent
performance that deploys al-halqa’s framing narrativization of fragmented
stories of four lonely and disenfranchised characters: a widow (who speaks
in the Amazigh language of the Sous valley), a misled woman (who speaks
Moroccan Darija, a variety of colloquial Arabic), a raped girl (who is French),
and a gay man (who is Amazigh). Their narratives are much fragmented
through successive interruptions. The narrative framing of their stories
exemplifies the overflow of old ways into new ones; these are instances of
post-colonial modernity insofar as they employ the age-old techniques of
al-halqa in a different context. Framing is more than an artistic device in the
traditional storytellers’ halqa; it is a matter of survival too. Scheherazade’s
heirs are conscious of the spellbinding effects of framing as a strategy of
telling stories within-stories-within-stories ad infinitum. By doing so, they
survive and continue telling stories. This tradition relates strongly to the
Arabian Nights, since framing is what keeps Scheherazade alive. It is one of
the secrets of al-halqa’s performative boundlessness. Stories remain unfin-
ished, and framed within other stories, all sharing the same common base.
Interruptions similar to al-halqa’s artistic intermissions are made part of the
performative fabric of Makach’s first fragment. Confined within a wardrobe
with windows, mirrors, and curtains, the four performers have to physically
and psychologically submit to a stage situation which ostensibly appears to
confine and restrict their physicality. Makach transforms the most private
space of one’s dwelling into a stage that can be shared within the perform-
ance. The visual metaphor of a wardrobe invokes a manifestation of psy-
chic states that mirror the most intimate desires and fears. The spectator is
invited to discover the intimate drama of each character through free-form
monologues that suggest stream of consciousness techniques. The music
starts, one notices the choreography behind the curtains, and then an off-
stage voice speaks. Makach stages fragments of miserable lives representing
beings who are survivors of traditional Moroccan prejudice and patriarchal
xenophobia and heterosexism. Discontent is the common feeling among all
the characters; they are all victims of a deeply rooted patriarchal mind-set
and tradition:

The widow: I was born, I married, I died…

The misled woman: She looks at the mirror. I was born, I married, I died…
The raped girl: She looks at the mirror. I was born, someone raped
me, someone killed me...
The man: I was born, my mother cramped me; she killed
me…
204 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

The widow: I was married at the age of 13; he was the age of my
father…
The misled woman: My marriage was a love match, love deceived me,
marriage deceived me, I was deceived ...
The raped girl: I am the woman without a position; I am a victim of a
kind of curse for life. There is no man for me. There
are only drafts, one enters and the other leaves ... Me,
I am neither for sale, nor to give away, since the age of
ten everything has gone away, everything ...27

Makach’s Fragments is about victimhood. As a restless generation who have

emerged in contemporary Moroccan society today, these victims, rather
than heroes, strive to get away from the fabric of conservative discursive
structures. Makach’s critique goes far beyond the typical feminist discourse
in Morocco. Her presentation of the two traditional victims of patriarchy,
the misled woman and the widow, are only a first level treatment of the
issue. The first victim is a battered wife who is condemned to live with an
abusive spouse, and a suffocating social environment victimizes the second.
Her audacity in violating patriarchal taboos is a real challenge to the deeply
rooted phallic discourse even inside the field of theatre practice. Makach’s
subversive vision characterizes the institution of rape as epidemic these days.
Feelings of shame, guilt, and unwillingness to speak about the traumatic
event of rape permeate the raped girl’s narrative and exemplify symptoms
of post-traumatic stress. As an institutionalized victim, the raped girl, who
is neither a virgin nor a married woman, is stigmatized by Muslim society as
a threat. What happens in the third and fourth fragments is an inversion of
roles. where the raped girl takes revenge through a seductive assault against
lustful males:

Women: Why you unveil us? You never saw a woman?

(The women encircle the man, he kneels, he closes his ears, one hears
Gipsy music and witnesses a choreographed movement: the women
wrap the man on the ground with a red fabric and dance around
him.)28

Makach also provides an intimate look at the life of a gay man who was
pushed by his mother to marry a woman. His sexual experience with the
wrong partner forced him into a revelation that he hates women. “She killed
me … The first night, I could not move any more, I could not walk any more,
I collapsed … She is a monster … During the day she is a woman; she can do
everything. The night, she can devour a human being … I hate her, she is
the man; she is the man. I hate women … I hate women …” (Fragments
( , 5).
His monologues liberate him from the previously unvoiced rejection of
heterosexism, and imply an eventual self-acceptance of his homosexuality.
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 205

Again, Makach confronts us with the cultural fear of gay men as Others. In
brief, Makach’s Fragments utilizes some of the old framing devices of al-halqa
within a contemporary dramaturgical structure, to create an uncompromis-
ing and angry critique. Makach stands out among contemporary Amazigh
authors in her focus on the cultural constructions of gender and class rather
than Amazigh identity.
In her 2009 Aswat Koltes (Voices of Koltès) Makach demonstrates that in
the work of the French dramatist Bernard-Marie Koltès she found many of
the themes and devices that characterized her own self-reflexive and post-
modern work – displacement, fragmentation, and “liminal de-representation.”
Utilizing fragments of several Koltès plays, in Amazigh, Moroccan dialect,
African languages, and French, the production traced the sufferings of some
of Koltès’s most disenfranchised characters: the Arab (Aziz), the mysterious
African (Alboury), the French (Adrien); even the dog. Through the many
fragmented voices and disenfranchised bodies, the performance juggles
astutely between monologues and sharp-edged encounters, between insults
in daylight and confessions of dark nights. Cinematographic choreography
permeates the performance, marking the emergence of a new mode of
theatrical representation in Morocco informed by visual dramaturgy and
“intermediality.”29 The visual landscapes and quotations from Bernard Marie
Koltès’s plays subvert the traditional formulations of meaning and percep-
tion through fragmented narrative frames and mental systems and Makach
further complicates the web of intertextuality through her weaving together
of different artistic media. Through various simulational dimensions typical
of hyperrealism the performance suggests that preconceived realities, iden-
tities, and subjectivities are no more than cultural constructs duplicated
by the medium of theatre and its unlimited representational strategies.
Hierarchies between original and copy, unmediated presence and represen-
tation, live and mediatized performance are all deconstructed.
By such radical restructuring, Makach challenges not only conventional
Moroccan modes of representation, but perception too, by inviting audi-
ences to construct their own meaning of what is happening around them
rather than onstage. Her persistence on unsettling the traditional hierarchi-
cal representation inherent in Moroccan theatre is clearly apparent in her
introduction of filmic representation, which creates fluctuating identities
in a volatile time and space. Makach may thus be seen as simultaneously
reimagining traditional performance approaches like the halqa and explor-
ing the most radical contemporary challenges to traditional modes of
representation. She is clearly one of the central examples of the complex
workings of postmodernism in the Moroccan theatre.
For almost half a century, al-halqa has been a vital source of energy in
Moroccan theatre. Its retrieval for the stage exemplifies the potential of what
Erika Fisher-Lichte calls “Interweaving Performance Cultures.” Most Moroccan
performances inspired by al-halqa have been somehow informed, not to say
206 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

controlled, by Saddiki’s Al-Majdub, treating this form as a museum piece rather

than the first step of an experimental project that is open to new developments.
The enormous potentialities of al-halqa still remain largely unexplored at the
practical level. There are no records of any interdisciplinary experimentation
of al-halqa’s repertoire of pre-expressivity, or even more, its acting techniques
that would exalt the actor’s energy and presence in a methodic way. The
Moroccan halqa is still an “Art as presentation” as opposed to Grotowski’s last
phase of research, labeled by Peter Brook “Art as vehicle.” Al-halqa as presen-
tation is still conceived within the age-old confines of Manichaeism: Actor/
spectator. However, if al-halqa is elevated into the level of Art as vehicle, then
there would be no actors/spectators, only doers. The circularity of the halqa has
the potential, ideally, to transmit energy and tune bodies and minds together.
The current critical emphasis on self-referentiality brings to the fore another
important component in postmodern theatre practice in Morocco (and else-
where in the Maghreb) besides the reinvention of tradition, namely its
engagement in privileging representation and simulacra.
Here, as in so much of modern Moroccan theatre, Saddiki provides a
major point of reference. His 1990 Le Diner de Gala (The Gala Dinner)
exemplifies his life-long project of interweaving performance traditions
belonging to East and West and experimentation with theatre and perform-
ance conventions. The play can be seen as a passionate lament about one
of the tragic moments of Moroccan theatrical history, the ruthless decision
to demolish one of a very limited number of theatre buildings in Morocco,
the Théâtre Municipal of Casablanca, where Saddiki himself served as
artistic director for about ten years. The play offers a histrionic reflection
on the Théâtre Municipal’s theatrical repertoire in particular, and a critical
reflection on the brief history of Moroccan theatre and its present predica-
ment. The setting is a micro-theatre that is situated on the stage, a fact that
establishes a constant effect of double distancing. It is a theatre with its own
stage and auditorium within another macro-theatre. The on-stage theatre
is supposedly the Théâtre Municipal in its last moments. The whole action
takes place at the last night of the on-stage theatre that will be demolished
the next day.
Le Diner de Gala30 opens with the last scene of Shakespeare’s Othello as the
last performance in the onstage theatre before its demolition. The actor playing
Othello is seen preparing on the stage, and repeating Othello’s famous farewell
to life and arms. The speech thus also suggests Saddiki’s anguish at the loss of
a real national pearl, this theatre, and the conspiracy of a new betrayer of this
oasis of freedom. Instead of the original final speech of Shakespeare’s hero,
Saddiki creates a farewell ceremony headed by his own protagonist, Ali Chatter,
an actor, director, and manager of a theatre company. The transhistorical gala
dinner itself is hosted by Ali Chatter as a tribute to the dying theatre and is
attended by artists from different epistemes – Van Gogh, Molière, William
Shakespeare (Big Bill), Orson Welles, Badie E-zzamane El-Hamadani, Abou
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 207

Naouass, Bakshish, Malik Jalouk, Abidates R’ma, Ahoush, and Ahidous. With
the exception of Shakespeare, these guests were marginalized, misunderstood,
or even condemned during their lifetimes, and canonized after their death.
The miserable condition of the artist is the link between most of these guests,
as Chatter admits: “Poor actor, you will never see glory while alive, maybe
after death.”31 At the close of the play an actor moves toward the audience and
declares: “The Municipal Theatre of Casablanca was effectively destroyed on
31 May 1984.”32 The play, then, is framed by metatheatrical concerns. Besides
the existence of a stage-within-a-stage and the representation of characters as
actors in a theatrical rehearsal, the transhistorical dinner party brings to the
fore different
f theatrical traditions in a self-reflexive way. All of the transhistori-
cal artists are transplanted into a different time and space so as to witness the
destruction of Chatter’s oasis of freedom, and at the end of the play Chatter is
left alone and without a theatrical location.
An important strategy for the subversion, even temporary, of the theatrical
apparatus, has been the development of impromptu (or improvised) theatri-
cal projects, sometimes developed to almost absurd extremes and refusing to
compromise when it comes to the politics of reception. Mohammed Kaghat
is the best representative of the subversive Moroccan murtajala (L’impromptu
(
théàtrale/the
/ Improvised play). He is an academic, playwright, director, and
actor who is well acquainted with the Western tradition of impromptu
with all its self-reflexive dispositiff and its comic yet ironic representation of
theatre problematics since Molière’s L’Impromptu de Versailles and Critique
de L’école des Femmes. In his prologue to Murtajalat Fes33 (The Impromptu of
Fez), Kaghat not only legitimatizes his practice of the Impromptu, but also
our need for such a theatre practice: “Because our theatre suffers from all
kinds of problems, I have adapted the Impromptu in order to expose them
to the audience after I realized that discussing problems is not as effective as
performing them onstage. Through Irony and Comicality and the exaggera-
tion of comic situations I desire to create a dark comedy.”34 Thus, the impro-
vised play becomes a theatre practice that is based on an unfinished dramatic
script; full of holes that must be filled in the process of the performance event
through actors’ improvisation. This dynamic enlarges the freedom of the
actors, who contribute a great deal in the rewriting of the dramatic script at
every performance.
The murtajala is comic through and through, due to its hilarious witty
dialogues, comic situations, and dramatis personae and its sharp critique of
theatre practice within its social milieu. Nevertheless, it is considered a dark
comedy, as it foregrounds the old Moroccan saying “more sadness makes
you laugh.” In The Impromptu of Fez, for example, and through an ironic
representation of the corrupt and ruthless judge Al-kadi Yazref, Kaghat
reminds us of one of the most painful moments in Moroccan theatre’s brief
history, namely the Fakih Ahmed Ben Saddik’s fatwa against the practice
of theatre and acting at large: “Ah… Ah… You don’t know that acting is
208 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

forbidden by divine law? Haven’t you read the book of Ikamatu dàlili àla
hurmati at-tamtili? You don’t know that the imitation of non-believers
is forbidden …”35 Such a statement sums up a whole mindset that still
regards theatre as an evil practice which should be eradicated from Arabo-
Islamic culture. Kaghat’s ironic reflection on the subject illustrates the true
problems that hinder artistic expression in Morocco. Yet, in the murtajalat
Chmisa Lalla,36 the general public’s incessant search for trivialities and non-
substantial laughter changes suddenly into a state of deep sorrow. Lalla
Chmisa, daughter of the Sultan, can no longer laugh or enjoy the beauty
of life because of such sadness. So the Sultan asks all actors and entertain-
ers of the country to restore her smile and discover the causes behind her
deep sorrow. The play critiques the reification of theatre practice under
government auspices (especially the highly critical amateur theatre of the
1970s), and reveals the impotence of most selected juries in the National
Festival of Amateur Theatre. Lajnat Al-hukàm al-hukamaa al-muhanàkin
(The Committee of Wise and Fat Jurymen) is supposed to be the savior of
Lalla Chmisa. But what happens in the play is quite the opposite, for they
deepen her sadness. This fact illustrates their incompetence and inability
to appreciate substantial art. The representation of the committee’s debates
and suggestions reveal their theatrical illiteracy, a fact that creates ironic
situations.
The Impromptu of Casablanca (Arabic Version 2003/French Version 2005)
by Masrah Adifa Al-Ukhra (The Other Bank Theatre Company) also stages
the predicament of theatre practice in Morocco during the present period,
which is often called the period of change (with Mohammed El-Achàri
as Minister of Culture between 1998 and 2007). Through an intricate
deployment of black humor, the play dismantles the hegemonic discur-
sive structures that control theatre practice in Morocco. This predicament
is manifestly related to the status of the arts and artists in a country that
still regards artistic expression as a luxury rather than being functional in
the construction of cultural identity. The play’s comicality invokes a bitter
laugh, a laugh that laughs at the absurd situation wherein these trained
young actors of the High Institute of Dramatic Art (ISADAC) find them-
selves thrown into a social structure that hinders art as a profession.37 More
than that, and through an ironic representation of the National Theatre’s
previous director and his naïve understanding of the needs and demands of
professionals, the play sharply critiques government policies as regards
theatre and calls for an urgent change. These young professionals have
chosen the improvised form as a means to make a statement. Their message
was presented within comic situations that are carried to absurd extremes
invoking what might be called “bitter laughter.” Because their situation
(and that of all other Moroccan artists) is so disturbing at all levels, they
have chosen to laugh at it.
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 209

One of the most moving improvised plays commenting on contemporary

Moroccan theatre has been that presented by the Masrah al-yawm company
entitled Imta nbdaw imta (When Are We Going to Start, When?). It was first
performed in 1997 and featured the renowned Moroccan actress Touria
Jebrane in the leading role. The performance was an oscillation between
the miserable life of theatre artists on the one hand, and the characters in their
dramas on the other. The ensemble is unable to find a theatre location, for
they are ordered to abandon the rehearsal space time and again. The play,
then, becomes a reflection on the crisis of Moroccan theatre, a crisis that is
caused by censorship, the lack of both theatre buildings and a stimulating
subsidy system.38 Play and parody are the main weapons in Masrah Al-Yawm’s
arsenal, for they possess the innate ability to confront authority and censor-
ship and assert autonomy.
However, the political rhetoric of the play seems to offer a critique of the
state of hesitation that marked political reconciliation between king and
opposition in the mid-nineties in Morocco, just before the government of
tanawub (Alternance) led by socialist leader Abderrahman Youssefi as Prime
Minister in 1998. The performance asked a fundamental question related to
Morocco’s political condition in 1997: “When are we going to start?” Masrah
al-yawm is a politically committed theatre company and the question was
all about the political situation of Morocco in the mid-nineties, which was
characterized by dialogue between the monarchy and the opposition. It is
all about the start of a democratic process in the country. The perform-
ance investigates the political context that preceded the capitulation of the
socialist leaders to the regime in 1998, accepting the position of a façade
hiding the wheels of an age-old machine. When Are We Going to Start W When?
asked the most painful questions after 40 years of independence. If it
is true that we are now on the verge of redefining ourselves as a nation,
will theatre continue to serve our needs for escape from the more painful
imperatives of time, or can it again become, a creative, meaningful force in
our lives? Touria Jebrane, the leading actress of Masrah al-yawm, and her
husband Abdelwaahed Ouzri, the artistic director of the company and one
of the most intelligent minds in Moroccan theatre, seemed to struggle with
this question during their entire theatrical journey including the years when
Touria Jebrane became Minister of Culture.
Tchach is among the dramas that appeared during the reconciliation period
following 1998.39 It was performed in Morocco’s national festival of Meknes
in July 2008 by a semi-professional theatre company called Wamadat, led by
the artistic director Omar Sahnoun from Agadir. Set against a background of
economic crisis and political tension between opposition and the monarchy
in the 1970s and 1980s, the play recounts life among the vulnerable, yet
resilient political detainees in Morocco (some of whom were imprisoned for
no reason). Tchach investigates the uncertainty and doubt that surround the
whole process of political reconciliation in Morocco since 1998, a demarcating
210 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

date of transition wherein some parties of the opposition were called to join
in governing. The ex-president of the Union of Moroccan Writers, poet and
columnist Mohammed Al-Achàri became the Minister of Culture in Morocco
in 1998.40 The Karnaval, written by Mohammed Amine Benyoub and pro-
duced by Al-Kasbah Theatre Company in 2006, also stages fragments con-
cerning political prisoners. The play was inspired by family memories and
especially by those of the writer’s brother Jamal Benyoub, who spent eight
years in prison and was released on 17 January 1992. Min Ajlihim (For Them)
is another drama related to political imprisonment, directed by Naima Zitan
and produced by the Aquarium Theatre Company in 2010, it is based on
selected poems from prison. The Aquarium Theatre Company was founded
in 1994 by Naima Zitan, Naima Oulmakki, and Abdullatif Oulmakki. Against
the backdrop of political transition in Morocco, the company draws its
strength from being political in nature, deeply committed to social theatre
and to the cause of gender equality and respect of women’s rights. Qabla
Al-Futurr (Before Breakfast, 1997) is another production of Aquarium that
critiques the behavior of the majority of Moroccan male intellectuals who
practice their version of modernity only outside their own homes. Hkayaat
Nssa (Women’s Stories, 1999) is a drama that stages narratives of five women
on board a ship. With Aquarium, theatre, utilized in the service of the down-
trodden, has become a real platform for social change.
Spared many of the difficulties suffered by the Algerian and Moroccan
theatre communities toward the end of the twentieth century, the Tunisian
theatre has become one of the most advanced and experimental in the entire
Arab world. On 27 March 1993, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali41 made
the decision to transform the old regional theatre companies into Regional
Centres of Dramatic Art. The incentive behind such a decision was to enlarge
the household tasks of these centres to include also a permanent program of
practical training and supervision of theatre companies in the region. “It was
decided at first to create centers of dramatic arts at El Kef, Gafsa, and the
National centre for Puppet Theatre in Tunis.”42 To implement President
Ben Ali’s decision to craft a plan intended to boost the role of community
arts centres and guarantee their immediate impact, the Ministry laid down
a national plan to upgrade these centres. The Cabinet meeting held under
the aegis of the President of the Republic on 1 August 2001 approved this
new agenda. The actions of the community arts centres were completely
transformed in 2007. Upgrading led to improvement of content – in accord-
ance with the plan whose launching the President had ordered to mark the
twentieth anniversary of the Change, when Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had
acceded to the highest executive office on 7 November 1987. The result was
a sudden increase in independent professional companies, and also more
independent theatres.
Tawfiq Jebali founded the first private theatre in Tunisia, El Teatro, in 1987,
which has remained a leader in this movement. For much of its career, Klem
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 211

Ellil (Night’s Talks) has been El Teatro’s most popular series of performances,
although these are only one facet of Jelabi’s theatrical experimentation. For
Jebali, Klem Ellil was initiated as a marginal theatrical experiment in 1989.
His intention was to move beyond the age-old proscenium tradition, which
Arabic theatre borrowed from the West. “The project started as a free play
at all levels: text, music, visual components ... It was shocking for audiences
when we first presented it here in this theatre,” Jebali admits.43 The project
was inspired by a TV show of the same name and, like the German Kabaret,
deals with topical political and social issues, local and international, in a
highly ironic and cynical way. Klem Ellil interpolates the imaginary of the
Tunisian public in its own particular way. It has become the trademark of El
Teatro, a highly popular show that combines comedy, TV techniques, and
multimedia theatrics to produce a unique performance. The “klem” (words)
acquire a cardinal importance in Jebali’s theatrical enterprise, and inspire its
totally unpredictable scenography as well as its appealing strangeness.
The first nine performances of Klem Ellil took place in 1990, followed
by another production in 1995, and then by Klem Ellil 9/11 and Loussous
Baghdad d in 2004. Every production is different from those that went before.
The concept of Klem Ellil utilizes the ancient device of telling stories within
stories within stories, each story different from the rest. Among the most
devastating losses after the fall of Baghdad on 9 November 2003 was the
looting of the Iraqi National Theatre. Jebali’s Loussouss Baghdad d built upon
this tragic event to flood his audiences with intriguing questions related to
being an Arab after the tragic events of 9/11. Loussouss Baghdad d critiqued
the daily assaults of TV news media and their insufficient attention to the
plight of Iraqi civilians, their tragic predicament during the conflict, and the
damage caused to their cultural memory. Jebali’s theatrical approach asked
unusual questions pertaining to the templates which have been applied in
almost all media coverage, namely the personification of the Iraq War news,
in which the emphasis lies on Arab victimization or its opposite (depending
on the ideological location). Jebali instead calls for an embedded spectator-
ship, a sort of citizens’ theatre that transforms the very act of watching a
performance from an intimate act into a political/social one. He also makes
use of digital technologies and the web to reach out to his growing public.
In Facebook, there is a group called “El-Teatro” with more than 1670 friends
of “El-Teatro” enrolled by the fall of 2010.
El Teatro was quickly followed by many others, among them Muncef
Essaiem’s Theatre Phou in Tunis (1988), Dalenda Garara’s Théâtre universel
in Sfax (1990), Fadel Jaïbi’s Familia in Tunis (1993), Noureddine Ali’s Etoile
du Nord in Tunis (1996), and Habib Zarafi’s Perle des arts in Sousse (2002).
Of these many ventures, unquestionably the best known internationally is
Familia. Fadel Jaïbi (b.1945), a leading figure in contemporary Arab theatre,
was the co-founder of the regional theatre company of Gafsa in 1972, direc-
tor of the National Centre for Dramatic Art from 1974 to 1978, co-founder
212 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

of the first Tunisian independent company, the “New Theatre” in Tunis in

1976, and co-founder – along with his wife, actress and playwright, Jalila
Baccar – of the renowned company Familia Productions in 1993. He has
directed more than 20 theatre works and four films. Among his theatre
performances are: Comedia in 1991, Familia in 1993, Coffee Lovers Desertt in
1995, In Search for Aida in 1998, Junun in 2001, Araberlin in 2002, Khamsoun
(Captive Bodies) in 2006, Yahia Yaïch (Amnesia
( ) in 2010. Jaïbi’s theatre has
enjoyed great success over the last decade not only in Tunisia, but in Egypt,
Syria, Morocco, Jordan, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Holland, Sweden,
Portugal, Japan, Germany, and the United States.
In Tunisia, theatre was the only cultural form subject to censorship under
the law up till 14 January 2011. A public performance permit (visa de
représentation publique) had to be obtained for any performance. Permits
were granted by the National Review Board, a commission of the Ministry
of Culture, wherein members of the Ministries of Interior and of Religious
Affairs were also represented. The commission recommended changes in the
script and performance, yet these recommendations were mostly taken for
granted by the Ministry of Culture. Khamsoun (Captive Bodies), written by
Baccar and directed by Jaïbi, is the most prominent case of censorship in
Tunisian theatre today. The play had to emigrate to France for its première in
the prestigious Théâtre l’Odéon in Paris on 7 June 2006. After a long battle,
it was put on Tunisian stages, starting with the Municipal Theatre of Tunis a
year later.44 The narrative takes place on the fiftieth anniversary of TTunisia’s
national independence in 2006, creating an occasion for questioning Tunisian
T
politics after 50 years of independence: what was founded, and what was
wrecked? Has a dead-end been reached or, perhaps, a final break before a new
start? The new generation appears to be heading towards fundamentalism
and jihadism. Parents are losing their pan-nationalism and leftist activism,
sinking into despair and defeat. Authority remains unchanged and unchal-
lenged. The so-called “left-wing” leaders have completely capitulated to the
regime, accepting service as a hypocritical facade behind which the wheels
of the old despotic machine are still turning, while the pretence of carrying
out “reforms” continues. The hopes invested in the new government have
been dashed. An attempt to return to open dictatorship would lead to an
uprising in the present circumstances, and yet the promise of reform has
turned out to be a complete sham. A real bankruptcy of the regime fuels
fundamentalist movements. All this is what Khamsoun is really about: an
inventory of oppression, detainment, and dead language that numbs society,
and devours its own citizens. This is a biography of communities living their
destruction, thinking it their only prospect.
The father of a young teacher, an ex-left wing activist, suffers a nervous
break-down when he learns about the imprisonment of his daughter Amal
following the suicide bombing of her female colleague in the courtyard of
their school. Her mother (played by Baccar), a lawyer and also an activist,
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 213

struggles to understand the reasons for which her daughter chose the veil
and gave up her parents’ values. She cannot imagine how her own offspring
decided to oppose the path of resistance and the history of her own society,
as well as to challenge her parents’ authority. In a moment of clarity, she
sadly realizes that the new generation has deliberately thrown itself into the
grip of fundamentalism. Through this narrative, Khamsoun tries to recount
the experience of 50 years of national independence – and what is true of
Tunisia is also true of most Arab states – proving that the cultural, political,
and social vision of Baccar and Jaïbi has widespread implications. They
continue to develop similar themes in many different narratives that vary
with each new play.
Yahya Yaich (Amnesia) pursues many of these same social, political, and
sexual concerns. The play was also subject to minor revisions by what
Jaïbi rightly calls the ‘censorship commission’ rather than ‘Orientation
Commission’. These revisions affected even the title of the play, which was
inverted from the original “Yaich Yahya.” It subtley constructs a world of
black and white, cut through by intense light: a powerful family in Tunis
learns of the dismissal of the father, Yahya, from a ministerial post. Yahya
serves unconsciously as a scapegoat, letting others off the hook. The play
opens with 11 performers arising from the auditorium gazing at the audi-
ence, then taking seats on stage. Their lack of engagement with the audience
suggests the silence of the class of high-ranking officials and politicians in
contemporary Tunisia. Yahya appears onstage, celebrating many years of the
abuse of power, only to be ironically bombarded with the devastating news of
his dismissal from the ministry and detainment at home. He is not charged
with a crime, but is no longer allowed to leave his home, and by extension,
the country, because of what he knows about state secrets. His private library
is burned, while he is kept alive. He makes his final exit symbolically in an
armchair, facing the charges of his previous victims, and fully confronting the
horror he wrought on his community in the name of duty. y He unwillingly
deals with his past abusive acts in a futile attempt to justify his obedience
to the hierarchical power structures. But life has become a relentless hell for
him after being abandoned by old friends who are not ready to compromise
their positions in the name of friendship. The irony of history is that one
sympathizes with the fallen minister, who becomes no more than a shadow
in an amnesic society. The many doctors, lawyers, and businessmen around
him are unmasked, showing their true faces. Some readings of the play make
strong connections between the situation of Yahya Yaich and ex-President
Bourguiba, even though Jaïbi has denied this interpretation. This 2010 pro-
duction is a call for power-holders to revise their relations with citizens; it is
another exploratory study of identity and power relations in post-colonial
Tunisia. At the time of this book going into production, the play is still tour-
ing even though the Jasmin Revolution has provided major challenges to
the situations depicted in it. The play was performed in Theatre Mohammed
214 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

V in Rabat on 21 April 2011 and the connections between Yahya and the
ousted President Ben Ali were quite evident.
Under Mohammed Driss the National Theatre of Tunisia has become a
site of interweaving performance cultures beyond the Mediterranean shores.
Rajel Wa Mra (A Man and a Woman; see Figures 19 and 20) exemplifies this
tendency. The play, inspired by three works by the Japanese actor, playwright,
y
and theorist of the noh theatre Zeami Motokiyo, was written and directed
by Driss, and produced by TNT in 1995. The play was judged a masterpiece
by many critics and won a number of prizes at the Carthage Festival (1995),
and The Experimental Theatre Festival of Cairo (1996), as well as the Ushima
Prize in Japan (1997). The play is a profound reflection of contemporary
changes happening in Tunisian society. The man is a problem drinker who
married a woman through a marriage broker. As he could not handle a nor-
mal relationship with his partner, he relies on alcohol and brutality in an
attempt to dominate her. He cannot accept the idea that he might be aban-
doned by a woman. The woman hopes to establish a stable home and know

Figure 19 A scene from Rajel Wa Mra, written and directed by Mohammed Driss,
1995 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National Theatre Archive)
 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010 215

Figure 20 A scene from Rajel Wa Mra, written and directed by Mohammed Driss,
1995 (photo courtesy of the Tunisian National Theatre Archive)

happiness with the man the marriage broker has chosen for her. However,
she discovers that she is married to an overgrown child, who cannot even
give her love and protection. She decides to bring her case to the marriage
broker, author of this marriage.
One of the last productions of the TNT for the theatre season 2010, entitled
Haqaib (Suitcases), reflects Mohammed Driss’s openness to new talents.
Suitcases was the winner of the best performance award of the twenty-second
Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. The play was written
by Youssef Bahri, the dramaturgy and mise-en-scène were by Jaafar Guesmi.
The play explores the potential of traveling containers to articulate multiple
facets of being an artist. The suitcase becomes a metaphor for both the con-
structedness and the mobility of the actor’s identity, as well as the burden
of life. It suggests a journey through the actor and his inner self. Suitcases
opens the suitcase of the author, who is himself a suitcase: His sensitivity is
a suitcase, his silence a suitcase, his sorrows a suitcase; his dreams, his music,
his space are all suitcases. The key to all these suitcases is there in stage life.
Familia is the most visible of a major network of independent profes-
sional companies in present-day Tunisia. By 2001 there were already 91
such companies in the country, as well as 106 amateur companies, and
four Centers for Dramatic Art besides the National Theatre. In 1995, in
the total of 90 performances 74 texts were devised by directors. In 2001 in
216 Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

the total sum of 189 performances, 144 texts were devised by directors. The
linguistic map of Tunisian theatre between 1995 and 2001 also reveals the
following: Dialect was used in 570 productions (65 percent), classical Arabic
in 259 productions (29.5 percent), and French in 40 productions (4.6 percent).
No concerted effort has yet succeeded in bringing about a similar blossoming
of private theatres in the Maghreb and the rest of the Arab world. Although
almost all of these houses are still essentially dependent on government
funding, they have been home to the most adventurous and daring theatre
productions in Tunisia. They have served as resisting artistic sites in modern
Tunisia, and today, Tunisian theatre is widely regarded as the most advanced
and experimental in all the Arab World. Although it still continues to struggle
within social and cultural constraints that are shared by the theatre of many
other nations, its achievement remains a model for its Maghreb neighbors and
theatres elsewhere and promises even greater accomplishments in the future.
Conclusion

In the present volume we have pursued a “bottom-up” approach, developed

through field research and close consultation. Our choice of Maghreb the-
atre is mainly due to the fact that it perfectly exemplifies the post-colonial
condition, and yet it is the least studied even in Arabic. Dramas of the
Maghreb written in native languages are literary representations that have
also remained outside the circles of Theatre Studies, Post-colonial Studies
and Middle Eastern Studies. We have taken the following questions as guid-
ing principles: What are some of the key aspects of performance cultures in
the Maghreb before the last European colonial intervention? What are some
of the key events in the Europeanization of the Maghreb stage? What are
the main aspects of the post-colonial turn? Who are the key people? What
specific performances, artists, genres, and/or practices have helped shape the
“performative turn” of the Maghreb?
Our deployment of historiographical periodization is meant to highlight
moments of change in the theatres of the Maghreb in a more productive and
visible way. It is an attempt to reinterpret “linear national time” with inter-
ruptive discontinuities that bring together and further subdivide territorial
structures through a persistent spatio-temporal dislodgment. The urgency
of the intercultural debate to transcend the polarities East/West, and even
North/South, within a global environment is the most significant indication
of paradigm shift in international theatre research. In line with that spirit,
we have suggested three broad historical periods in Maghrebi theatre history,
each of which has overlaid, rather than supplanted, those coming before.
Such a strategy also implies a reinstallation of boundaries. Our investigation is
deeply historiographical, insofar as it insists on re-editing previous histories.
The first period underlines neglected genealogies of performance cultures
in the deep Maghreb. Traditions such as al-halqa and gouwâl that were
eclipsed in dominant histories are highlighted as missing narratives from
the official history of Maghrebi performance cultures. The second period
explores the early “Molièrization” of the Maghrebi stage that had been
conditioned by the general shock of encounter with the Western Other
217
218 Conclusion

since the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. A whole apparatus of translation

and theatrical reproduction of Western theatrical canons flourished in the
Maghreb, bringing about a difficult, hybrid emergence of Maghrebi theatre.
As a result of cultural negotiations and various forms of interweaving past
and present, the Maghrebi stage became not simply a supplement that
reproduced the Western tradition of theatre-making; rather, it transformed
the conditions of different performance traditions, only to emerge as new
and different kinds of performative agencies. The third period also explores the
prospects of post-colonial hybridity in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The
transfer of al-halqa to the stage constitutes the peak of a hybrid moment
that has emerged out of different tropes. Tayeb Saddiki, Morocco’s most
versatile playwright and director, exemplifies this emerging third space
wherein dancing over hyphens is not only possible but innate. The Algerian
Abdelkader Alloula’s experimentations with the techniques of the popular
gouwâl are also pertinent in our analysis. The Tunisians Azzedine Madani
and Muncef Suissi are also prime examples of interweaving old performance
practices and new imported ones. The whole body that constitutes the third
period deals with the liminal condition of Maghrebi theatre. It is a reflection
upon middle grounds of performativity beyond colonial hybridity, where
binary relationships between East and West dissolve and become more and
more interwoven.
The post-colonial turn in the Maghreb has also generated different posi-
tions vis-à-vis theatre practice. These conflicting postures were all part of
the enterprise of making a nation. That is why these were also fraught with
violence. According to the apologists of tradition, theatre in the Western
style must be replaced by “indigenous” performance traditions (which is
another way of returning to pre-colonial Morocco). This tendency has led
some to a useless quest for purity. Such essentialist theatrical enterprises rest
upon a new myth of origin in the name of “authentic” Arabic/Maghrebi
Theatre (a tendency that is part of Pan-Arabism in the realm of politics).
Decolonizing Maghrebi theatre from Western hegemony does not mean a
recuperation of a pure and original performance tradition that pre-existed
the colonial encounter. Such a tendency falls into an inevitable process of
essentializing and self-Orientalizing. “Does there even exist the possibility of
returning to an ‘authentic’ state, or are we not all somehow caught up in
an interactive and never-to-be-completed networking where both subaltern
formations and institutional powers are subjected to interruption, trans-
gression, fragmentation and transformation?”1 There is no way back to an
authentic state. The implications of Derrida’s deconstruction of the Western
metaphysics of presence and plenitude – as manifested in the myth of
origin – are extremely important in our critique of different approaches of
tradition retrievals and walks towards reconciliation with memory.
Another position that is taken on board by the apologists of empire sees
Western theatre as a supreme model opposed to its local counterpart, which
 Conclusion 219

is so often called “pre-theatre.” In fact, this position also reproduces the

same Eurocentric eclipse, if not exclusion, of other peoples’ performance
traditions. In this context, the European theatrical traditions are considered
as unique models that should be imitated and reproduced. In other words,
there is no other theatre but the one that developed in classical Greece.
This second stance, still held by many Westernized Maghrebi artists and
critics, falls into another kind of essentialism that sees European theatre as a
unique and homogeneous model that should be disseminated all over the
world even at the expense of other peoples’ theatrical traditions and per-
formative agencies. The Europeanization of Arabic performance (Ta-awrub
al-furja al-arabia) exemplifies the complicity of colonized subjects. Rustom
Bharucha’s critique in Theatre and the World: Essays on Performance and
Politics explains the dangers of such “exchange”: “Colonialism, one might
say, does not operate through principles of ‘exchange.’ Rather, it appro-
priates, decontextualizes, and represents the ‘other’ culture, often with
the complicity of its colonized subjects. It legitimates its authority only by
asserting its cultural superiority.”2
However, despite the illusion of boundedness, there is no theatre that is
uniquely original. Western theatres are themselves hybrid models. More
than that, theatrical art is a hybrid medium that necessitates a transforma-
tion of something written on a script into an acoustic and visual world
called the mise-en-scène. Throughout the present volume we have attempted
to highlight a third position between the two essentialist traps, which is
precisely the hybrid nature of post-colonial Maghrebi theatre as it is prac-
ticed today. Our argument is that Maghrebi theatre is construed within a
liminal space. The hybrid nature of Moroccan theatre is manifested in the
very transposition of al-halqa from Jemma-el-Fna to modern theatre build-
ings like Theatre Mohammed V in Rabat, the Municipal Theatre in Tunis, or
TNA in Algiers, which are similar to Western theatre buildings if not built
by Westerners. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, hybridity is very much related to
enunciative processes of power revision. In an interview with Gary Olson
and Lynn Worsham, Bhabha clarifies such misunderstanding:

Finally, I think there is a misunderstanding about my notion of hybrid-

ization. For me, hybridization is really about how you negotiate between
texts or cultures or practices in a situation of power imbalances in order
to be able to see the way in which strategies of appropriation, revision,
and iteration can produce possibilities for those who are less advantaged
to be able to grasp in a moment of emergency, in the very process of the
exchange or the negotiation, the advantage. Hybridization is much more
a social and cultural and enunciative process in my work. It’s not about
people who eat Chinese food, wear Indian clothes, and so on; but some-
times, in a very complementary way to me personally, it’s been taken
to mean a kind of diversity or multiple identities. For me, hybridity is
220 Conclusion

a discursive, enunciatory, cultural, subjective process having to do with

the struggle around authority, authorization, deauthorization, and the
revision of authority. It’s a social process. It’s not about persons of diverse
cultural tastes and fashions.3

Hybridity is not simply a fusion of two pure moments, but the persistent
emergence of liminal third spaces that transform, renew, and recreate differ-
ent kinds of writing out of previous models. For Bhabha, “the importance
of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which
the third emerges, rather hybridity … is the ‘third space’ which enables
other positions to emerge.”4 Eluding the politics of polarity and fixities of
Manichaeism, this third space ensures “that the meaning and symbols of
culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be
appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.”5 Bhabha is confi-
dent about the potentialities granted by the exploration of this third space:
“We should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – cutting edge of translation and
renegotiation, the in-between-space – that carries the burden of the meaning
of culture. It makes it possible to begin envisaging national anti-nationalist
histories of the ‘people.’ And by exploring this third space, we may elude the
politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves.”6
Ultimately, the search for thematic and conceptual crossovers of different
performance practices remains an open enterprise. Theatre in the Maghreb
was from the start “deterritorialized,” or rather trapped in an ambiguous
compromise and confronted with the necessity to interpolate between
different language systems and different systems of thought. At its heart,
“deterritorialization,”7 according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is
effected by a movement away from a given system, say the proscenium tradi-
tion in theatre, and the construction of a new energy out of it, yet removed
from the original system, as is the case of the halqa theatre as practiced by
Alloula and Saddiki among others. Following Deleuze and Guattari, “deter-
ritorialization” can thus be seen as a movement out of an established system
in a new direction, while “reterritorialization” is the reciprocal movement
within the system to counterbalance the deterritorializing movement with-
out a return to “territorialization”. The deployment of al-halqa techniques
and mode of artistic production in Maghrebi theatre today exemplifies the
inventive and intensive utilization of language that resists the lure of hege-
mony. Even the fixity of the inherently European theatre edifice becomes
deterritorialized in the process of transposing al-halqa’s free play to a stage
building. The openness and free play of Jemma-el-Fna are forced upon the
rigidity and closure of the Western theatrical building. The result is not a
return to pre-theatre, but rather a creation of an aporical space within the
fixity and closure of the Italian theatre-building. The same aporia affected
post-colonial Moroccan dramatic scripts, which have become hybrid com-
binations of orature and literature.
 Conclusion 221

The Maghreb under colonial rule instilled a sense of “dépaysement,” t a

feeling of alienation within one’s own territory. Any attempt to reclaim
a past performance culture results in the creation of fantasy. Longing and
nostalgia for what is lost or being put on the defensive because the ascen-
dancy of consumerist understanding of modernity distorts what it was, and
it therefore becomes a product of the imaginative process. Alternatively,
utilizing the colonizer’s language and artistic modes, as Frantz Fanon puts it
in The Wretched of the Earth, the native artist contents himself with stamp-
ing these instruments with a hallmark, which he wishes to be national, but
which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who
comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact
like a foreigner.8 This paradoxical self-exoticizing is what Salman Rushdie
calls the creation of imaginary homelands, “Indias of the mind,”9 and the
Moroccan philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi considers “le non-retour.”
Our evaluation of essentialist paths such as Pan-Arabism, Islamism,
Berberism, or Eurocentrism as inevitable failures leads us to a “pensée-autre,”
a thinking otherness or rather, a critical dynamic that challenges both
Western hegemony and the deeply rooted onto-theology of Arabo-Islamic
discourse on identity and difference.10 The Maghreb’s post-coloniality, how-
ever, needs to be conceptualized anew, as a historical period during which
Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria can conjure up potentialities for a possible
modernity. Maghrebi theatre’s hybridity cannot otherwise be an inexorable
condition forever, insofar as it is characteristic of its historical positioning
rather than a manifestation of an adamant inner life of post-colonial art-
ists of the Maghreb. In this context, Maghrebi re-enactments of Western
canons are not simply demythologized forms of writing back relocated
within the emerging space of Maghreb’s post-coloniality, but also liminal
third spaces that elude the politics of polarity and Manichaean delirium. In
brief, self-reflexive negotiations within the space of Maghrebi theatre are
not simply supplements that reproduce the myth of big narratives through
a simple palimpsest; rather, they transform the conditions of the original
texts, only to emerge as new and different kinds of performance texts. The
European models, then, become a crossroads and a continuum of intersec-
tions, encounters, and negotiations; the outcome is a complex palimpsest
that underlines the powers of a post-colonial modernity. Our belief is that
instead of trying to erase one element of the current performance culture
landscape, we should evaluate that very landscape according to a double
critique and highlight the multiple crossroads and palimpsests of interweaving
and persistent acts of writing under erasure.
Notes

Introduction
1. Routledge World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Drama, Volume 4, ed. Don Rubin
(London: Routledge, 1999).
2. For example, M. M. Badawi: Modern Arabic Drama in Egyptt (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), Early Arabic Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988); Philip Sadgrove: The Egyptian Theatre in the Nineteenth Centuryy (Durham:
University of Durham Press, n.d.).
3. Salma Jayyusi and Roger Allen (eds), Arabic Writing Today: The Drama (Cairo:
American Research Center, 1977); Salma Jayyusi and Roger Allen (eds), Modern Arabic
Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Salma Jayyusi (ed.), Short
Arabic Plays (London: Interlink, 2003).
4. Taher Bekri, De la literature tunisienne et maghrébin (Paris: Harmattan, 1999). All
translations from French and Arabic sources are by the authors, unless otherwise
noted.
5. Ibid., 5–13.
6. M. M. Badawi, “Arabic Drama Since the Thirties,” in Modern Arabic Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 402.
7. The only book-length study of drama in the Maghreb in English is the highly
informative, but rather narrowly focused Strategies of Resistance in the Dramatic Texts
of North African Women Dramatists by Laura Chakravarty Box (London: Taylor &
Francis, 2004). The only English-language collection of drama from this region yet
to appear is Four Plays from North Africa, ed. Marvin Carlson (New York: Martin E.
Segal, 2008).
8. M. Flangon Rogo Koffi, Le Théâtre Africain Francophone (Paris: Harmattan, 2002).

Part I The Pre-Colonial Maghreb

Chapter 1 The Roman Maghreb

1. Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress, The Berbers (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1996), 50.
2. Trudy Ring, Adele Hast and Paul Challenger, International Dictionary of Historic
Places. Volume V: Middle East and Africa (London: Routledge, 1996), 466.
3. Apuleius, Florida, XVIII, 3–5.
4. Debra Bruch, “The Prejudice Against Theatre,” The Journal of Religion and Theatree 3:1
(Summer, 2004), 3. By the third century, Christianity gained more territory within the
Roman Empire, thereby posing a greater menace to the state and its stage. The North
African theologian (formerly Amazigh) Tertullian (155–220) in his De Spectaculis,
denounced theatre and drama as untrue, and maintained that Christians must for-
swear the theatre when baptized. The Council of Trullo in 692 banned all pagan
festivals, including theatrical performances.
5. The inaccurate, but widespread characterization of Islam as an essentially negative
force in relation to theatre will be dealt with in a special section on this subject in
Part II of the present study.

222
 Notes 223

6. Augustine, Confessions, Book III, trans. and ed. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore, MD:
Penguin, 1961), 55–6.
7. Augustine, The City of God: Against the Pagans, trans. and ed. J. W. C. Wand
(London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 26–7.

Chapter 2 Orature
1. Jacqueline Kaye and Abdelhamid Zoubir, The Ambiguous Compromise: Language,
Literature and National Identity in Algeria and Morocco (London: Routledge,
1990), 15.
2. Jacques Berque, Arab Rebith: Pain and Ecstasyy (London: Al Saqui, 1983), 4.
3. Kamal Salhi, “Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia,” in Martin Banham (ed.), A History
of Theatre in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39.
4. Kaye and and Zoubir explore the problematic diglossic situation of Morocco along
with the cultural and geographic diglossia. For them, “the Arab conquest of Morocco
had brought writing in its trail but it did not convert Morocco into a written cul-
ture. Instead there developed, as in other Arab and Arabized cultures, a splitting or
diglossia. While classical Arabic was to remain the model, and its formulaic grace of
thought and expression survived embedded in everyday speech, Moroccan Arabic
developed alongside but not in competition with Berber because as an unwritten
language it could not impose itself.” See Ambiguous Compromise, 10.
5. Debora A. Kapchan, “Gender on the Market in Moroccan Women’s Verbal Art:
Performative Spheres of Feminine Authority” (unpublished), 4. See also Deborah
A. Kapchan, Gender on the Market:Moroccan Women and the Revoicing of Tradition
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
6. Salhi, “Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia”, 42.
7. Youssef Rachid Haddad, Art du conteur, Art de l’acteurr (Louvain-la-Neuve: Cahiers
theatre Louvain, 1982), 15.
8. Fes 555–6, quoted in Ch. Pellat entry, “hikaya” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, ed.
B. Lewis et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2009) III, 372.
9. Camille Lacoste-dujardin, Le Conte kabyle: étude ethnologique (Paris: François
Maspero, 1970), 23.
10. Pellat entry, “hikaya,” III, 367–77.
11. Dan Ben Amos, “Towards a Definition of Folklore in Context,” in Americo
Paredes and Richard Bauman (eds), Towards New Perspectives in Folklore (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1972), 10–11. John Miles Foley, a scholar of orality,
writes: “What precisely does it mean to say that a work of literature is oral? What
does orality or the lack of it have to do with the making of literature or with its
interpretation? These are, of course, relatively new and unfamiliar questions; not
very many years ago they and questions like them could not have been posed,
not to mention thoughtfully considered or even answered. For it is only recently
that the assumption that literature must in all cases fulfill to the letter its etymol-
ogy from letter (Latin: Littera) has been shown to be inaccurate, and that the
rapidly developing field of oral literature research and scholarship has begun to
assert itself.” Introduction to Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research (An Introduction
and Annotated Bibliography), (New York: Garland, 1985), 2.
12. Ruth Fennegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 3.
13. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word d (London:
Methuen, 1982), 4.
14. Sabra Webber, Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North
Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
224 Notes

15. Marie Maclean, Narrative As Performance: The Baudelairean Experimentt (London:

Routledge, 1988), 1.
16. Friederike Pannewick, “The Hakawati in Contemporary Arabic Theatre, in Angelika
Neuwirth et al. (eds), Myths, Historical Archetypes and Symbolic Figures in Arabic
Literaturee (Beirut: Hassib Dergham, 1999), 337–48.
17. Ibid., 342.
18. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1967), 193.
19. Ibid., 193–4.
20. Ibid., 194.
21. Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics,
trans. Iris Jain Saskya (London: Routledge, 2008), 75.
22. Quoted by D. Reig in Ibn al-Jawzi. La pensée vigile (Paris, 1986), 134.
23. See W. Raven’s entry, “sira,” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. P. J. Bearman and
Mark Garborieau (Leiden: Brill, 2002), IX, 660–3.
24. See, for example, M. C. Lyons, “The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Storytelling,”
Comparative Literature 49:4 (1997), 359–70.
25. See the entry by Pellat and others, “kissa” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, V, 185–207.
26. Haddad, Art du conteur, r 28–43.
27. M. Sammoun, L’Expérience radicale dans le théâtre arabe, Unpub. Diss., Paris, 1990,
quoted in Pannewick, “The Hakawati,” 339.
28. See Pellat’s entry, Encyclopedia of Islam, III, 367–77. This also contains information
on related forms like the sira and nadira.
29. See the chapter on “hikaya” in Shmuel Moreh, Live Theatre and Dramatic Literature
in the Medieval Arab World d (New York: New York University Press, 1992, 85–122).
30. Majid El Houssi, Pour une histoire du théâtre tunisien (Tunis: Maison Arabe du Livre,
1982), 160–4.
31. See Boratav’s entry on “maddah” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, V, 951–3.
32. Lufti Abdul-Rahman Faizo, The Cycles of Arabic Drama: Authenticity versus Western
Imitation and Influence, unpub. diss., University of Colorado, Boulder, 1985, section
on the madih, 26–30.
33. Reinhardt Dozy, Supplement aux Dictionnaires Arabes (Leiden: Brill, 1927), 150.
34. Fazio, Cycles, 26.
35. See Brockelmann and Pellat’s entry on “makama” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, VI,
107–15.
36. Moreh, Live Theatre, 105.
37. See Pellat’s entry on “nadira” in the Encyclopedia of Islam, VII, 856–8.
38. Much study has been done on the popular Djera character in his various
forms. The most complete study is by the prolific writer on Algerian literature,
Jean Dejeux, Djoh’a: héros de la tradition orale arabo-berbere: hier et aujourd’hui
(Sherbrooke, Quebec: Naaman, 1976). Metin And, in his Drama at the Crossroads:
Turkish Performing Arts Link Past and Present, East and Westt (Beylerbeyi, Istanbul:
Isis Press, 1991), explores the background of this character, along with the similar
Molla Nasreddin of Iran, arguing that they are derived from Nasreddin Hoja, a
well-known popular character in Anatolian folk-tales. He also speculates on the
relation of this performance tradition to international performance work from
India (via the Romany, or gypsy, culture) and Indonesia.
39. An example of the continuing insistence on correctness in the name of Islam is
the appeal to boycott Bilmawn’s (Bujlud) masquerade that is conceived of by con-
servative Sunni scholarship as a pagan relic. Abdellah Hammoudi, a Moroccan
 Notes 225

Cultural Anthropologist, foregrounds the Fqih’s position with regard to the

ongoing masquerade during an interview in his village mosque, where the Fqih
commented that “It’s a practice of corrupt people (fasiqin). They take advantage
of this occasion to settle their scores. Someone who has an old score to settle with
someone else uses this situation to beat him up. And there is more to it than that,
I swear before God; here like everywhere else, the masquerade is the opportunity
to make a contact with a woman one has desired for a long time.” In Abdellah
Hammoudi, The Victim and Its Masks: An Essay on Sacrifice and Masquerade in the
Maghreb, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 88.

Chapter 3 The Halqa

1. Joachim Fiebach, “Theatricality: from Oral Traditions to Televised Realities,”
Substance 31:2–3 (1998–9), 17.
2. Philip D. Schuyler, “Entertainment in the Marketplace,” in Donna Lee Bowen
and Evelyn A. Early (eds), Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle Eastt (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 2.
3. Kapchan, “Gender,” 3.
4. Ben Amos, “Toward a Definition,” 11.
5. Schuyler, “Entertainment,” 277.
6. Quoted in www.lavieeco.com/.../6636jammaa-el-fna.
7. Mohammed Kaghat, Al-mumatil wa-alatuhu (The Actor and His Machine) (Rabat:
Ministry of Culture Publications, 2002), 30.
8. Ibnu Arabi, “Al-mabadiu wal-ghayat,”in Khalid Belkacem, Al-kitabatu wa-ttasawufu
inda ibnu arabiyy (Casablanca: Tubkal, 2000), 49.
9. Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit,
t translated from the German
by J. A. Underwood (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 77.
10. Ibid., 77.
11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana Collins, 1973), 87.
12. Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance, 36.
13. Peter Brook, in Michael Wilson, Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Storytellers
and their Artt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5.
14. Hassan Bahraoui, Al-masrah al-magrebiy baht fi al-usul a-s-sosyu taqafia (Moroccan
Theatre: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Roots) (Casablanca: Arabic Cultural Center,
1994), 28. Needless to say, al-halqa performers are not aware of Western acting
and stagecraft theories. These are spontaneous artists who make spectacles with-
out recourse to any Western theory of theatre-making. One can even say that
these people have never ever seen a performance in a theatre building. So, the
analogy with Brecht and Stanislavsky is meant only to illuminate their highly
artistic strategies of acting.
15. Schuyler, “Entertainment,” 277–8.
16. Lahsen Benaziza, Romancing Scheherazade: John Barth and the One Thousand and
One Nights (Agadir, Maroc: Publication de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences
Humaines, 2001), 1–2.
17. John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction (New York: Putnam,
1984), 268.

Chapter 4 Shadow Plays and Costumed Performers

1. Derek Hopwood and Mustafa Badawi, Three Shadow Plays by Mohammed Ibn
Daniyal (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial, 1992 ), 24.
2. Ibid., 3–12.
226 Notes

3. Hermann Von Puckler-Muskau, Chronique, Lettres, Journal de voyage, Volume 2

(Paris: Fournier, 1836–7), 99–100.
4. El Houssi, Pour une histoire, 50, n. 28.
5. Arlette Roth, Le théâtre algérien de langue dialectale 1926–1954 (Paris: Maspero,
1967), 15.
6. Richard Southern, The Seven Ages of the Theatre (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961),
29–30.
7. Bujludd in Arabic means “the man with the skins.” The Berber titles for this
figure are Bilmawn in the Shilha dialect and Bu-Islikhen in the Tamazight. One
also finds the Arabic Bubtayen or even Sba’ Bubtayn, “the lion with the skins.”
Finally, one also sometimes hears the term Herrma. Edmond Doutté, who tran-
scribed this as Herena, suggests that the word may come from the Arabic root
HRM, meaning “to grow old,” hence Herrma, “the decrepit one.” But one might
also think of Hermes… In brief, the word Bujlud d and its Berber equivalents mean
almost the same thing and invoke the same metaphor of masking the human
under an animal’s skin.
8. Hammoudi, The Victim and its Masks, 11.
9. Ibid., 1.
10. Eugenio Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 45.
11. Ibid., 23.
12. René A. Bravmann, Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974), 31.
13. Julian Baldick, Black God: The Afroasiatic Roots of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim
Religions (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 80.
14. Ibid., 143.
15. Julius Caesar,
r Act I, scene 2.
16. Brion Gysin, in Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka (New York: Point
Music, 1995), 1.
17. William Burroughs, “Face to Face with the Goat God,” OUII 2:8 (Chicago, August
1973), 1.
18. Stephen Davis, Jajouka Rolling Stone: A Fable of Gods and Heroes (New York:
Random House, 1993), 55–6.
19. Melvyn Bragg, in Paul Bowles by His Friends, ed. Gary Pulsifier (London: Peter
Owen, 1993), 1, 60.

Chapter 5 Carnival and Ritual Performance

1. August Mouliéras, Le Maroc inconnu, Volume II (Paris: Challamel, 1899), 106–11.
2. H. Marchand, Masques carnavalesque et carnival en Kabylie (Algiers: Societe
Historique Algerienne), 2–3.
3. Edmund Doutté, Magie et Religion dans L’Afrique du Nord d (Paris: J. Maisonneuve,
1994), 535.
4. Nabila Amir, “Fête de la Sbeiba: Un ritual et une histoire,” L’Info.au quotidian
(29 December 2009).
5. James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, Volume 4 (London:
Macmillan, 1911), 152–3.
6. Mohammed Mennouni, in Abdessamad Kenfaoui, Sultan Tulba (Casablanca: Tarik
Publications, 2004), 8.
7. Hamid Triki, “La Fête de Soltan Tolba ou l’éphemère souverainté,” in Abdessamad
Kenfaoui (in collaboration with Tayeb Saddiki), Sultan Tulba (Casablanca: Tarik
Publications, 2004), 11.
 Notes 227

8. Pierre Loti, Au Marocc (Casablanca: Eddif, 2005), 164, 233–4.

9. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London:
Verso, 1981), 148.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helen Isworsky (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1965), 317.
11. Marvin Carlson, “Theatre and Dialogism”, in Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R.
Roach (eds), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992).
12. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 122.
13. Hassan Mniai, Abhat fi Al-Masrah Al-Maghrebi (Studies in Moroccan Theatre) (Meknes:
Sawt Meknes, 1974), 7.
14. Doutté, Magie et Réligion en Afrique du Nord, 507.
15. Karl-G. Prasse, The Tuaregs: The Blue People (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
Press, 1995), 41.

Part II Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Chapter 6 Nineteenth-Century European Theatres

1. The present Alaoui royal family took power over the ruins of the previous ruling
house of Saadiyin, though both are descendents from the Prophet’s line. Building
upon the achievements of his successors, especially in unifying the country
against the Siba (outlaw), Sultan Moulay Ismail acceded to the throne in 1672 and
extended his rule as far as Senegal via a well-organized army. After consolidating
his power, he invested a great deal in diplomatic relationships with France during
the reign of Louis XIV, and to a lesser degree England during the time of James II.
2. The leading Moroccan playwright, Tayeb Saddiki, has written an engaging comedy,
Nous nous sommes faites pour nous entendre, concerning the adventures of the first
Moroccan ambassador in Louis XIV’s Paris.
3. “Lettre d’un comédien à un de ses amis, touchant sa captivité et celle de 26 de
ses camarades, chez les corsairs de Tunis et ce qu’ils obliges de faire pour adoucir
leurs peines,” Paris: Pierre Clement, 1741, quoted in Moncef Charfeddine, Deux
siécles de théâtre en Tunisie (Tunis: Editions Ibn Charaf, 2002)., 9–11.
4. Ibid., 13–15. Hatem Noureddine, “Sompteux Théâtre Municipal,” Le Temps (24
May 2008), 19.
5. Pierre Grandchamp, Autour du Consulat de France à Tunis (Tunis: Aloccio, 1943), 39.
6. Capitaine ***, Une Promenade à Tunis en 1842 (Paris: Vassal, n.d.), 45–7.
7. Capitaine ***, Promenade, quoted in Charfeddine, Deux siécles, 20.
8. Ibid., 21.
9. Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830–2000: A Short Historyy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2001), 3.
10. Fernand Arnaudies, Histoire de l’Opéra d’Algerr (Algiers, 1941), 116.
11. Henry Dunant, Notice sur la régence de Tunis (Geneva: Jules-Guillame Fick, 1858), 59.
12. Ibid., Notice sur la régence de.
13. Alexandre Dumas, Le Véloce ou Tanger, Alger et Tunis (Montreal: Le Joyeux Roger,
2006), 190–1.
14. Hamadi ben Halima, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre Arab en Tunisie (Tunis: Université
de Tunis, 1974), 21.
15. Stora, Algeria 1830–2000, 5.
16. Ibid., 18.
17. Charteddine, Deux siécles, 51–4.
228 Notes

18. Details of Paradiso from Tunisian historian Raoul Darmon, quoted in ibid., 60–2.
19. Quoted in ibid., 65.
20. Quoted in ibid., 69.
21. Quoted in ibid., 81–3.
22. Ibid., 171.
23. Quoted in ibid., 201–3.
24. Anon, “Pour sauver Carthage,” Revue de Paris (September 1911), 36.

Chapter 7 The First Arab Performances

1. Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth-Century
Arabic Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Ibid., 10–11.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. Ibid., 22.
6. Ibid., 50.
7. Ben Halema, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 31–2.
8. Potter, “Le comédie arabe,” Revue de Paris 5 (1864), 155–62, quoted in Roth,
Le théâtre algérien, 18.
9. Edmond Doutté, Magie et Religion, 500, 504.
10. Quoted in Ben Halima, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 36.
11. Najib Al-Haddad, Riwayat Salah El-Din Al-Ayoubi (The Story of Salah El-Din
Al-Ayoubi), 3rd edn (Beirut: Maktabat Sader, 1929), 4.
12. Ben Halima, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 40.
13. Ibid., 35–40.
14. All this was reported in the Arabic newspaper As-Zohra , 23 February 1909, quoted
in Ben Halima, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 43–4.
15. Quoted in Charfeddine, Deux siécles de théâtre, 253–4.
16. Quoted in ibid., 254.
17. Ahmed Cheniki, Le Théâtre en Algérie: Histoire et enjeux (Aix-en-Province: Edisud,
2002), 17.
18. Mahboub Stambouli, “Regards sur le théâtre Algérian,” Amal (Promesses
( ) (March
1976).
19. C. R. Pennel, Morocco Since 1830: A Historyy (London: C. Hurst, 2000), 152.

Chapter 8 The Developing Maghreb Stage

1. Jacques Ladreit de Lacharrière, La Création marocainee (Paris: Lavanzelle, 1930), 143.
2. Hulbert Lyautey, quoted from Letters du Tonkin et de Madagascar, r 1894-1899
(Paris: 1920, p. 71), in Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social
Environmentt (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989), 285.
3. Charles Kuzman (ed.), Modernist Islam 1840–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 6.
4. Abdellah Chakroun, A la Recontre du Théâtre au Marocc (Casablanca: Najah El
Jadida, 1998), 44–5.
5. Abdelwahed Ouzri, Le théâtre Au Maroc: Structures et Tendances (Casablanca: Les
Editions Toubkal, 1997), 22–3.
6. Abdellah Chakroun, “Tatawwor al-Masrah al-Maghraby Qabl el-Esteqlal wa
Ba’adaho,” Jaridat el-Elm (1956), 36–7.
7. Roth, Le théâtre algérienne, 21.
8. Mahiéddine Bachtarzi, Mémoires 1919-1939 (SNED, Algiers, 1968), 49.
 Notes 229

9. Roth, Le théâtre algérienne, 22.

10. Bachtarzi, Mémoires 1919–1939, 31.
11. Roth, Le théâtre algérien, 59.
12. Bachtarzi, Mémoires 1919–1939, 44.
13. Jeanne Faivre d’Arcier, Habiba Messika: La brûlure du péchéé (Paris: Belfond,
1998), 68.

Chapter 9 The Theatre of Resistance

1 26 April 1937, quoted in Cheniki, Théâtre en Algérie, 27–8.
2. Roth, Le théâtre algérien, 75.
3. Quoted in Ben Halima, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 109.
4. As-Sawab, 15 February 1934, quoted in ibid., 95–6.
5. In 1923 Tangier became an international zone that was politically neutral and
economically open. The new statute formalized international control over the 140
square miles that represented the city and its surroundings between 1923 and 1956
(with a five-year disruption as Spain controlled the city after the collapse of France
in World War II in June 1940). For almost 23 years, Tangier was run by an inter-
national council formed by delegates from the major countries that had acceded
to the Algeciras Act in 1907, and became a notorious dream city and a congrega-
tion site for a number of important Arab and Western exiles, artists, writers, and
politicians who fell captive to its magical spell including Henri Matisse, Eugene
Delacroix, Walter Harris, Jean Genet, and Paul Bowles along with his wife Jane
Bowles. During the late fifties and sixties, the Beat Generation made a well-worn
path to the underground life that marked the international city. Writers and art-
ists such as Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg,
Truman Capote, Gregory Corso, Ira Cohen, Irving Rosenthal, Gore Vidal, and Alfred
Chester all passed through in transit and marked the city’s collective memory.
6. Azouz Hakim, quoted by Abderrahman Al-Wafi (ed.), Intissar Al-Hak (Tetouàn:
Asmir Publications, 2006), 5. Shakib Arslan (1869–1946) is a Lebanese poet,
journalist, and political activist who was exiled by French mandate authorities
in Geneva, Switzerland, a growing place for militant Arabs and Muslims during
World War II. His influence became significant with the Journal he founded,
La Nation Arabee (1930–8), as it conducted a serious critique of European imperialism
with a particular focus on the French colonial rule of the Maghreb. Arslan was
instrumental in connecting independence movements in the Maghreb and the
Mashreq. Thanks to his visit to Tetouàn and Tangier and his mentoring of an
emerging resistance movement, the Moroccan fight against the Berber Decree was
made international.

Chapter 10 Islam and the Colonial Stage

1 Al-Haddad, Riwayat Salahed-dine Al-Ayoubi, 3.
2. Jacob Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1958).
3. John Gassner and Edward Quinn, The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama
(New York: Crowell, 1969).
4. Mohammed Aziza, L’Image et l’Islam (Paris: A. Michel, 1978).
5. Peter J. Chelkowsky, Ta’ziyeh: Ritual and Drama in Iran (New York: New York
University Press, 1979).
6. Mohammed Al-Khozai, The Development of Early Arabic Drama, 1847–1900 (New
York: Longman, 1984).
230 Notes

7. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama.

8. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy, History of the Theatre, 9th edn (Boston,
MA: Allyn & Bacon, 2003), 69.
9. John Bell, “Islamic Performance and the Problem of Drama,” The Drama Review
49:4 (T 188) (Winter 2005), 7.
10. Al-khozai, The Development of Early Arabic Drama, 4.
11. Mohammed Aziza, Al-islam wal- masrah (Islam and Theatre) (Riyad: Oyoun
Al-maqalat, 1987), 21–45, 211.
12. Ahmed Ben Saddik, in Hassan Bahraoui, “Al-Islam wal-masrah” (Islam and Theatre),
revue culturele Alamatt 4 (1995), 7.
13. Abdelkebir Khatibi and Mohammed Sijelmassi, The Splendor of Islamic Calligraphy,
trans. James Hughes (London: Thames & Hudson,1976).
14. Ibid., 192.
15. Ibid., 192.
16. El Balagh el Djezairi, 24 February 1932, quoted in Cheniki, Le Théâtre en Algérie, 26.
17. For a detailed study of the salafi movement and of its complex relationship with
the FLN in the establishment of modern Algeria, see James McDougall, History
and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press,
2006).
18. J. Damis, “The Origin and Significance of the Free Schools Movement in Morocco,
1919–1931,” in Revue de L’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranéee 19:1 (1975), 81.
19. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86.
20. Ibid., 112.
21. Ouzri, Le Théâtre au Maroc, 210.
22. Ibid., 104.
23. Just as the French attempted to diminish nationalist sentiments in Morocco by
attempting to develop Berber culture as a system competing with that of the
Arab/Islamic population, they championed “Andalusian” culture as a “European”
alternative to native “African” expression throughout the Maghreb.
24. Ouzri, Le Théâtre au Maroc, 56.

Chapter 11 From World War II to Independence

1. Hassan Mniai, Abhat fi Al-Masrah Al-Maghrebi, 64.
2. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 137.
3. McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism, 68.
4. Alger republicain, 21 October, quoted in Bachtarzi, Mémoires 1939–1951, 74.
5. Mniai, Abhat fi al-masrah al-maghribi, 65.
6. Chakroun, A La Rencontre du théâtre, 145.
7. André Voisin, quoted by Omar Fertat, “Le Théâtre Marocain: de la tradition a
l’écriture,” in Martine Mathieu-Job (ed.), L’entredire Francophone (Bordeaux: CELFA
Publications, 2004), 191. For more on André Voisin’s mission in Morocco, see also
Omar Fertat, “Théâtre, monde Associatif et Francophonie au Maroc”, in Sylvie
Guillaume (ed.), Les Associations dans la Francophonie (Pessac: Publication de la
Maison des Sciences de L’homme d’Aquitaine Pessac, 2006), 141.
8. André Voisin, “Le Crochet à Nuages: Expériences de Théâtre Populaire Au Maroc,”
in Denis Bablet and Jean Jacquot (eds), Le Lieu Théâtral dans La Société Moderne, 2nd
edn (Paris: Editions Du Centre National de la recherché Scientifique, 1968), 49.
9. Ibid., 50.
10. Ibid., 51.
11. Andre Voisin (interviewed by Cherif Khaznadar), Jeune Afrique 513:3 (November
1970), 62.
 Notes 231

12. J. Vilar, “Theatre: A Public Service [1960],” in Jeremy Aheame (ed.), French Cultural
Policy Debates: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 44.
13. An-Nahda, 12 June 1949, quoted in Ben Hamila, Un Demi Siècle de Théâtre, 129.
14. Quoted in Abdallah El Rukaibni, “Algeria,” in The World Encyclopedia of
Contemporary Drama, ed. Don Rubin, Volume 4, The Arab World d (Routledge:
London, 1999), 52.
15. Quoted by Allalou in “L’Aurore du théâtre algérienne,” Cahiers du CDSH, H Oran
(1982), 12.

Part III Post-Colonial Theatre in the Maghreb

Chapter 12 The Early Theatres of Independence, 1956–1970

1. Jean Vilar, “Theatre: A Public Service (1960),” 44.
2. On 25 January 1955, the company was officially created by a decision of the
President of the Municipality of Tunis under the name of “La Troupe Municipale
d’Art Dramatique Arabe.” Its management was assigned to Mohammed Aziz
Al-Agrebi who was assisted by the Egyptian artist Zaki Taymat as artistic director.
At the beginning of the theatre season 1960–1, Hassen Zemerli became director,
and then Ali Ben Ayad from 1963 up to 1972. After Ben Ayad’s sudden death in
Paris, a younger generation took over: Mohsen Ben Abdallah (1972–5), Muncef
Souissi (1976–8), Béchir Drissi (1980–3), Mohammed Kouka (1983–99), Béchir
Drissi again (2000–2), and since the year 2002 the actress Mouna Noureddine has
become the new director of the most privileged theatre edifice in Tunisia, as well
as its theatre company. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venicee was the first production
of the company at the Municipal Theatre of Tunis 3 and 4 February 1954, followed
by a musical entitled Layla min Alfi lila wa lila (A Night from the Thousand and One
Nights) with the contribution of Egyptian artists such as the musician Abdelaziz
Mohammed and actress Awatif Ramadan on the 18 and 19 May 1954.
3. The Secrétariat of State for Culture and Information published Bourguiba’s speech
in Arabic and French, under the title “pour sortir le théâtre Tunisien de bordière”
in November 1962. Mohammed Mediouni, a leading Tunisian theatre scholar,
asserts that President Bourguiba’s speech was “unique in modern Arabo-African
cultures. None of the heads of the emerging states of the time dedicated a
whole address to theatre, its conditions and problems in full details the way the
Tunisian president did.” Mohammed Mediouni, Theatre in Tunisia (Sharjah: Arab
Theatre Institute Publications, 2009), 57.
4. Ali Ben Ayad, in Mahmoud Al-Majri (ed.), Min Shawaghili at-taassisi lil masrahi at-
tunusiyy (Questions of the Formation of Tunisian Theatre) (Tunis: Jaridat Al-Huriya
Publications, Book Series No.11, 2009), 65.
5. The first manifesto of Ceremonial Theatre in Morocco appeared in March 1979.
In three decades, it was followed by seven other manifestos by the same group under
the leadership of the Moroccan playwright Abdelkrim Berrchid. The first manifesto
created a heated debate in the amateur theatre scene giving rise to alternative mani-
festos from other groups who disagreed with Berrchid. However, this war of manifes-
tos was mostly theoretical and hardly visible on the ground at the practical level.
6. Muncef Souissi, son of the actor Ezzedine Souissi, has profoundly influenced the
Tunisian theatre scene for almost 40 years. He graduated in 1965 and went to
France to further his artistic development, becoming a disciple of Vilar. In 1968, he
returned to Tunisia and founded the El Kef regional theatre company. At an early
stage, his various collaborations with playwright and critic Azzedine Madani gave
232 Notes

meaning to “the call to return to tradition.” Through his interweaving of Vilar’s

spectacular performance techniques and Madani’s exploded narrative dramas
Souissi inaugurated a new era of theatre-making in Tunisia.
7. Hafedh Djedidi writes: “La troupe devient ainsi un creuset d’artistes et une
nouvelle école théâtrale qui va se distinguer par un traitement intelligent du
patrimoine arabo-musulman en vue de disséquer le quotidien social et politique
de l’époque,” Le Théâtre Tunisien
T dans tous ses Etats (Hammam-Sousse: Editions Dar
El-Mizen, 2003), 21.
8. Will D. Swearingen, Moroccan Mirages: Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912–1986
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 186.
9. Mohammed Kaghat, Binyat At-Taelif Al-masrahi mina Al-Bidaya ila Attamaninat
(Casablanca: Dar Thaqafa, 1986), 53.
10. The Mamoura theatre company served as a real platform for emerging profes-
sionals. Between 1966 and 1968, the company presented 50 performances of
Shraa atana rbaà in various Moroccan cities with 30,412 audience members
in total. The play was written by Mohammed Ahmed Al-Basri and directed by
Abdessamad Dinya. The Mamoura also presented 20 productions of Hamlett for
audiences totalling 3757, and 25 performances of Waliyo al-lah for audiences of
10,192. During the same period the company presented ten televised dramas,
among them Driss Tadili’s Al-Hadh. Among the members officially affiliated with
the Mamoura: Malika Amaari, Fatima Rajwani, Zhour Mamri, Fatima Rawi, Driss
Tadili, Mohammed Afifi, Ahmed Alawi, Larbi Yakoubi, Ahmed Tayeb Laalaj, Aziz
Mawhoub… .
11. Pierre Lucas, “Réalisation et Perspectives du C.A.D.,” in Arts et Culture, revue de la
division de la Jeunesse et des sports (Rabat, 1960), 10.
12. Ouzri, Le Théâtre au Maroc, 171.
13. Tayeb Saddiki, in Ahmed Farhat, Aswat Taqafia mina al-Magreb al-Arabiyy (Beirut:
A-ddar Al-Alamia, 1984), 55.
14. Hassan Mniai, Al-masrah al-magrebiy mina t-tasisi ila sima-at al-furja (Moroccan
Theatre from Construction to the Making of Spectacle) (Fez: University Sidi
Mohammed Ben Abellah Publications, 1994), 10.
15. Tayeb Saddiki, Diwan Sidi Abderrahman Al-Majdub (Rabat: Stouki, 1979), 64.
16. Act 1, scene 1.
17. Act 1, scene 6.
18. Quoted in El Rukaibi, “Algeria,” 53.
19. Kamel Bendimered, “Ould Abderrahmane Kaki, Le Pionnier du théâtre ihtifal,”
Djazirr 3 (Algiers, 2003), 30.
20. During his exile in Paris, Boudia continued both his dedication to theatre and his
political activism. He served for several years as director of the Théâtre de l’Ouest
Parisien and personally financed a Maghreb theatre in the capital. He also openly
championed the Palestinian cause, for which he was targeted by the Israeli secret
service and he was assassinated by a bomb planted in his car in 1973.
21. Cheniki, Le Théâtre en Algérie, 158.
22. Wadi Bouzar, La Culture en question (Algiers: Silex-SNED, 1982), quoted in
ibid., 45.

Chapter 13 Developing National Traditions, 1970–1990

1. Cheniki, Le Théâtre en Algérie.
2. Kateb Yacine, “Les Intellectuels, la révolution et le pouvoir,” Jeune Afrique 324
(26 March 1967), 22.
 Notes 233

3. The manifesto of the company is reproduced at www.kadour-naimi.com/

f-theatre-mer-algerie.htm.
4. Kateb Yacine, interview with Jacques Alessandra, “Le Théâtre révolutionnaire
algérien,” Travail théâtral (December 1979), 95.
5. See interview with Kadour in l’Oranie, reproduced at www.kadour-naimi.com/
f-theatre-mer-algerie-kadour-naimi-yacine.htm.
6. Kamil Salhi, The Politics and Aesthetics of Kateb Yacine (Lewiston, NY: Edwin
Mellen, 1999), 15.
7. Kateb Yacine, quoted in Nadia Tazi, “Kateb Yacine,” L’Autre Journal (July–August
1985), 17.
8. Kateb Yacine, Le Poète comme un boxeurr (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 33.
9. Salhi, Politics, 121.
10. Hichem ben Yaïche, interview with Yacine in December, 1989. Quoted in ibid.,
219.
11. Ibid.
12. Arlette Casas, “Entretien avec Kateb Yacine,” Mots 57 (1998), 105.
13. Ahmed Cheniki on censure, a television interview of TVDZ (16 April 2007). See
www.dztv.net/index.php?2007/04/26/900-le-point-de-vue-de-ahmed-cheniki-
sur-la-censure.
14. Interview with Ahmed Cheniki, quoted in “Les Lieux de la Mise en Scene,”
Analyze du Texte (Annaga, 2005).
15. Ibid.
16. Posted by Abdelmadjid Kaouah,12 November 2009, on wwwjohablogspotcom-
kaouah.blogspot.com/2009/11/la-halqa-inedite-dabdelkader-alloula-html.
17. Christiane Achour, Vies et portraits (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1995),
480.
18. H. M. Kahina, tribute to Alloula published in La Nouvelle Republique (8 March
2004).
19. Abdelkader Alloula, “Du Théâtre-Halqa à la Commedia dell’Arte” interview with
Mohammed Kali, in En Mémoire du Futur: Pour Abdelkader Alloula (Paris:Sindbad,
Actes Sud, 1997), 175-76.
20. Mniai, Al-masrah al-magrebiy, 51.
21. Abdelkrim Berrchid, Hududu Al-Kaini walmumkini fi Al-Masrah Al-Ihtifali (The
Limits of the Given and the Possible in Festive Theatre) (Casablanca: Dar
Athakafa, 1985), 127–47.
22. Mustapha Ramadani, Qadaya Al-Masrah Al-Ihtifali (Issues of Ceremonial Theatre)
(Damascus: Union of Arab Writers, 1993), 32.
23. Berrchid, Hududu Al-Kaini, 15.
24. Abdelkrim Berrchid, OTayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud (Othello, Horses, and Gunpowder)
r
(Casablanca: At-taqafa Al-Jadida, 1975).
25. “Bouhou: Who am I? I am the one who put on the garments of a fool. I am the
one who took people’s complains to your majesty, then I came disguised as a
clown loaded by the sufferings of the poor ones, the hunger of the hungry ones.
I came to you with things that happen in your absent presence” (OTayl, 31).
26. Abdelkrim Berrchid, Imruu al-qays fi-bariz (Imruu Al-Qais in Paris) (Rabat:
Editions Stouki, 1982). All quotations and references are from our English
translation.
27. Ibid., 15.
28. Ibid., 15–16.
29. Berrchid, Hududu Al-Kainii, 13.
234 Notes

30. Mohammed Meskin, in Hassan Mniai, A Study of Mohammed Meskin’s Theatrical

Projectt (Rabat: Manshurat Itihad Kutab Al-Maghreb, 1991), 6.
31. Fadel Jaïbi is an author and director of theatre and cinema. Between 1967 and
1972, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and at Charles Dullin School. Between
1974 and 1978, he taught at the Centre d’Art Dramatique of Tunis. He is the
co-founder of the southern Theatre Gafsa in 1972, and The New Theatre in
1975. Fadel Jaïbi is indisputably a major contemporary Arab theatre figure; his
theatre that he calls “elite for all” is appreciated in Tunis, as it is in Rabat, Beirut,
Damascus, or Cairo. Europe in recent years has become interested in Jaïbi’s theat-
rical research and uncompromising representation of Tunisian politics, as well as
his “method” of theatrical training, internships for directing the actors, multiple
communications and interventions. His performances, such as Comedia, Familia,
Desert coffee lovers, Junun, have great success in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy,
Spain, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, and even Argentina, Korea, and Japan. Jaïbi
was the first Arab artist to be invited officially to perform at the 2002 Avignon
Festival in the 56 years of its existence.
32. TNT was created by Law No. 113, 30 December 1983 (relating to paragraphs 73–74
of the Finance Act of the same year).
33. “C’est un enfant né adulte en raison du retard enregistré pour doter le pays
d’une vitrine théâtrale officielle qui engagerait totalement l’état tunisien dans
une prise en charge de la création théâtrale à un haut niveau.” Djedidi, Le
Théâtre Tunisien, 23.
34. Mohammed Driss, quoted in ibid., 24.
35. Tawfiq Jebali, Interview in http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion /2011/01/
2011116142317498666.html (accessed 17 January 2011).
36. Bertolt Brecht, “Interview with an Exile” was first published in Copenhagen on
20 March 1934, then quoted by Helge Hulberg in Die ästhetischen Anschauungen
Bertolt Brechts (Copenhagen, 1962), and re-edited and translated into English by
John Willett in Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1957).

Chapter 14 Entering a New Century, 1990–2010

1. Quoted in Bouaiane ben Achour, Le Théâtre en Mouvement: Octobre 88 à ce jour
(Oran: Éditions Dar El Gharb, 2002), 107.
2. See www.abdelkaderalloula.org.
3. Quoted in Sara Deschryver, “Parcours Ziani Chérif El Ayad,” in www.lafriche.
org/friche/zdyn1/rubrique.php3?id⫹314 (October 2006).
4. Quoted in Fayçal Métaoui, “Mohammed Benguettaf à la librairie Socrate:
‘J’appartiens à une génération qui commence à disparaître,’” El Watan 24 (October
2009), 1.
5. Quoted in Catherine Bédarida, “2003, année de l’Algérie et des polémiques,”
Le Monde (1 April 2002), 16.
6. Quoted in Marina Da Silva, “L’Algérie en France, une Année polémique,” Le Monde
diplomatiquee (15 December 2003), 4.
7. “Avant-propos” to La Récréation des clowns, quoted in Cheniki, Théâtre en Algérie,
114.
8. Mahmoud Chaal, “Un patrimoine en danger d’extinction,” Algérie Newsweek
(8–14 October 2009), 2.
9. La tribune, quoted in Ben Achour, Le Théâtre, 148.
10. Mohammed Said Fellag, “Le Théâtre algérien est dans la rue,” interview with
Chantal Boiron, UBU 27/28 (2003), 55–9.
 Notes 235

11. H.Z., “Arezki Tahar où le combat d’un homme de théâtre Kabyle,” L’Humanité
(11 April 2002), 16.
12. Quoted by Idr Ammour, in “La Générale de la pièce théâtrale Fatma à Tamanrasset,”
posted 2/3/2008 on www.tamanrasset.cnet/article.item.1167.htm.
13. Tayeb Saddiki, Al-fil was-sarawil (Kenitra: Éditions Boukili, 1997).
14. Ibid., 9.
15. The maqama or assembly is an Arab artistic form. It is a long narrative poem.
The tradition off maqama started in the eleventh century when Badie a-Azzaman
al-hamadani composed his first maqama. Though it has dramatic characteristics,
the maqama cannot be regarded as a complete play destined for the stage. Jacob
Landau highlights the theatricality of the maqama: “Another popular literary
form which often contains the elements of mimicry is the Arabic maqama, in
which the theme was frequently presented in the guise of conversation, parts of
which imitated various characters” ( Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theatre
and Cinema (Philadelphia: 1957). The rawi (narrator) presents his narrative in the
form of storytelling, yet adapts different roles to flesh out his characters. However,
the poetic aspect of the maqama is much more dominant than its theatricality,
as Landau rightly observes: “[Its] linguistic sophistication is valued more than
successful imitation” (ibid., 3).
16. Tayeb Saddiki, Maqamat Badiaa Ezzamane El-Hamadani (An Entertaining bsat) t
(Kenitra: Èditions Boukili, 1998), 1.
17. Ahmed Tayeb Laalaj, Juha wa Chajarat A-ttufah (Juha and the Apple Tree) (Tangier:
Chirae, 1998).
18. Abdelhaq Zerouali, Kidtu Arah (I Was About to See) is a script written in 2002 and
presented during the theatre season of 2003 by Zerouali’s Theatre Company.
19. The High Institute of Dramatic Art is the unique Institute of higher Education
specialized in forming actors, scenographers and cultural directors and cura-
tors in Morocco. It is part of the Ministry of Culture rather than Education.
Conceived in 1969, but realized only in 1987 with Mohammed Ben Issa as
Minister of Culture, the Institute’s vision has ever since been shaped by the
Ministry’s different temperaments.
20. El-Meskini Sghir, Bu-jma’ l-faruj (Bu-Jma’ the Rooster) (Casablanca: The Center for
Third Theatre Publications, 2000).
21. Lalla J’mila is a play by Zober Benbouchta, first performed by the Ibn Khaldoun
Theatre Company in 2004. The acuteness of the play was well explored by the
experimental director Jamal Eddine El-Abrak along with his devoted team and
particularly the two outstanding actresses Hasna Tantaoui and Kenza Fridou.
22. Faqih in Arabic means a knowledgeable man who learns the Qu‘ran by heart, and
knows the Sunna of the Prophet Mohammed, and all that concerns everyday-life
practice of the Muslims (Shari’a). In brief, it is a title that is achieved mostly by
men, for only they have easy access to public education. Very few women in Arabo-
Islamic history have achieved the title of fkiha, which literally means an educated
woman who is able to advance her own interpretation of reality in a male-domi-
nated world. Lalla Yennou’s self-education and desire to educate other women are
all subversive attempts to dismantle paternalistic systems of governance.
23. Benbouchta, Lalla J’mila, 25.
24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (California:
University of California Press ,1984), 23.
25. Benbouchta, Lalla J’mila, 25.
26. Ibid.
236 Notes

27. Zohra Makach, Fragments, 4 (Unpublished script).

28. Ibid., 23.
29. According to Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, intermediality “is about
changes in theatre practice and thus about changing perceptions of performance,
which become visible through the process of staging. We locate intermediality at
a meeting point in-between the performers, the observers, and the confluence of
media involved in a performance at a particular moment of time. The intermedial
inhabits a space in-between the different realities that the performance creates
and thus it becomes, at the minimum, a tripartite phenomenon.” Freda Chapple
and Chiel Kattenbelt (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam,
Editions Rodopi B. V., 2006), 12.
30. Tayeb Saddiki, Le Diner de Gala (Casablanca: Éditions eddif, 1990).
31. Ibid., 34.
32. Ibid., 101.
33. Mohammed Kaghat, Al-murtajala al-jadida & murtajalt Fes (The New Improvised
Play and The Impromptu of Fez) (Casablanca: Sabou Publications, 1991).
34. Ibid., 7.
35. Kaghat, murtajalat Fes, 83–4.
36. Mohammed Kaghat, Chmisa Lalla (unpublished script).
37. According to research conducted by Amina Touzani, ISADAK was conceived in
1969 and realized in 1987. Up till 1998, 73 percent of the alumni were recruited
by the Ministry of Culture, 10 percent pursued postgraduate studies, 6 to 8 percent
were recruited by local municipalities, 4 to 5 percent worked in TV, and 1 percent
worked in the private sector. These figures reveal that the field of professional
theatre is still very fragile in Morocco.
38. According to the Ministry of Culture up till 2003, there were 20 theatre buildings in
Morocco offering 11020 seats; 12 of these were found in the political capital, Rabat,
and in the economic one, Casablanca, with 9270 seats and almost 80 percent of the
total seats in all Morocco. For more details on the current situation, see also Amina
Touzani, La culture et la politique culturelle au Marocc (Casablanca: Édition la croisée
des chemins, 2003), 173.
39. Just before he died, King Hassan II inaugurated Morocco’s path to recover its
memory. A truth commission was formed in order to enquire into state violence
in the “years of lead” (les années du plomb) that was mainly characterized by
autocratic dictatorship with limited freedoms and excessive use of force. This
process continued with his son, King Mohammed VI; however the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission chose a non-punitive approach that highlighted
repressed narratives rather than the explanation of what happened and its
legal implications. Some of the narratives were even broadcast on Moroccan TV
without pointing out the agents of repression. In the past 15 years a significant
literary output that is called Adab A-Sujuun (the literature of prisons) has flour-
ished in Morocco. Ex-political prisoners contributed a great deal to the present
recovery of memory. Theatre, too, has contributed. Al-Karnaval is among the
dramas that relate the experience of imprisonment in Morocco. It was written
by Mohammed Amin Ben Youb, a Professor of Theatre at ISADAK whose brother
was a political prisoner for eight years. The play was put onstage by the Kasbah
company in 2009.
40. During his two terms in office, Cultural Minister Al-Achàri changed the subsidy
structure by rendering it more transparent and democratic, with a legal text and
a national commission. His main partner in this project was the National Union
 Notes 237

of Theatre Professionals that was founded in 1993 immediately after the first
National Forum for Professional Theatre, held on 14 May 1992. A date that is still
celebrated in Morocco as the National Day of Theatre, partly because King Hassan
II addressed the participants of the forum with a letter.
41. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (b.1936) was President of Tunisia between 7 November
1987 and 14 January 2011 after a peaceful medico-legal coup d’étatt against
President Bourguiba who was declared medically unfit for the job. Ben Ali took
up the presendency of the republic acting under Article 57 of the Tunisian
Constitution. In 2009, President Ben Ali was re-elected for the fifth time. In 23
years, Ben Ali and his entourage built one of the most policed and autocratic
regimes in the region, leading the country to economic distress and political
repression. On Friday, 14 January 2011, Ben Ali fled the country leaving escalating
riots behind him.
42. President Ben Ali, an extract from his address to cultural operators on the occa-
sion of the International Theatre Day on 27 March 1993, in Al-Hurriya (28 March
1993). It is important to note that the state in Tunisia utilized different artistic
means in the service of the official ideology. This is evident in the percentage
of the national budget devoted to the cultural sector, which was originally
around 0.25 percent after independence. It was multiplied by 10 in 2009; the
estimation today stands at 1.1 percent of the annual budget of the state. The
missions assigned to the Ministry of Culture in the artistic field are: To promote,
coordinate and harmonize cultural activities and to ensure the development and
execution of programs aiming at the development and the democratic diffusion
of culture. Another priority is the support of national cultural action abroad
and the strengthening of international cooperation. In short, it is especially a
question of safeguarding the historical and artistic heritage, democratization
of culture and its regionalization, particularly through a network of regional,
national, and international festivals. The state subsidy to theatrical diffusion
also allows the purchase of up to ten performances from the same company
per annum by the Ministry, for a going amount of 20,000 and 40,000 dinars.
The Ministry determines where these performances be played. The subsidies are
granted to the company once the performance is approved by the commission
of the Ministry.
43. Tawfiq Jebali, http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1E20DC69-EB88-4B45-A72C-
987DC9532B50.htm (accessed on 17 January 2011).
44. The battle of the Jaïbis was fought at various locations. Some political parties
such as the Progressive Democratic Party put a petition in their website that
reads as follows: “Support Jalila Baccar and Fadel Jaïbi: Tunisian drama writers
and theatre directors.”
We have just learned that, the Consultative Commission called “Orientation
théâtrale” in Tunisia has recommended the censorship of the Play “Khamsoun”
(Captive Bodies). This recommendation is fully effective since it has been rati-
fied by the Ministry of Culture. Needless to remember that the authors of this
play, Jalila Baccar and Fadel Jaïbi, have been at the heart of the theatre rebirth in
Tunisia as well as in the rest of the Arab world. For the last 35 years, through each
of their stage creations, they have never stopped stiring up the world of the thea-
tre and injecting new impulses into it. They have fed and enrichened it by sce-
nographical innovations unveiling the failures, the gaps, and the make-believes
of the society they live in. Moreover, their numerous performances have been
acclaimed worldwide. Those of you who have had the chance to applaud them on
238 Notes

the occasion of their latest (now banned ) play at the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe
in Paris in June have been impressed by its high literary and artistic quality as well
as by the soundness of its political dimension. Indeed, this play reflects, through
the pure magic of theatre, the violence of radicalism and the creeping ideology
lying underneath it, legitimizing crime. How can a regime supposedly based on
modernity deprive citizens it is ruling from a performance aiming at raising their
awareness of the root causes of a crisis which jeopardizes progress, encourages
regression, and endangers the future? We strongly condemn this act of censorship
which deprives the artists of their source of livelihood and above all, of their very
reason to live. To link with the petition: www.familiaprod.com. In http://www.
pdpinfo.org/spip.php?article4229 (accessed 14 November 2010).

Conclusion
1. Ian Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identityy (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),
74. In Derridean terms, the “authentic” is very much like a “cinder” or a “trace,”
for it destroys its purity at the very moment of presenting itself, or rather as it is
thrown into being. The matrix form of plenitude, fullness, and origin is a myth.
Derrida puts it thus: “The concept of origin … is nothing but the myth of efface-
ment of the trace – that is to say, of an original différance that is neither absence
nor presence, neither negative nor positive” (J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans.
Gayatri Chakravorty, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
167). Obviously, origin as presence is, according to Derrida, “the myth of addi-
tion.” There is no origin but “différance”; there is no presence but representation.
The origin is constructed only through a non-origin; its existence as différance
precedes its delusive essence, for it originates in a lack of plenitude. “The trace,”
as a matter of fact, “is not only the disappearance of origin …, it means that the
origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by
a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin” ( J. Derrida,
Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 61).
2. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Essays on Performance and Politics of
Culture (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 2.
3. Bhabha, quoted in Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of
Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,” in Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham
(eds), Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1999), 39.
4. Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space, Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Jonathan
Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1990), 211.
5. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
6. Bhabha, ibid., 38–9.
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 88–9.
8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 223.
9. Salman Rushdie describes the effects of such alienation as follows: “our physical
alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of
reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions,
not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the
 Notes 239

mind,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (New York: Penguin,
1992), 10.
10. Khatibi is critical of the two most frequent itineraries chosen by North Africans to
construct a post-colonial society: the Pan-Arabic version of Marxism that is based
on Hegelian dialectics and Western metaphysics; and an ever-impossible “retour
aux sources,” which has most often taken the form of a radical Islam. His insis-
tence on the history of the interrelations of Mediterranean civilizations provides
the example of the very impossibility of the kind of cultural purity sought after by
both traditionalists and Europeanized elites. He proposes that instead of trying to
erase one element of the current ethno-cultural landscape, Maghreb intellectuals
should evaluate that very landscape according to what he calls a double critique.
“The Occident is part of me,” Khatibi reminds us, “a part that I can only deny
insofar as I resist all the occidents and all the orients that oppress and disillusion
me” (Khatibi, Maghreb Pluriel, 106).
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Denis Bablet and Jean Jacquot (eds), Le Lieu Théâtral dans La Société Moderne, 2nd edn
(Paris: Éditions Du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), 49–54.
——. (Interviewed by Cherif Khaznadar), Jeune Afrique 513:3 (November 1970), 62.
Webber, Sabra. Romancing the Real: Folklore and Ethnographic Representation in North
Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).
Willett, John. Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1957).
Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Storytellers and their Art
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Yacine, Kateb. “Les Intellectuels, la révolution et le pouvoir,” Jeune Afrique 324 (26
March 1967).
——. Interview with Jacques Alessandra, “Le Théâre révolutionnaire algérien,” Travail
théâtral (December 1979).
—— Le Poète comme un boxeurr (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Zerouali, Abdelhak. Kidtu Arah (I Was about to See) (Unpublished script, 2002).
Index

Aba, Noureddine Ahrar, Latifa, 171

La Récréation des clowns, 185 El-Ajwad, Oran, 184
Abbaba, Algeria, 149 Al-Akoudi, Ibrahim, 78, 89
Abbar. Azzadine, 157, 187–8 Aladin, Sidi Bel Abbès, 189
Abbas, Khedive, 80 Alaoui, Kamal, 134
Abd-el-Kader, 61 Al-Alaoui, Mohammed Bel-Arbi, 106
Abdeall, Mohya, 157 Alaric, 13
Abdelhadi, Tawfiq, 133 Alawai, Ahmed, 232
Abdennadher, Mohammed, 134 Algerian National Theatre (TNA), 126–8,
Abderrahmane, Ould (Kaki), 4, 143–4, 143–52, 156, 159, 161, 165, 177,
147, 152, 176–9, 183, 187 180–3, 186, 189–91, 193, 219
132 Sana (132 Years), 145 Algiers, 60–1, 71, 86–7, 90, 93–5, 116,
Afriqiya Qahl al-Aam Waahid (Africa 125, 157–9, 186, 192
before the Year One), 145 Algiers Opera, 63, 86, 115–16, 124, 143
Beni Kelboune, 150 Ali, Noureddine, 211
Diwan el Garagouez, 145 Ali Agha, 59
El Guerrab wa Essalhine (The Water Ali Bey, 58
Bearer and the Marabouts), 145 El-Alj, Bachir, 118
Koul Ouahed ou hukmou (Each Allalou (Sellali Ali), 90–1
according to his own judgement), Djeha, 90
145 Zouaj Bou Akline (The Marriage of Bou
Sha’b uth-Thulma (The People of the Akline), 91
Night), 145 Alloula, Abdelkader, 4, 145–6, 159–66,
Tarikh Essahra (The Legend of the 176–9, 181, 183–5, 187, 218, 220
Rose), 144 Al-Agouwâl (The Sayings), 161–3, 165,
Abiad, George, 80, 85–6, 88–9, 97, 123–4 180
Abidat r’ma, 35 El-Ajwad (The Generous Ones), 162–3,
El-Abrak, Jamal Eddine, 235 165, 184–5
Al-Achàri, Mohammed, 210, 236 Chaab Faq (The Awakening of the
Achard, Frédéric, 65 People’s Conscience), 185
Achour, Tawfik, 132 La Générale, 185
Action culturelle des travailleurs Hammam Rebbi (The Baths of
(Workers’ Cultural Action, ACT), Bon-Dieu), 161
153, 158 Homk Salim, 150, 159, 185
Al-Adab al-Arabiya (Arabian Letters), El Khobza (Bread), 159, 186
Tunis, 77–8, 88, 96 Laalaq (The Leeches), 147
Adet, Georges, 118 El-Lithem (The Veil), 162–3, 184–5
Afifi, Ahmad, 77 El Meida (The Table), 159–60
Afifi, Mohammed, 232 Nassine oua salatine, 189
Agadir, Morocco, 193, 203, 209 El Wjb el Watani (The National Duty),
Agar, Madame, 65 185
Al-Aghaliba, 111 Alloula, Raja, 176, 184
Al-Agrebi, Mohammed, 92, 123, 132, 231 Amaari, Malika, 232
Ahmed I, 62 Amalric, Mathieu, 186

247
248 Index

Amazight theatre and culture, 2, 9, 19–20, Ayyoub, Habib

24, 27, 44, 101–2, 108, 134, 151, Les Adieux, 186
154–5, 157, 182, 190–3, 203 Al-Azdi, Ahmad Abu’l-Mutahhar, 15
Amed (Hope), Blida, 115–16 Al-Aziz, Abd, 74
El Amiri, Taha, 125 Aziza, Mohammed, 103–4
Amour, Hammadi, 121 Azzefoun, Algeria, 191
And, Metin, 224
Annaba, Algeria, 115, 143, 181, 189–90, Baccar, Jalila, 134, 172, 212–13, 237
192 Araberlin, 212
Annahdha, 97 In Search for Aida, 212
Anouilh, Jean, 124 Junun, 212, 234
Antonin, Emperor, 11 Khamsoun (Captive Bodies ), 212, 237
Antun, Farah, 86 Yahia Yaïch (Amnesia ), 212–13
Aouche, Mme., 191 Bachedjerrah, Dhelloul, 91
Apulieus, 11–13 Bachtarzi, Mahieddine, 87–8, 90–1, 95,
Aquarium Theatre Company, 210 114–17, 124–5, 146, 156
Hkayaat Nssa (Women’s Stories), 210 Béni Oui Oui (Those who always say
Min Ajlihim (For Them), 210 yes), 105
Qabla Al-Futurr (Before Breakfast), 210 Boutchenchana (Cocaine), 95
Arab Maghreb Liberation Committee, 122 Bouzarai fi al askarr (The Peasant in the
Arabi, Ibnu, 32 Regiment), 95
Arabian Nights, see Thousand and One Doulet Ennisa, 124
Nights Al-en-nîf (Duty), 95
El Aras, Oran, 146 Les Femmes (Women), 95
Arezki, Mfouke, 192 El Kheddaïne (The Traitors), 95–6, 105
Arena, Tunis, 64–5 Ma Yenfaa ghir Essah (Only the Truth
Aristophanes, 147 Counts), 95, 144
Parliament of Women, 139 El Ouadjib (Duty), 105
El-Arkoubi, Youssef, 198–9 Zid’ayat, 95
Arslan, Shakib, 100, 101, 229 Badawi, M.M., 1, 4, 38, 103
L’Art Scénique, Sidi Bel Abbès, 187 Baghdad, 23, 25
Artaud, Antonin, 119–20, 170 Bahraoui, Hassan, 33
Ashura Festival, 40, 46, 51, 74 Bahri, Youssef, 215
Assala, 32 Haqaib (Suitcases), 215
Association of Algerian Muslims Bakhti, Mohammed, 156
(AUMA), 110 Anti oua Ana (You and I), 156
ATAWAKEL, 137 Djelssa Merfoua (Getting-up Session), 157
L’Atelier, Sidi Bel Abbès, 187 Ya Ben Ammi Ouine (Oh, Cousin,
Augustine, 13–14, 46 where are we going?), 157
Augustus, 10 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 49
L’Avenir, Tunis, 67 Bali, Hajar, 186
Avignon Festival, 158, 234 Le Détour,r 186
Ayachi, M’mida, 188 Le Testament, t 186
Ayad, Ahmed, see Rouiched Banan, Aliaa, 78, 85
Ayad, Ziani Chérif, 177, 179–80, 183 Banan, Hasan, 85
L’étoile et la comète (The Star and the Bank, Federico, 83
Comet), 180 Banan, Hasan, 85
Ayadi, Samir Bannan, Alya, 78
Atchan ya sabaya, 172 El Baoundi. Abdessatar, 134
Al-Ayoubi, Salah El-Din, 75, 102 Barba, Eugenio, 40
 Index 249

Barbarossa, 57 Bendejedid, Chadli, 176

Barbary Corsairs, 58 Benguettaf, Mohammed, 146, 177, 183
Baron, A.M., 68 El Ayta (The Cry), 177
Barthes, John, 35 Bab el Foutouh, 150
Al-Basri, Mohammed Ahmed Baya, 177
Shraa atana rbaa, 232 Bliss Laouer Kayen Mennou (The Blind
Batna, Algeria, 150, 177 Devil Truly Exists), 146
Beaumarchais, Pierre, 137 Le dernier des prisonniers (The Last of
The Barber of Seville, 69, 121, 196 the Prisoners), 177
Beckett, Samuel, 144, 171, 175, 187 Fatma, 177, 186, 190–1, 193
Endgame, 142, 188 Journal d’une femme insomniaque (Diary
Waiting for Godot,t 148 of an Insomniac Woman), 184, 190
El-Bedaoui, Bouchaib, 118 Les Martyrs reviennent cette semaine
Bejaia, Algeria, 150, 177, 180–1, 189–90, (The Martyrs Return this Week), 184
192–3 Benhamamouch, Jamil, 185
Bekri, Tahar, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 33
Belbey, Malika, 184 Bennani, Mohammed, 118
Belhadj, Nesrine, 190 Benshmicha, Hocine, 188
Ben Abdalla, Mohsen, 172, 231 Benhsmicha, Kada, 187–8
Ben Aicha, Abdellah, 58 Adel, 187
Ben Ali, Zine El Abidine, 210, 214, 237 Les Clowns, 187
Ben Aarafa, Mohammed, 122 M’kaidech, 187
Ben Abdellah, Sidi Mohammed, 50 L’oeuf blue (The blue Egg), 187–8
Ben Amar, Rajae, 134, 172 Le Rossignol et l’oiseau méchanique
Ben Ayad, Ali, 132–3, 172, 231 (The Nightingale and the Mechanical
Ben Ayad, Mohammed, 121 Bird), 187
Ben Badis, Abd al-Hamid, 110–11 Ulysse, 188
Ben-Cheikh, Mohammed Benyoub, Mohammed Amine
Intissar al-baraa (The Victory of The Karnaval, 210
Innocence), 99 Benyoucef, Messaoud
Ben Friha, Chadi, 85, 89 Dans les ténèbres gîtent les aigles (Eagles
Ben Kamla, Ali, 89 Dwell in the Shadows), 186
Ben Marbouk, Yahia, 125 Berber. See amazight
Ben Rachid, Noureddine, 93 Berber Decree, 100–1, 108, 110
Ben Saddik, Ahmed, 104, 207 Berber spring, 158
Ben Said, Mohammed, 119 Bernhardt, Sarah, 65, 80, 92
Ben Tijani, Hamda, 92, 113 Love, 92
Ben Youb, Mohammed Amin Bernziza, Lahsen, 35
Al-Karnaval, 236 Berrchid, Abdelkrim, 166–8, 231
Ben Zidane, Moulay Tabeb, 119 Imruu al-qays fi-Bariz, 168
Benaïssa, Slimane, 146, 148–9, 153, 155, Otayl wal-Khayl wal-ba-rud d (Otayl,
158–9, 176, 179, 183 Horses and Gunpowder), 168
Babour eghraq (The Ship Sinks), 158 A-Zawiya, 171
Babour ghraq (The Ship Sails On) Bey, Maïssa
Boualem zid el Gouddem (Boualem, Filles de silence, 186
Go Forward), 149–50 Bhabha, Homi, 109, 219–20
El mahgour (The Scorned), 158, 181 Bharucha, Rustom, 219
Youm el Jhem’a (Friday), 158 Al-Bidaoui, Bouchaib, 118
Benbouchta, Zober Biskra, Algeria, 190
Lalla J’mila, 200–2, 235 Blahi, Abdelkader, 187
250 Index

Blida, Algeria, 87, 115–16 Brulin, Tone

Bolo, Etienne, 127 The Dogs, 144
Bonbonniere, Tunis, 68 L’bsat,
t 50, 52, 118
Bordj El Kiffan, Algeria, 143, 147, 179, Bujlud, 40–2, 52
183, 185 Al-Bukhari, 104
Bouabid, Abderrahim, 118 Burroughs, William, 42
Bouajila, Sam, 186 Bussat, 83
Bouanani, Samir, 189
Boubrioua, Ahcène, 159 Caesaria, see Cherchell
Boudia, Mohammed, 127–8, 143, 146, Café Kharief, Tunis, 74
232 Café-Théâtre, Casablanca, 139
Naissancers, 128 Café-Théâtre, Tunis, 67
L’Olivier,
r 127 Calderon, Pierre
Boudiaf, Mohammed, 158, 192 Life is a Dream, 143, 147
Boudjedra, Rachid Camera, Lopez, 63
al-Halazoun al-A’need (The Stubborn Camus, Albert, 125
Snail), 157 Caligula, 132
Bouguermouh, Malek, 181 Candas, Georges, 65
Boujellatia, Mohammed, 134 Canetti, Ellias, 33
Boulbyar, Aziza, 134 Caracol, Manuel, 83
Boulayman, Ahmed, 77, 89, 97, 113, 123 Carlin, 59
Boulifa, Mohammed, 183 Carlson, Marvin, 50, 222
Boumedienne, Hourai, 143, 145, 158 Carthage, 9, 11, 13–15, 69–70
Boumedienne, Sirat, 145, 177 Carthage Festival, 14, 155, 157, 179, 214
Bourguiba, Habib, 122, 124, 131–3, 213, Carton, Louis, 69–70
231, 237 Caruso, Enrico, 83
Bourguiba, Mohammad, 77, 79, 88, 91–2 Casablanca, Morocco, 122, 139, 193,
At-Tagya (The Tyrant), 97 200, 206, 236
Bouteflika, Abdelaziz, 177 Casino Plage, Sousse, 67
Bouzar, Wadi, 146 Castro, Estrella, 83
Box, Laura Chakravarty, 222 Cercle des etudiants de Ben-Aknoun, 155
Bowles, Paul, 42–3 Ceremonial Theatre, see Al-Masrah
Bradbury, Ray Al-Ihtifalia
La colonne de feu (The Column of Fire), Cervantes, Miguel de
188 The Siege of Naumantia, 147
Destination cratère de Chicago, 187 A-Chabab al Qayrawani (Kaiouanian
Bravmann, René, 41 Youth), 111
Brecht, Bertolt, 21, 33, 144, 147, 170–1 Chakroun, Abdallah, 83, 118–19
Caucasian Chalk Circle, 146 Le secret Absolu, 118
The Exception and the Rule, 157 Chapman, George
Good Person of Setzuan, 181 The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of
Herr Puntila, 188 Byron, 58
Interview with an Exile, 175 Charfeddine, Moncef, 58
The Measures Taken, 181 Charles II, King of England, 58
The Mother,r 173 Charles X, King of France, 61
Petty Bourgeois Wedding, g 173 Chateaubriand, François
Private Life of the Master Race, 163 The Last of the Abencerages, 86
Señora Carrar’s Rifles, 144 Chekhov, Anton
Brockett, Oscar G. and Frank Hildy, 103 Swan Song, g 182
Brook, Peter, 206 Chelkowsky, Peter J., 103
 Index 251

Chen, Chu Su Delavigne, Casimir, 80

Monnaies d’or,
r 147 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 220
Cheniki, Amed, 150 Delvair, Mme, 70
Cherchell (Caesaria), Algeria, 10, 14, 46, Demarcy, Richard
149 Les Mimosas d’Algérie, 185
Cherqui, Gérard Dennery, Adolphe, 65, 89
Alger-Alger,
r 186 Derdour, Ahcène, 115
Chouak, Aziz Derrida, Jacques, 12, 218
El Maestro, 186 Derham, Mohammed, 198
Chrysalide, 186 Destour Party, 96
Cicolo Europeao, 62 Dhalila, Haja Bali, 184
Clauzel, Bertrand, 61 Di Castelnuovo, 64
Cleopatra, 10 Dido, 9
Cleopatra Selene, 10 Dinya, Abdessamad, 232
Cohen-Tanugi, David, 64 Djedidi, Hafedh, 134, 173
Combined Company (al-Firqa Djenina palace, Algiers, 61, 63
al-Mokhtalita)a , 85 Doghmi, Mohammed, 118
The Comedy Theatre (al-Masrah Don Sebastian of Portugal, 57–8
Fukaahi), 96 Donizetti, Gaetano
Comédie Française, 14, 65–6, 70, 119–20, Bélisaire, 61
136, 180, 184–5 La Favorite, 64
Comédie Italienne, 59 Lucie de Lammermoor, r 61
Constantine, Algeria, 63, 110, 115–17, Douagi, Ali
143, 151, 159, 177, 189–90 Al Amira Banga (The Princess Banga),
Conteh-Morgan, John, 4 93
Coppée, François Douchet, Jacob, 66
Pour la Couronne (For the Crown), 97 Doudou, Aboul Id
Coquelin, Constant, 66 at-Turaaab (The Soil), 116
Corneille, Pierre Dougga, Tunisia, 11, 14
Le Cid, 79, 111, 191 Doughmi, Mohammed, 121
Horace, 80 Doutté, Edmond, 46, 51, 74, 226
Polyeucte, 14, 70 Dozy, Reinhardt, 26
Courteline, Georges, 69 Driss, Mohammed, 134, 172, 174–5, 188,
The Crescent (al-Hilal), 88, 89, 92 214–15
Cypriani, Homere, 66 L’Héitage (The Legacy), 174
Rajel Wa Mra (A Man and a Woman),
Dahmoune, Brahim, 90–1 214–15
Daif, Bouselham, 171 Drissi, Béchir, 172, 231
Dakkar, Hakim, 189 Al Ghoussoun al Homr, r 172
Damis, J., 106 Ducange, Victor, 89
Daniel, Ibn, 38 Dullin, Charles, 119
Daninos, Abraham Dumas, Alexandre, 62
Nazahat al-Mushtaq (The Pleasure Trip Catherine Howard, 76
of the Enamoured), 71–2 La Tour de Nesle, 88
Daudet, Alphonse, 69 Dumas, Alexandre fils, 65
Davis, Stephen, 42–3 L’Aventurière, 65
De Gaulle, Charles, 114, 128 Dunant, Henry, 61
Dejeux, Jean, 224
Delarue-Mardus, Lucie The Educator (al-Mouhaddiba ), 86
La Prêtresse de Tanit,
t 70 Eagleton, Terry, 49
252 Index

Eden Theatre, Kairouan, 67 Fichet, Alexandre, 67, 70

Egyptian Company ((Koumidia el Masria), Fiebach, Yoachim, 28
74 Filippo, Eduardo de
Eid, Aziz, 92 The Art of Comedy, 191
Eisenhower, Dwight, 114 Firqat Achabiba Al-Fassiya (Fez Youth
Elaïdi, Abdou, 186 Company), 108
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 58 Firqat Al-Mamoura (Mamoura Theatre
Ennasser, Mohammed, 57 Company), 122, 136, 138, 170, 232
Erdman, Nikolai, 190 Firqat al-Mokhtalita (Combined
The Suicide, 188 Company), 85
Errazi, Mohammed, 115 Firqat An-Najm Al-Maghrebi Lit-Tamthil
Le Justicier,
r 115 Al-Arabiy
Les Trois Voleurs, 115 (The Maghreb Star of Arabic Acting
Le Voleur de minuit,t 115 Company), Fez, 111
Errkik, Youssef, 133 Firqat as-Saada (Happiness Company),
Essaiem, Muncef, 211 Tunis, 96
l’Essor, Tunis, 67, 69–70, 79 Firqat At-Tamthil Al-maghribi (The
Etoile du Nord, Tunis, 211 Moroccan Theatre Company), 122,
Etoile Nord- Africaine (ENA), 94 136
El Eulma, Algeria, 190 Firqat Wassila Sabri (Wassila Sabri
Experimental Theatre Festival, Cairo, Company), 93
214–15 Flores, Lola, 83
Ezzahia, Algiers, 91 Fly-whisk affair, 61
Foley, John Miles, 223
Faizo, Lufti, 25–6 Folies Bergères, Tunis
Falaki, Reda, 115 Frazer, Sir James, 41, 46–8
Familia, Tunis, 212, 215, 234 Fridou, Kenza, 235
Coffee Lovers Desert,t 212, 234 Frisch, Max
Comedia, 212, 234 The Firebugs, 181
Familia, 212, 234
Fanon, Frantz, 21–2, 221 Gafsa, Tunisia, 134, 172, 174, 210–11, 234
Farag, Alfred, 3 Gafsi, Rajah, 134
Alif Lachey Alik, 134 Galano, Jo, 65
Zir Salem, 134 Gallego, Antonio, 83
Farah, Iskandar Garara, Dalenda, 211
Matami an-Nisa, 76 Gassner, John, 103
Farhat, Raja, 134 Gèze, François, 183
Al-Fassi, Allal, 99, 106 El-Gharbi, Mohammed, 133
El-Fassi, Latifa, 119 Al-Ghazi, Mohammed, 107
Fellag, Mohammed Said, 190–2 Ginioux, Hubert, 139
Les Aventures de Tchop, 189, 191 Goddard, Benjamin
Un bateau pour l’Australia, 192 Ruy Blas, 64
Femmegan, Ruth, 20 Gogol, Nicolai
Ferhan, Razika, 193 The Nose, 187
Fertat, Omar, 230 Diary of a Madman, 159, 182
Fetmouche, Omar, 193 Goldoni, Carlo
Harf B’harf,f 181 The Servant of Two Masters, 134, 165
Fez, Morocco, 19, 30–1, 46–9, 83–5, 100, El Gosto, Marseilles, 180
107–11 Gounod, Charles
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 33–4, 205 Faust,
t 64–6
 Index 253

Gouri, Hamid Douaa el hamam (the Prayer of the

El Houb fi bilad el hidjara, 189 Doves), 182
El-Tarous (The Hunting Dog), 189 Laachia, Aaouicha wa el harraz (The
Gouwâl, 18–19, 23, 145, 147, 150, 160, Lover, Awicha and the Charlatan), 182
162, 217 El-Hadj, Hamida, 182, 193
Gozzi, Carlo Hafid, Moulay, 81
The Green Bird, 144 Haft, Mohammed, 80
Gran Teatro, Tunis, 64 Haiyat, Yusef, 75
Gran Teatro Cervantes, Tangier, 83 Hakam, Abderrazak, 118
Grandmougin, Charles Hakawati, 18, 21, 24–6, 29
La Mort de Carthage, 70 Hakim, Azouz, 101
Gribi, Mustapha, 115 Al-Hakim, Tewfik, 172
Gringa, 65 The Sultan’s Dilemma, 144, 147
Groupe d’action culturelle, 159 Halaf, Muhriz Ibn, 14
Errafd (The Refusal), 159 Halioui, Hadi, 133
Lahal Idoum (Time Past), 159 Al-halqa, 18–19, 26–37, 140–1, 145, 150–1,
Nass El Houma (People of the 154, 160–2, 165–7, 195–206, 217–20
Neighborhood), 159 Al-Halqa, Sidi Bel Abbès, 188
Rih Essamar (The Wind of the Al-Hamadhani, 26
Attorneys), 159 Hamat Asma, Blida, 116
Grotowski, Jerzy, 206 Hamid, Abd al-Haq
Guellaty, Hassan, 78 Tariq ibn Ziyad, 117
Guelma (Calama), Algeria, 10–11, 14, 149 Hamidou (Ahmed Ben Messaoud), 118
Guesmi, Jaafar, 215 Al-Hamis, Bayram, 63
Guevara, Che, 145 Hammam-Lif, Tunisia, 123
Gysin, Brion, 42 Hammar, Mokrane, 192
Imehbas (The Prisoners), 192
Hached, Farhat, 122 Hammoudi, Abdellah, 40, 42, 224
Hachemaoui, Fadela, 186 Hamouda, Djamel, 189
Al-Hachmi, Halima (Habiba Medkouri), Djamila, 190
119 Khabat Kraou, 189
El-Hachemi, Nourredine, 181 Zbida Ezzel, 190
Al-Haddad, Mohammed, 99 Zbida Show, 190
Kalila wa Dimna (Kalila and Dimna), Hamrouni, Abdellatif, 134
100 Al-Hariri, Mohammed Al-Qasim, 26
Al-Haddad, Najib, 75–7, 102 Harouda, Aicha, 32
Haroun Ar-Rachid Wal-Baramika Harrba, 32
((Haroun Ar-Rachid and Al-Baramika), Haskouri, Ahmed Belbachir, 122
89 Hassan II, 50, 135–6, 170, 236–7
Salah El-Din al-Ayoubi, 75–6, 85–6, 89, Havel, Vaclav
91, 96, 102, 107 The Memorandum, 181
Taratu el arab (The Revenge of the Helilou, Dalila, 190
Arabs), 86 Herodotus, 12
Al-Walid Ibn Abd Al-Malik (Ibn, Son of Heywood, Thomas
Abd Al-Malik), 100 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody,
Haddad, Youssef Rachid, 19, 24 58
El-Hadj, Faouzia, 193 The Life and Death of Captain Thomas
Awlad el Qasaba (Children of the Stukeley, 58
Kasbah), 147 High Institute of Dramatic Art, Morocco,
Business is Business, 193 199, 208
254 Index

Hijazi, Ibrahim, 77, 88–9 Jasmine Revolution, 213

Hijazi, Salama, 85–6 Jawks, 88
Hikaya, 25 Jawq an-Nahda Al-Arabviya (Company
Hikmet, Nazim, 146 of Arab Rebirth), 83
Al-Hilal (The Crescent), Tunis, 88–9 El Jawk Al-Tanji Li-Tamthil Al-Arabi
Al-Hilal El Djazairi (The Algerian (Tangier Ensemble of Arabic Acting),
Crescent), 91–2 100
Hirschler, 66 Al-Jawzi, Ibn, 23–4
Hoenerbach, W., 38 Jaziri, Fadel, 134, 172–3
Hopwood, Derek, 38 Jebali, Tawfiq, 133, 174–5, 210–11
Houhou, Ahmed Rida, 115–16 Klem Ellil (Night’s Talks), 210–11
Malakat Gharnaata (The Queen of Klem Ellil 9/11, 211
Granada), 115 Loussous Baghdad, 211
El Houssi, Majid, 25 Mémoire d’un Dinosaure (Memories
Hugo, Victor, 69, 79, 123 of a Dinosaur), 175
Hernani, 76 Jebrane, Touria, 209
Les Miserables, 65 Jemma-el-Fna, Marrakesh, 31, 140, 196,
Al-Husni, Hasan, 127 219–20
Jenan El-Harty, 85
El-Ibdae, Oran, 185 Jil Jilalla, Morocco, 198
Lbsaytiya (the bsat people), 196 Jimeze, Armstrong Diego, 83
Ibn Khaldoun Theatre Company, 235 John, King of England, 57
Ibrahim, Abdellah, 118 Jones, Brian, 42–3
Ibrahim, Hafez Jonson, Ben
Chahid Beirut (The Martyr of Beirut), 80 Volpone, 139
Ibsen, Henrik El Joudi, Jamil, 134
A Doll’s House, 181 Juba II, 9–10
Id el-kbir (Feast of Sacrifice), 40–1, 51 Julius Caesar, 9, 42
Ihtifali (Carnivalesque) theatre, 145 Justinian, 14
Imperial Theatre, Algiers, 63
Ionesco, Eugene, 187 Kabyle language, 155, 157, 192
Amédée, 139 Al-Kabbani, Abi Khalil, 137
The Bald Soprano, 144 El-Kadmiri, Ahmed, 118
Rhinocerous, 181 El Kaghat, Mohammed, 32, 137, 207–8
Al-Itytihad Kawakib al-Tamil (The Assatir Muassira (Contemporary
Planets’ Theatrical Union), Tunis, Myths), 171
123 Murtajalat Chmisa Lalla, 208
Al-Itytihad al-Masrahi (The Theatrical Murtajalat Fes (The Impromptu of
Union), Tunis, 97, 112 Fez), 207
El-Jadida, Morocco, 121, 137 Kahina, H.M., 162
Kairouan, Tunisia, 67, 79, 111, 134
Jagger, Mick, 43 Kairouanian Youth (As-Sabab al
Jaïbi, Fadel, 134, 172–3, 211–14, 234 Qayrawanti), 111
Arabs, 173 Kaki, see Ould Abderrahmane
Jaibi, Mohammed Kanfaoui, Abdessamad, 119
as-Sultan Byn Judraan Yaldiz (The Sultan Kaouah, Abdelmadjid, 160
before the Walls of Yaldiz,), 77 Kaouti. Mohammed
Al-Jalali, Mohammad ibn al-Abid, 110 No Man’s Land, 171
Jamaliyaat al-estitraad (The Aesthetics of Kapchan, Deborah, 18
Digression), 172 Karabaka, Abderrazak, 89
 Index 255

Karagoz, 38–9, 59, 74 Laalej, Ahmed Tayeb, 121, 170–1, 196–7,

Al-Kasba Theatre Company, 210 232
Kasbaoui, Noureddine, 132 A-Chattab (The Sweeper), 137
Kataev, Valentin Juha wa chajarat a-tufah (Juha and the
Squaring the Circle, 181 Apple Tree), 197
Kateb, Mustapha, 125–8, 143–4, 179, Tamrin al-Akbach (Sheep’s Rehearsals),
181 170
Al-Kawkab al-Tamili (The Theatrical Laalaj, Bachir, 118
Star), Tunis, 112, 123 Laalej, Tayeb, 137
Keddadi, Ahmed Labiche, Eugene, 123
Hal Wa Ahwal, 134 Workers’ Theatre (Masrah al-Ummali),
El Kef, Tunisia, 134, 172, 174, 210, 231 139
Keltoum (Adjouri Aïcha), 93, 117, La Camago, 59
126–7, 146, 182 Lacharrière, Jacques Ladreit de, 82
Kenfaoui, Abdessamad, 137 Lacoste-Dujardin, Camille, 19
El Kewkeb, Algiers, 95 Lahbib, Mohammed, 97, 113
Khaled, Emir, 79 Al-Watiq Billah al-Hafsi, 97
Khalil and Yazji Yawm Gharnata (The Day of Grenada),
Vertu et Fidélité, 80 113
Khatibi, Abdelkebir and Mohammed Lahlou, Nabil
Sijelmassi, 104, 221 Ophelia n’est pas Morte (Ophelia is not
Khayal al-zill (shadow theatre), 38 Dead), 141–2
Al-Khazmy, Ali, 78 Al-Sa’aa, 141
Kheddaoui, Si Moussa, 115–16 Les Tortus (Turtles), 171
Les Malheurs du pauvre (Sorrows of the Lakhal, Mahieddine, 116
Poor), 116 Lakhdar, Saim, 115, 156
Kherroufi, Allel, 181 Lakhmiri, Taher, 132
Khetmi, Fadhil, 93, 97, 123 Landou, Jacob, 103, 235
Khetmi, Fachla, 93 Lang, Jack, 147
Khoudi, Ahmed, 180–1, 190, 192 Laoust, Emile, 41
Hommage à Aït Menuellet, 184 Lardjam, Kheireddine, 184–5
Le Kassem (The Oath), 181 La Scala, Tunis, 65
Al-Khozai, Mohammed, 103 L’bsat,
t 50–2, 168, 195–6
Khraief, Mustapha Lecocq, Charles, 65
Al-Kahina, 98 Giroflé-Girofla, 65
Koffi, Flangon Rogo, 4 La Petite Mariée, 65
Koltès, Bernard-Marie, 205 Leon l’Africain, 46
El Korchi. El Mekki, 183 Lesskov, Nikolai, 33
Kouiret, Sid Ali, 126–7 Le Tourneau, Roger, 19
Kouka, Mohammed, 231 Liceo Rafael Calvo, Tangier, 83
Krtnsks, Abd-al-Razzaq, 85 Lissan Achab (The Voice of the People),
Ksentini, Rachid, 91, 93–4, 116, 144–5 97
El-ahed el-wafl (The Faithful Vow), 91 Living Theatre, 151–3
Dar-el-mhabel (The Insane Asylum), 94 Lixus, Morocco, 10–11
Faqo (They Woke Up), 95 Lope de Vega, Felix
Er-raqedd (The Sleepers), 93 Fueteovejuna, 182
Zouaj Bou Borma (The Marriage of Bou Lorca, Federico Garcia
Borma), 91 The House of Bernarda Alba, 132, 181
Kursaal, Algiers, 86–7 Yerma, 132
Kuzman, Charles, 82 Lotfi, Rachina, 92
256 Index

Loti, Pierre, 49 Masara al-Khyana (The Tragic End of

Louati, Ali, 133 the Traitoress), 79
Louis XIV, 58 Manifesto of the Eleven, 133–4
Louis-Philippe, 62 Mansali, Mohammed, 87, 90
Lyautey, Louis Hubert, 82–3 Tarik Ibn Ziad, 87
Al-Mansur, Caliph, 104
Mabru, Zaki Maqama, 26–7, 196, 235
Shuhadae al-Wataniya (Fatherland), 88 Al-Maqdissi, Izz Abd al-Salam
Maclean, Marie, 20 Kachf al-asrar (The Revelation of
Madani, Azzedine, 132, 172, 231–2 Secrets), 72
Ala al-Bahr al-Ouafir,
r 174 Marabouts, 45, 105
EL Hallej, 134, 172 Marchetti, Filippo
Mourad III,
I 132 Ruy Blas, 65
Sahib al-himar (The Donkey Owner), Mark Anthony, 10
132 Marouk, Habib, 172
Al-Madani, Ahmed, 116–17 Marrakchi, Mohammed Bachir, 119
Hannibal, 116–17 Marrakesh, Morocco, 30, 33, 49–51,
Al-Madina, Cheikh, 97 84–5
El Maghout, Mohmed El-Masrah (The Theatre), Algiers, 144
Galou laarab galoubutt (So the Arabs El-Masrah (The Theatre), Tunis, 97–8
Said), 180 Masrah Adifa al-ukhra (The Other Bank
Magnan, Jean, 186 Theatre Company)
Algérie, 54–62, 186 The Impromptu of Casablanca, 208
The Maghreb Star for Arabic Acting Masrah Eddik, 188
Company (Firqat An-Najm Al-Masrah Fukaahi (The Comedy
Al-Maghrebi Lit-Tamthil Al-Arabi), 111 Theatre), Tunis, 96
Mahassen, Souad, 134 Masrah El Ghad (Theatre of Tomorrow),
Mahdia, Tunisia, 134 Algiers, 115
Mahieddine, Mohammed, 193 Al-Masrah Al-Ihtifali (Ceremonial
Shamshoum al-Jazaa’iri (The Algerian Theatre), 134, 166–7, 197, 231
Samson), 117 Al-Masrah al-jadid (The New Theatre),
Maiakovski, Vladimir Tunis, 172–4, 212, 234
The Bathhouse, 180 Masrah al-muqawama (Theatre of
Makach, Zohra, 203–5 Resistance), 98
Aswat Koltes (Voices of Koltès), 205 Masrah a-naaqd (Theatre of Criticism),
Fragments, 203–4 169
Makhoukh, Boubekeur, 182 Masrah el Qalla (Theatre of the Citadel),
Aladin, 182 177, 180, 189
Ali Baba, 182 Masrah al-Ummali (Workers’ Theatre),
Galileo, 182 Casablanca, 139
Hafila Tassir (The Bus Thief), 189 Masrah al-Ummali (Workers’ Theatre),
Hissaristan, 182 Rabat, 139
The Wolf and the Sheep, 182 Masrah Al-Yawn (Today’s Theatre),
Malraux, André, 150 Tangier, 84
Mamoura Center, Rabat, 119, 136, 138 Imta nbdaw imta (When are we going
Mamoura Theatre Company, see Firqat to start, when?), 209
Al-Mamoura El Masri, Abdel-Qadir, 74
Manai, Rached, 175 Al-Masri, Mohammed Azzedine, 86
Al-Mana, Habib, 89 Massenet, Jules
Manasu, Mohammed Manon, 67
 Index 257

Massoud, Bouhssin, 171 Mohya (Moyha Abdellah), 190

Al-Mastaqbal at-Tamtili (The Theatrical Sinni, 190, 192–3
Future), 97, 112 Mokdad, Abdelkader, 134, 172
Masurel, Christian, 134 Molière, 91, 113–14, 123, 137, 169–70,
Mata, Candid, 83 190
Mattei, George L’Avare, 65, 69, 100, 114
La Guerre des Gusses, 186 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 132, 136
La Mauvaise Graine, Caen, 184 Critique de L’ecole des Femmes, 207
Mawhoub, Aziz, 232 Don Juan, 59, 143, 147, 174
El Mazher, Constantine, 115 Les Faux Savants, 116
McDougal, James, 230 Les Fourberies de Scapin, 137, 144, 196
Mecca, 32 George Dandin, 134
Meddah, 18, 25–6, 44–5 Imaginary Invalid, 78, 90, 114, 127,
Medea, Algeria, 80 138, 146
Medjoubi, Amina, 181 Impromptu de Versailles, 207
Medjoubi, Azzedine, 176–7, 182, 189–90 La jalousie du barbouille, 118
Mediouni, Mohammed, 231 Le Médecin malgré lui, 65, 78, 84, 90,
Mekki, Chebbah, 95 100, 118
La femme ivrogne ignorante, 95 School for Wives, 139
Tarak Ibn Ziyad, 95 Tartuffe, 95, 100, 104, 166
Meknes, Morocco, 199 Molineaux, 78
Meknes Festival, 209 Montesquieu
El-Mellouhi, Niddal, 187 Persian Letters, 69
Mendes-France, Pierre, 124, 131 Moreh, Shmuel, 26, 71–2
Mennouni, Mohammed, 48 Moroccan Center for Dramatic Research,
Merle, R. 121
Flaminio, 132 Moroccan Theatre Company, see Firqat
Meskini, Mohammed, 169–70 At-Tamthil Al-maghribi
Ashour,r 169 Mosbah, Ali, 134
El-Meskini, Sghir, 199–200 Mostaganem, Algeria, 189–90
Messika, Habiba, 91–3 Al-Mouhaddiba (The Educator), Algiers, 86
Meunier, Arnaud, 184–5 El-Mouhib, Allel, 144, 179
Miller, Arthur Mouley Ismail, 58, 227
Death of a Salesman, 182 Moulay Rachid, 50
Millet, René, 39 Mounet-Sully, Jean, 70
Mimiche, Tawfiq, 189 Mrini, Houssin, 121, 137
Minh, Ho Chi, 148 Mrozek, Slawomir
Minouni, Rachid The Emigrants, 190
La Fleuve detourné, 193 Municipal Theatre, Algiers, 86
Al-Mithinni, Basir, 89, 97, 123 Municipal Theatre, Tunis, 66–9, 73–4, 76,
El Mizhar (The Blossom), Algiers, 125 78, 88–9, 132, 172, 212, 219, 231
Mniai, Hassan, 50, 113, 118, 140, 166 Al-Muqaffa, Abd-Allah Ibn, 100
Mniai, El-Mehdi, 99–100 El Murrakechi, Ahmed, 133
Mnouchkine, Ariane, 159 Murtajala (Impromptu), 207–8
Mohammed, 24, 28, 104, 235 Musset, Alfred de
Mohammed, Abdelaziz, 231 Lucie, 69
Mohammed Bey, 61 Al-Mutribya, Algiers, 87–8
Mohammed V, 118, 121–2, 131, 135
Mohammed VI, 236 Naceri, Mohammed Mekki, 171
Mohl, Jules, 71 Nadira, 26–7
258 Index

An-Nahda at-Tamtiliya (The Theatrical Oulmakki, Abdullatif, 210

Renaissance), 123 Oulmakki, Naima, 210
An-Najma (The Star), 77 Orif, Mustapha, 183
Naimi, Kadour, 151, 153–4 Ouarda, Ibrahim, 168
An-Najjar, Makhlouf, 79 Ouaziz, Tahar, 119, 137
Napoleon III, 63 Ouettar, Tahar, 184
An-Naqqas, Sali Khalil, 76 Oufkir, Mohammed, 135
An-Naqqash, Maroun, 75, 87, 137 Ouzri, Abdelwahed, 84, 109, 139, 209
Al-bakhil (The Miser), 71
Fath el Andalous (The Conquest of Pailleron, Edouard, 65
Andalousia), 87 Pannewick, Friederike, 21
Fi Sabil el Watan (For the Fatherland), Pasolini, Pier Paolo
87 Pylade, 184
National Center of Circus Arts and Live Le Passage, Tunis, 86
Performances, Tunis, 174 Peele, Feorge
National Center for Dramatic Art, Tunis, The Battle of Alcazar,
r 58
211 Pellat, Charles, 10
National Center for Puppet Theatre, Peña, Don Manuel, 83
Tunis, 210 Pennel, C.R., 81
National Liberation Front Arts Perle des arts, Sousse, 211
Company, 125 Petit Théâtre de Douchet, Tunis, 67
National Theatre of Tunis (TNT), 173–5, Pirandello, Luigi, 190
214–15 Piscator, Irwin, 145
National Theatre Mohammed V, Rabat, Planchon, Roger, 121
139 Plautus, 9, 196
Naum, Jabran, 78 The Captives, 147
Nero, 12 The Handbag, g 144
New Theatre, Tunis, see Al-Masrah Politeama, Tunis, 65, 69
al-jadid Porto-Riche, Georges de, 123
An-Niffari, Mohamnmed, 197–8 Prison theatre, 127
Nordine, Douila, 189 Provost, M., 86
Noureddine, Mouna, 231 Puckler, Muskau, Hermann von, 39
Nugue, Charles, 119 Pujda, Morocco, 122
Nujum al-Fann (The Stars of Art), Tunis, Punic Wars, 9
123
Al-Qabbani, Abu Khalil
O’Casey, Sean Ins al-Jalis, 76, 89, 96, 111
Red Roses for Me, 144, 147 Al-Quaraaqoz, 38–9
Odéon, Paris, 70, 212, 238 Al-Qarawiyin Mosque and University,
Offenbach, Jacques 30–1, 49, 107–9
La Fille du Tambour Major,
r 65 Al-Qardahi, Jawq Sulayman, 75–7
La Jolie Parfumeuse, 65 Al-Qiyada an-Nissaiya (Women’s
Ohnet, Georges, 65 Leadership), 93
Olivier, Alain, 148 Qissa, 23–5
Olson, Gary, 219 Quinn, Edward, 103
Omar, Hadj, 144, 146, 179, 181 Qu’ran, 2, 18, 23, 28, 32, 87, 104–7,
Ong, Walter, 20 115, 235
Oran, Algeria, 63, 115–17, 143, 146, El-Qurri, Mohammed, 99, 108, 110, 115
150, 157, 159, 161, 184–6, 189 Al-Ilm Wa Nata-aijuhu (Knowledge
Orellana, Hope, 83 and its Results), 108
 Index 259

Rabat, Morocco, 51, 118–19, 122, 136, Rukibi, Abdellah

139, 236 Masra at-Tughaat (The Death of
Rachid, Amina (Faiza al-Amri), 119 Despots), 116
Racine, Jean, 76, 123 Rusdi, Safya, 122
Rafool, 85 Rushdie, Fatimah, 85, 92–3
Al-Rahman, Kaki Wil Abed, see Ould Masra Kilyubatra (The Fall of
Abderrahmane Cleopatra), 92–3
Rais, Abdelhaim, 126–7, 147 Rushdie, Salman, 221
Al ahd (The Vow), 127 Rwached, Abdellah, 133
Alwad el Casba (Children of the
Kasbah), 127 As-Sa’ada (Happiness), Tunis, 117
Al-Khaalidoon (The Immortals), 127 Sabri, Wassila, 93
Nahu an-Nour (Towards the Light), 127 Saddiki, Tayeb, 50, 121, 139, 145, 160,
Le Serment,t 147 170, 194–5, 197, 206, 218, 220, 227
Rajae, Mohammed, 134, 172 Le Diner de Gala (The Gala Dinner),
Rajwani, Fatima, 232 206–7
Ramadan, Awatif, 231 Diwan Sidi Abderrahman Al-Majdub
Ramadani, Mustapha, 166 (The Collection of Master
Rameau, Jean-Philippe Abderrahman Al-Majdub), 139–41,
Les Indes galantes, 59 200, 205
Raouroua, Mohammed, 183 Al-fil was-sarawil (The Elephant and
Rawi, Fatima, 232 Pants), 194–5
Regnard, Jean-François Maqamat Badia Ezzamane
Le Joueur,
r 59 El-Hamadani, 196
Resplandy, Jean Emile Ferdinand, 67 Sadgrove, Philip, 1, 71–2
Richard I, 75–6 Safiri, Abdelkader
Richie, Pierre, 119 Deux-pièces-cuisine (Two Kitchen
Richepin, Jean Pieces), 144
Le Serment,t 69 As-Sahama al-Arabya (Arabian Gallantry),
Rif rebellion, 94, 98, 110, 117 Tunis, 77–8, 88–9, 92, 123
Al-Rihani, Najib, 85 Sahnoun, Omar
Roblès, Emmanuel, 125 Tchach, 209
Montserrat,t 125, 144 Saint-Exupery, Antoine de
Rochdi, Chafia, 122 The Little Prince, 181
Rolling Stones, 42–3 Saint-Saens, Camille
Rome, 9–13, 15 Samson et Dalila, 70
Rose, Jose de la, 83 Salafi movement, 101–2, 105–9, 111, 115
Rossini, Gioachino Sale, Morocco, 30, 108
Sémiramis, 61 Salhi, Kamal, 17
Rostand, Edmund Salvini, Alessandro, 65
L’Aiglon, 92 Sammoun, M., 25
Cyrano de Bergerac, 66 Sannou, Yacub, 80, 137
Rota, Giuseppe Saqui, Mme, 62
Beatrice Cenci, 65 Sardou, Victorien, 67
Roth, Arlette, 90 Fedora, 65
Rouiched (Ahmed Ayad), 144–5, 181, Patrie, 88, 98
183 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 124
El Bouaboune (the Concierges), 146 The Respectful Prostitute, 157
El Ghoula, 147, 161 El Saydia, 144
Hassan Terro, 144–5, 147 Sayem, Muncef, 134
260 Index

As-Sawab, 97 Société Dramatique Victorien Sardou,

Sbeiba Festival, 46 Tunis, 67
Schechner, Richard, 39 Sonia (Mkio Sakina), 177, 184–5, 190–1
Schiller, Friedrich Sophocles, 147
The Robbers, 78 Antigone, 158
Scholl, Gottfried, 60 Electra, 181
Schuyler, Philip, 29 Oedipus, 69, 132
Scribe, Eugene, and Jean-Henri Dupin Southern, Richard, 39–41
Michel et Christine, 62 Sousse, Tunisia, 67, 76, 79, 134
Scott, Walter Soussi, Brahim Ahmed, 118
The Talisman, 75 Souissi, Ezzedine, 231
Sedaine, Michel-Jean Souissi, Khadija, 134
Le Déserteur,
r 62 Souissi, Muncef, 133, 172, 174, 231–2
Semlali, Hedi, 93, 113 Stambouli, Mahboub, 80
Serreau, Jean-Marie, 148, 174 Stambuli, Khalifa, 111
Setif, Algeria, 189–90 Ana al-Jani (I am the Guilty One), 111
Sfar, Mustapha, 78 Aquibat al-Kaessi (The Consequences
Sfax, Tunisia, 69, 79, 134, 211 of Drinking Wine), 111
Sghir, El-Meskini Asdiqa wal-Hiyanaou Araf askun Ithalit
Bu-jma’ l-faruj (Bu-Jma the Rooster), (You Must Know with Whom You
200 Associate), 111
Shakespeare, William, 80, 123, 137, 147, Al-Flussi (Oh, My Money), 111
167–8 Al-Muizz li-Din Allah al-Fatimi, 111
Hamlet,t 76, 79, 96, 132, 138, 142–3, Zyadat Allah al-Aghlabi, 111
168–9, 232 Stanislavsky, Constantin, 34
Macbeth, 142–3 The Stars of Art (Nujum al-Fann), 123
The Merchant of Venice, 124, 231 Stoppard, Tom
Midsummer Night’s Dream, 181 Every Good Boy Deserves Favor,r 193
Othello, 73, 76–7, 79, 89, 93, 117, 132, Sue, Eugene
168–9, 174 The Wandering Jew, 65
Romeo and Juliet,t 76–7, 79, 84, 88, Sufi faith, 32, 197–8
92–3, 96, 193 Sultan Tulba, 47–50, 169
The Taming of the Shrew, 147 Sunna, 28, 235
Shamam, Nacer, 133
Sharamane, Mohammed Tadili, Driss, 232
Adafadie Al-Kahla (The Black Turtles), Al-Hadh, 232
171 Le Rhinoceros, 171
Shawqi, Ahmed, 124 Al-Tahar, Ali Cherif, 86–7
Shushan, Faraj, 133 Achifa ba’d anâ (Cure after Testing), 86
Sid-Iketfi, 51–2 Badi’, 86
Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria, 115, 143, 146, Khadîat el gharam (Passions Betrayed),
150, 156, 187–8 86
Sira, 23–4 Tahar, Arezki, 193
Skikda (Rusicada), Algeria, 13 At-Tahdib as-Safaqisi, Sfax, 79
Smain, Jadj, 159 Takchout, Rym, 190
Snouci, Mourad Tangier, Morocco, 30, 100, 118, 201, 229
Metzeouedj Fi Otla (A Husband on Tannus, Georges
Vacation), 189 As-Sab wa Qayar ((The Death of Caesar),
Snoussi, Ahmed, 134 88
Snoussi, Hocine, 183 Tantaoui, Hasna, 235
 Index 261

Tapia theatre, Tunis, 60–2, 63 The Thousand and One Nights, 17, 28, 30,
Taroudant, Morocco, 30 33, 35, 72, 76, 90–1, 168, 231
At-ta’sis Al-masrahiya, Casablanca, 168 Tiemcem, Algeria, 190
Tawrat al-malik wa shaab (The TILMA, 118
Revolution of King and People), 122 Timgad, Algeria, 14
Ta’ziyeh, 169 Timgad Festival, 14
El Teatro, Tunis, 175, 210–11 Timoud, Mohammed
Teatro Isabelle II, 63 Urss Al-Dib (The Wolf’s Wedding), 171
Teatro Espanol, Tetouan, 101 Tin Hinan, Sidi Bel Abbès, 187–8
Teatro Italiano, Tunis, 62, 67 Tizi Ouzou, Algeria, 150, 158, 182, 191–3
Teatro Paradiso, Tunis, 65–6 Today’s Theatre Company (Masrah
Teatro Rossini, Tunis, 68, 76–9, 88 al-Yawm), 84, 208–9
Temin, Mohammed, 58 Torres, Abdelkhalek, 99, 101, 107,
El Temthil el arabi (The Arab Theatre), 110–11
Algiers, 87 Intissar Al-Haq (The Victory of Right),
Terence, 9 101, 107
Tertullian, 222 Touri, Mohammed, 116, 124, 126, 144
Tetouan, Morocco, 63, 100, 107 Au café, 116
Teymour, Mahmoud, 189 Le comédien malgré lui, 144
Théâtre Brulat, Tunis, 65 Hier et aujourd’hui, 116
Theatre Cohen, Tunis, 64 Le Kilo, 116
Théâtre de la Mer, 151–4 Zat Zalamit,t 116
Et à l’aurore où est l’espoir (Toward the Sekkaj el Wahline, 144
Dawn, Where Hope Lies), 153 Treaty of Fez, 81, 83
Forma-Révolution, 152 Troupe Israélite, Sousse, 79
La Formi et l’Elephant (The Ant and Tuareg people, 52
the Elephant), 152 Tulaymat, Zaki, 123–4, 231
Mon corps, la voix et sa pensée Tunis, 58–65, 74–9, 88–9, 92–3, 121–3,
(My Body, Voice, and Thought), 152 172–3, 210–14, 234
La Valeur de l’accord (The Value of Tunis al-Masrahiya (Theatrical Tunis),
Agreement), 152 123
Théâtre de Plein Air, Tunis, 67
Théâtre Douchet, Tunis, 66 University Theatre Company, Morocco,
Théâtre Français, Tunis, 65–7 142
Theatre Mohammed V, Rabat, 213, 219 Umanitâ, Sousse, 67
Theatre Municipal, Casablanca, 206–7 Utica, 10
Théâtre National Populaire, 121, 131,
139, 176 Valabregue, Antony, 78
Théâtre Nouveau, Tunis, 64 Verdi, Giuseppe, 66
Theatre of the Citadel (Masrah el Qalla), Aida, 76, 92
177, 180, 189 Rigoletto, 63, 69
Theatre of Criticism ((Masrah a-naqd), 169 Traviata, 62
Theatre of Tomorrow (Mesrah El Ghad), d Vernet, Mme, 70
115 Le Veugle, Jean, 138
Théâtre pour enfants, Sidi Bel Abbes, Veuillet. Nathalie, 186
157 Vilar, Jean, 121, 131–2, 139, 146, 232
Théâtre Tunisien, Tunis, 67 Voisin, André, 119–21, 132, 136–7, 170
Theatre Phou, 211 Voltaire
Théâtre Universel, Sfax, 211 La Mort de César, 88
Teatro Rossini, Tunis, 68, 76–9, 88 Oedipus, 80, 97
262 Index

Wahbi, Youssef Bek Nedjma, 174, 180, 184

Assahra (The Desert), 93 La Palestine trahie (Palestine Betrayed),
Wamadat, Agadir 155
Tchach, 209 La Poudre d’intelligence (Powder of
Wannous, Sadallah, 172 Intelligence), 148
Warchat Ibdae Drama, Morocco, 196 Le Roi de l’ouestt (The King of the
Wattar, Tahar West), 155
a-Shuhadaa Ya’oudouna Hatha al-usboue La Voix des femmes (The Voice of
(The Martyrs are Returning this Women), 155
Week), 157 Yafil, Edmond, 87
Webber, Sabre, 20 Yakoubi, Larbi, 232
World War I, 80–1, 85, 92 Al-Yazejie, Ibrahim, 102
World War II, 105, 110, 113–14 Years of Lead (sanawat ar-rassas), 135, 170
Worsham, Lynn, 219 Youssef, Moulay, 84
Youssefi, Abderrahman, 209
Yacine, Kateb, 3–4, 125, 145–6, 150, 152–7, Al Youssi, Hassan, 31
159, 179–80, 183–5, 187–8, 192–3
Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité (The Zaghloul, Saad, 80
Ancesters Redouble Their Fury), 148 Zamoum, Ali, 151, 153, 156
Le Bourgeois sans culotte, 158 Zannetti, Napoleone, 65
La Cadavre encirclé (The Encircled Zarafi, Habib, 211
Corpse), 146, 148, 184 Zarruq. Mohammed and Abd al-Aziz
Le Cercle des représailles (The Circle of al-Wislati
Reprisals), 148 Jarati (My Neighbor), 98
La Guerre de 2000 ans (The 2000 Year Si Hamdun (Mr Hamdun), 98
War), 154 Zeami Motokiyo, 214
L’Homme aux sandals de caoutchouc (The Zemerli, Hassen, 231
Man with Rubber Sandals), 148–9 Zerouali, Abdelhaq, 197–9
Kahena, 155 Kidtu Arah (I Was about to See), 197
Mohammed prends ta valise Nechba, 198
(Mohammed, Take Up Your Zitan, Naima, 210
Suitcase), 150, 152–4, 157 Zmerli, Lahcen, 132