The King Is the King
The King Is the King
by Sa‘dallah Wannus
THE LITRARY WORK
A play set in an unnamed city in the premodern Arab world; published in Arabic (as al-Malik huwa al-malik) In 1977, in English in 1995.
SYNOPSIS
To allay his boredom, a king secretly places one of his subjects on the throne for a day. No one notices the change, and the original king goes mad when he realizes that he will never regain his Ihrone.
Events in History at the Time of the Play
Sa’dallah Wannus, Syria’s and perhaps the Arab world’s best-known playwright of the late twentieth century, was born near the Syrian coastal city of Tartus in 1941. After receiving his primary and secondary education in Syria, he obtained an undergraduate degree in journalism from Cairo University in Egypt. Wannus subsequently received an advanced diploma in theater studies from the Sorbonne’s Institute of Theater Studies in Paris in 1968. Throughout his life, he would balance critical with creative writing. He not only produced a large number of essays on his and others’ theatrical works but for many years also edited the journal al-Hayah al-masrahiyah (Theater Life). In the late 1970s Wannus helped establish the High Institute for Theater Arts in Damascus and went on to teach there. He published two collections of short plays before leaving for Paris in 1966. It was upon his return from Europe and in the context of the defeat of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 that he wrote Haflat samar min ajl khamsah haziran (Soiree for the 5th of June), the play that catapulted him to fame. An experimental play within a play, the work concerns the causes of the defeat. The play marked the beginning of a period of great productivity for Wannus, whose literary highpoints include his writing of The King Is the King. With the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Wannus went on an almost decadelong hiatus from play writing. The last decade of his life (he died in 1997), however, was nearly as productive as the pre-1982 era, despite a prolonged battle with liver cancer. Wannus wrote seven plays in eight years during the 1990s, including the highly acclaimed Tuqus al-ishamt wa-al-tahawwulat (Rituals of Signs and Transformations), written in 1994 and first performed in 1996. His post-1967 body of work is characterized by the twin goals of breaking down the traditional barriers between stage and audience and spurring the audience into political action. Wannus also distinguished himself as a pioneer in infusing the historical and cultural heritage of the Arab world into his drama, a strategy that surfaces along with the others in The King Is the King.
Events in History at the Time of the Play
Syria in the context of the Naksah
Probably the most important historical event informing The King Is the King is the defeat of the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, known in Arabic as al-Naksah (the disaster). Syria was one of the Arab states to give up land in this conflict, losing its Golan Heights to the Israelis. While there is still a great deal of controversy surrounding the events that led to the start of this conflict, what is known for sure is that in May of that year, a period of escalating tension between Syria and Israel, the Soviet Union mistakenly informed Syria and Egypt that Israel was planning an imminent attack on Syria. This led to action by the Egyptians that the Israeli leadership interpreted as a direct threat to the country’s sovereignty. Israel launched what it saw as a pre-emptive surprise attack on Egypt on June 5 and in a matter of six days (June 5–10) the Arab forces were routed and Israel occupied all of mandatory Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights.
One of the reasons that this loss had such an impact on the societies of the Arab world was because many of the region’s postcolonial governments had used the goal of the defeat of Israel to legitimize their regimes. The liberation of Palestine, the region’s citizens were told on a daily basis, was imminent. Syria was no exception in this regard. Nor was it an exception to the fact that the defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 led to increased militarization of the region’s countries. Under the leadership of Hafez al Assad who came to power in Syria in 1971, the Syrian military forces grew from 60,500 in 1968 to 500,000 by 1986 (Yapp, p. 262).
The defeat of 1967 greatly compounded an already existing refugee problem, adding some 300,000 displaced Palestinians to the large number (500,000-900,000) of refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948 (Yapp, pp. 301–302). These refugees added volatility to the region’s already shaky postcolonial regimes, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon. The bloody expulsion of Palestinian leadership from Jordan to Lebanon in 1971 led to increased volatility in the latter country, where the minority Maronite Christian government was already having problems cementing its rule. This and other factors led to the outbreak of a civil and regional war in Lebanon in 1975, a conflict that would last until 1990. Over the years Syria became heavily involved in fighting for a variety of factions in Lebanon. In fact, Israel used the strong Syrian presence in Lebanon as justification for an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, an event that impacted Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals only slightly less than the defeat of 1967. Whereas 1967 had led to an outpouring ofartistic expression, the events of 1982 did not inspire increased artistic productivity. A case in point is Wannus. For him, 1982 marks the beginning of a multi-year hiatus from play authorship.
The haves and have-nots
In 1970, a few years after the Naksah, a military coup brought Hafez al-Assad to power in Syria. He would rule Syria continuously until his death in the summer of 2000. At first, Assad enjoyed considerable popularity. Paradoxically, his popularity did not decrease with Syria’s failure to win back the Golan Heights from Israel in the “October War” of 1973. Though clearly a loss, Syrians were heartened by the fact that this time, unlike 1967, the Arab forces in both Syria and Egypt attacked and inflicted considerable damage on the Israeli forces in the first few days of the conflict. Despite the loss, the whole country remained united behind the struggle to reclaim the land given up in 1967. Also paradoxically, this loss resulted in an economic boom. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 led to a dramatic increase in world oil prices. Syria’s revenue from oil skyrocketed from 70 million dollars in 1973 to 700 million the following year (Seale, p. 318). At the same time, increased oil revenue in the labor-poor Arabian Gulf states meant increased employment opportunities for Syrians willing to travel to those countries to work. Assad used the increased revenue to fund not only the Syrian military but also development projects in the country. Syria’s five-year development plan for 1976–80, drawn up in the heady days after 1973, envisioned spending $13.5 billion, a considerable jump from the $2 billion of the prior five-year plan (Seale, p. 318).
As is often the case in such boom times, not everyone benefited equally from the improved economy. While the number of millionaires (in the local currency) climbed from 55 in 1963 to 3,500 in 1976, the gap between the rich and poor grew. Patrick Seale writes, “Instant millionaires constituted the core of a new bourgeoisie, many enriched by commissions, kickbacks, and even theft made possible by the dozens of government-financed projects” (Seale, p. 319). Almost simultaneously, the economy began to falter and migration from the countryside to the cities continued unabated.
The sputtering economy and increased gap between the rich and the poor clearly played a role in the rising tensions between Assad’s largely secular regime and those who wanted a government shaped more centrally by the tenets of Islam. What exacerbated the tension was the fact that Assad, like Wannus himself, came from the long oppressed and marginalized Alawite sector of Syrian society, whereas most of the Islamic fundamentalists were from the Sunni branch of Islam. Not only did many Sunnis consider the practices of the Alawites to be heretical to Islam, but they also felt, not without justification, that the Sunni majority had lost power at the expense of the Alawites under Assad. These are some of the factors that led to a rise in violent attacks on representatives of the government in the post-1975 years. The country slid into a brutal cycle of internal violence that culminated in the crushing of an uprising in the largely Sunni city of Hamah in 1982. Even before the tension reached this peak, however, Patrick Seale writes that Assad “looked weak indeed” (Seale, p. 317). His comment pertains to the years 1977–78, the very period Wannus was writing and publishing his The King Is the King.
The Play in Focus
Plot summary
In the Prologue, the reader (or viewer) not only meets all of the play’s characters, but also is told repeatedly that they are just that—characters—and that what he or she is about to watch is nothing more than an elaborate game. This message is reinforced both in the script and the stage directions, which instruct the actors to enter “like a group of circus players” (Wannus, The King Is the King, p. 79).
The actors form two groups on stage. One group includes the poor nuclear family of Abu Izza (the father), Umm Izza (the mother), their daughter, Izza, and the family’s servant, Urqub. The other group is composed of members of the royal court: the King, the Vizier, the Executioner, the Police Chief, and a courtier. These two groupings represent, we are told, the age-old war between rich and poor, between the proponents of the “allowed” and the supporters of the “forbidden,” and indeed, this is the crux of the conflict between the two groups. In an exchange between the two factions, the poor are told that they are allowed to dream, as long as they do not dream collectively and as long as their dreams are not realized. Abu Izza dreams of becoming King and taking vengeance on those who have wronged him:
Abu ’Izza (Spinning like someone in a swoon): I become Sultan of the realm…. I tighten my fist on my subjects, even if it’s only for a day or two. (Singing:) There goes my seal, / Done is my will…. Ah, Taha! That treacherous devious Shaykh…. He shall ride backwards on a donkey in the midst of everyone, and then shall be hanged in the unfurled cloth of his turban! And that great merchant [… ] along with the silk dealers who control the markets and regulate goods and trade, they shall be flogged to my heart’s content and then they shall hang, but not before I’ve taken over all they possess, money and land.
(The King Is the King, p. 80)
His wife fantasizes about gaining an audience with the King to complain about the “bastards” who have ruined her husband’s business. Their daughter, Izza, dreams of a knight in shining armor. Urqub, the servant, confesses that he only continues to work for Abu Izza because he dreams about winning Izza’s hand. The King, being “the dream itself,” dreams of nothing and is thus bored. It is this boredom that sets in motion events that lead to some of the above dreams being realized in a comi-tragic fashion. The play’s other two main characters are the Head Merchant and the religious figure Shaykh Taha. Throughout the Prologue they are separate from the two groups mentioned above and stand in the corner manipulating actual puppet strings. At Prologue’s end, they announce that with their puppet strings they control “the souk [the market],” “the rabble,” and the King himself. The Prologue’s events are hosted by Zahid and Ubayd, two characters who reappear later in a series of “Interludes” between the scenes.
Scene One takes place in the throne room of the King’s palace. Aside from the King’s ornate throne and elaborate vestments—in which he seems to be swimming—the room is empty and cold. The actors are instructed to move in a mechanical way to accentuate the coldness and constructedness of the setting. The King is bored and in no mood to listen to the praises of his royal band, his vizier’s news report, or his sycophantic courtier Maymun. What he would rather do—to his vizier’s consternation—is venture incognito into the city to have some fun at the expense of his subjects. In contrast to previous excursions, however, this time he wants his and his vizier’s disguises to be complete, and he does not want them to be trailed by guards. They will tell no one of their plan.
Scene Two transports us to Abu Izza’s house, where he is fantasizing about being King. Abu Izza is completely delusional. He believes that the sweat on his brow is a result of the physical effort it has taken him to ascend his throne. His servant, Urqub, himself seems to get caught up in the fantasy when Abu Izza says that he still has not made up his mind whom he will chose to be his vizier. After he selects his servant, Urqub, he calls for wine to celebrate. Not only does Abu Izza have no money to pay Urqub’s wages, but he does not even have enough to buy himself wine. We learn that Urqub plans to exploit his master’s impoverished straits to win Izza’s hand—so indebted to him will his master become that he will not be able to refuse the match. Izza’s clear disdain for the servant becomes readily apparent. When Umm Izza arrives home, she is enraged not only that her husband is drinking, but that he has borrowed even more money from his servant to do so. Toward the end of the scene, the King and the Vizier arrive disguised as Haj Mustafa and Haj Mahmoud respectively. It is made clear that these prominent citizens have visited Abu Izza before and are returning to take him out for a night on the town. To placate Umm Izza, they give her a card that will grant her an audience with the King.
Scene Three takes us back to the palace, where Abu Izza has been placed in the royal bed. At this point the King (Mustafa) conscripts Urqub for their plot, telling him they are courtiers and that for a bit of fun they are going to place Abu Izza on the throne for a day. To carry out their plans, they are going to have to dress both Abu Izza and Urqub in the King and Vizier’s clothes respectively. This is the first time that the Vizier (Mahmoud) has heard that he will have to give up his clothes as well. Once they send Urqub off to bed, the Vizier spends the rest of the scene trying to dissuade the King from carrying out the plan. Left alone at the end of the scene the Vizier prophesizes, “The beginning of the end…. No King can afford to forget his ribbons, or to treat his robe and crown lightly” (The King Is the King, p. 101). He decides that he will have to devise a plan to save his own skin.
In the first part of Scene Four, Abu Izza—still in the King’s bed—wakes up to find Maymun, the courtier, rubbing his feet. He thinks himself in a dream and rues the fact that he will soon have to awaken. When he sees his own servant, Urqub, dressed in fine robes, he begins to realize that he may not be dreaming. Urqub tells Abu Izza that he is King Fakhreddin and that Urqub is his loyal servant Barbir. In the second part of the scene, the King’s valets dress Abu Izza while the royal band serenades him. Once robed as the King, Abu Izza is instantly transformed: he “holds the sceptre; his features assume a somber look; his body becomes erect and his demeanor firm” (The King Is the King, p. 104).
Scene Five unfolds in five parts. In order to observe the playing out of their game, the King and the Vizier enter the court posing as new courtiers. The first sign of trouble comes when Maymun does not recognize his former master, the King, who suppresses his anger and continues in his new role of courtier. It is in this scene too that a slippage of names begins, when the Vizier (Mahmoud) refers to Abu Izza as the King and to the real king as Mustafa. In Part Two, Abu Izza slides even more completely into his role as King. His vizier Urqub, for example, reminds him that now would be a good time for him to take his revenge against enemies such as the Head Merchant and Shaykh Taha, the very figures responsible for his poverty. Urqub is baffled when Abu Izza defends them as upstanding citizens. (His reaction shows how easily he takes to his new role as King. Just as the former king held the merchant and the shaykh in high esteem, so does Abu Izza in his new role, highlighting the collusion between the wealthy and the privileged.) When it is announced that the day’s first visitor is to be the Police Chief, the real king (Mustafa) is confident that the Chief will realize that something is amiss.
In Part Three of Scene Five, however, the Police Chief does not notice that he is not speaking to the “real” king. If anything, he senses that the man before him is even more of a king than the king to whom he is accustomed to report. It becomes clear, in fact, that the Police Chief is used to bullying the King in his daily reports. Abu Izza surprises the Chief by upbraiding him for not reporting to him that there had been a prison break that very night. The Police Chief leaves the throne room cowed, and the original king, who is beginning to realize that no one can tell that Abu Izza is not the real king, goes insane. The original vizier understands that he must look out for his own interests. In the meantime, Abu Izza has called the Executioner and asked for the blade of his ax to be held nearby so that “the King and his blade be one” (The King Is the King, p. 110). That the Executioner does not recognize Abu Izza as an imposter only drives the original king more deeply into insanity.
The farce reaches its apex in Part Four of the scene, with Abu Izza so consumed by his role as King that he sentences his former self to public embarrassment. This happens when his wife and daughter come to court with their petition card to complain about how the Head Merchant and Shaykh Taha have conspired to ruin her husband. Umm Izza does not recognize her husband on the throne, nor does he recognize her. The only one who shows a glimmer of knowledge is Izza, but she becomes distracted when the King promises her in marriage to his vizier, none other than the very Urqub who has been unsuccessfully pursuing her for years. The King tells Umm Izza that he sympathizes with her complaints, but that the fault of her ruin is her husband’s (i.e., his own) and thus sentences him (i.e., himself) to public humiliation. When he announces that he is going in to see the Queen, the original king has a last glimmer of hope and a final moment of sanity: he is sure that the Queen will recognize that something is amiss. When it is clear that she does not, the original king goes completely mad and ends up being leashed by the Queen and walked around the palace like a dog. In the meantime the original vizier has schemed to get his cloak (and thus post) back from Urqub.
In the fifth and final part of Scene Five, Abu Izza, in the role of King, informs the Executioner that the King is going to perform his own executions from now on. The original vizier goes to Abu Izza, having tricked Urqub into giving him his cloak back, and informs him that a mutiny has been crushed. Abu Izza orders the arrest of all suspects, but also puts the Vizier in charge of establishing a new security apparatus to keep an eye on the Police Chiefs security organization. The scene ends with a meeting between the King, the Head Merchant, and Shaykh Taha, with the former reassuring the latter two that all is well in the kingdom. As the Merchant and the Shaykh exit, they note that the King has, in fact, “become more of a king” (The King Is the King, p. 119).
The play ends with an Epilogue that calls for all of the actors to appear on the stage. As in the Prologue, they talk about what just happened as having been a game, although this time several characters, such as Urqub, wonder if they have been both spectator and victim in this game. In his case, the money he was given in return for the Vizier’s cloak turned out to be counterfeit. Zahid and Ubayd, our hosts in the Prologue, have the last spoken words of the play, talking about their always-deferred revolution: “We must wait for the right moment: not a second too early or too late” (The King Is the King, p. 119). The play ends with all of the actors taking off their costumes and singing alternate lines of a song about a group of people who, having become fed up with their king, slaughtered and then ate him:
At first some had stomach
Aches, others got sick,
But after a while they
Recovered, and sat down to
Enjoy life without masks or disguises.
(The King Is the King, p. 120)
These references at the end to revolution bring closure to a theme repeated through “Interludes” between each scene. These interludes usually feature the hosts of the Prologue, Ubayd and Zahid. In the First Interlude, these two meet on the street with Ubayd pretending to be a hunchbacked beggar. They speak in hushed tones about the coup they are plotting against the King. In the Second Interlude, we discover that Ubayd is living in Abu Izza’s house, and that he and Izza are fond of each other. Izza tells him that she has noticed that he is not really hunchbacked, at which point he makes an indirect confession to being one of those plotting against the regime. The Third Interlude takes us back to the message of the Prologue, as the Executioner and Urqub remind the reader/spectator that he or she is witnessing nothing more than a game. The two argue over which sector of society the new King will favor once in power and when they come to blows, their fight is broken up by Ubayd, who tells them, “Let’s watch, shall we? We’d better keep track of the story” (The King Is The King, p. 101). The Fourth—and final—Interlude comes between parts three and four of Scene Five, when the original king starts to go insane. The Interlude freezes everyone in his or her place, and only the original king continues to move about and to wonder how no one has noticed that the man on the throne is not actually their king. Ubayd and Zahid joke back and forth about how whoever wears the clothes of the King, or sits in the seat of the King, automatically becomes King.
A final element that figures into the plot and deserves mention are the signs to be held up or projected at the beginning of each scene. Usually they provide a short summary of the upcoming action. Here are some examples:
“WHEN THE KING IS BORED HE REMEMBERS THAT HIS SUBJECTS ARE AN AMUSING LOT IN POSSESSION OF TREMENDOUS ENTERTAINMENT POTENTIAL.”
“REALITY AND ILLUSION CLASH IN THE HOUSE OF A SUBJECT CALLED ABU ‘IZZA.”
“SUBJECT ABU ’IZZA EVAPORATES BIT BY BIT.”
“LE ROI C’EST LE ROI [The King Is the King]: SUBJECT ABU ’IZZA FORGETS HIS ENEMIES.”
(The King Is the King, pp. 82, 88, 103, 108)
The use of “heritage” in the play
The staging of this play in 1977 in Damascus stirred controversy. Several critics noted the close resemblance between Wannus’s play and the German playwright Bertold Brecht’s Man Equals Man. An examination of both texts confirms to some extent the validity of this observation. But, while there is no denying the influence of Brecht’s work on Wannus, the main inspiration for this play lies elsewhere.
FROM “THE SLEEPER AND THE WAKKR,” A STORY IN THE ARABIAN NIGHTS
“And quoth Abu af-Hasan ’Would Heaven I might be Caliph for one day and avenge myself on my neigh-bors, for that in my vicinity is a mosque and therein four shaykhs, who hold it a grievance when there cometh a guest to me, and they trouble me with talk and worry me in words and menace me that they will complain of me to the Prince of True Believers [i.e. the Caliph], and indeed they oppress me exceedingly, and I crave of Allah the Most High power for one day, that I may beat each and every ooe of them with four hundred lashes… and parade them round the city of Baghdad… This is what I wish and no more’.”
(The Arabian Nights, p. 556)
Many of Wannus’s plays, and The King Is the King is no exception, can be considered part of a trend in modern Arabic literature of borrowing form and content from classical Arabic history and literature, which is generally referred to as turath (heritage). In this vein, The King Is the King stands out for its use of not just medieval but also early modem turath. The basic plot of the play relies on a story from the medieval The Arabian Nights (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literature and Its Times), and also on one of the first plays of modem Arabic literary history—Marun al-Naqqash’s Abu al-Hasan al-mughaffal aw-Harun al-Rashid (Abu al-Hasan the Idiot or Harun al-Rashid, 1849)—which itself relies on The Arabian Nights. The King Is the King, in other words, not only uses turath itself, but is also a self-conscious comment on the trend of employing medieval turath in modern writing. Simultaneously, the reference to al-Naqqash is a nod to the importance of the nineteenth-century founders of modern Arab theater on the contemporary Arab theater movement.
The story of Abu al-Hasan appears in Sir Richard Francis Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights as “The Sleeper and the Waker.” The story in the Burton translation is similar to that of Wannus’s The King Is the King in many ways. One difference is that the King of Wannus’s play is not a king but the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in The Arabian Nights. One group of tales in The Arabian Nights revolves around the fictional antics of this real-life caliph. Many of these stories, such as the one in question, involve the Caliph’s disguising himself and going out at night among his people on the streets of Baghdad. In “The Sleeper and the Waker,” disguised thus, the Caliph meets Abu al-Hasan, who invites him home and expresses his wish to be caliph for a day so that he can seek revenge against his oppressors. He is then drugged by the Caliph and placed on the throne. In The Arabian Nights version, however, the Caliph never loses control of his reign. The trick is played on Abu al-Hasan twice, and he is rewarded at story’s end by being made the Caliph’s chief companion. Another aspect of the story that Wannus changed is the outcome of Abu al-Hasan’s desire for revenge. In The Arabian Nights, Abu al-Hasan demands that the religious figures who have been harassing him be flogged and publicly humiliated. His orders are duly carried out. In Wannus’s play, on the other hand, those who have wronged Abu Izza not only remain unpunished but their high status in society is reinforced.
This Arabian Nights tale was the basis for one of the first works of modern Arab drama. Marun al-Naqqash, from present-day Lebanon, is often credited as founding modern Arab drama with his al-Bakhil (The Cheapskate) in 1847. His second play was the 1849 work whose title translates as “Abu al-Hasan the Idiot or Harun al-Rashid,” cited in Arabic above. The similarities between this work and Wannus’s play make it clear that Wannus was more directly indebted to this nineteenth-century drama than to The Arabian Nights itself. For example, al-Naqqash names his disguised caliph and his vizier Mustafa and Mahmoud, respectively. The character who is made the Caliph likewise has a servant named Urqub, who is in league with the real caliph, who becomes Abu al-Hasan’s vizier, and who sells his position back to the original vizier at the end of the play.
In response to critics who accused Wannus of unacknowledged borrowing of the play’s plot from Brecht, Wannus said that Brecht himself might have been influenced by The Arabian Nights. It is important to note that the text of the play The King Is the King does not explicitly state the borrowing either from The Arabian Nights or from al-Naqqash, though Wannus admitted his debt to these works in interviews and essays. More important than the similarities between all these texts, however, are the differences, which brings us to the crux of the issue of the use of turath by Wannus.
Wannus’s writings were very much influenced by the defeat of the Arabs in the Six-Day War of 1967. His first play in reaction to that war was the smash-hit Soiree for the Fifth of June. The play, a direct critique of the outcome of the war, was originally banned when first performed in 1968 (Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage, p. 351). Wannus seems to have learned his lesson by the time he wrote The King Is the King, which was written in the guise of heritage. One of the reasons often cited for writing in such a style is to avoid censorship, a strategy that seemed to work in view of the success and non-censorship of plays such as The King Is the King.
In addition to providing cover for direct criticism, another motivation for employing turath is to be able to locate the work’s main message in the very contrast between the modern piece and the piece being quoted. A main difference between Wannus’s work and that of al-Naqqash and The Arabian Nights story on which al-Naqqash’s play is based is that in The King Is the King the original king, by simply giving up his royal cloak, loses his power. A further difference is that once on the throne Abu Izza does not seek revenge on those that were the root cause of his fantasies about becoming king, but instead treats them with the same honor and respect that his predecessor on the throne granted them. Thus, one of the key messages of the play—the corrupting nature of power and the dependence of that power on outward appearances—is highlighted by the differences between his and the original texts on which his play was based.
Wannus pays homage to pioneers such as al-Naqqash and al-Qabbani not simply to celebrate early modern Syrian theater, but also because he was very interested in the fact that the audiences of that day interacted freely with the players on the stage. This brings us back to the issue of Brecht and his influence on Wannus and his contemporaries. One of the goals of Wannus’s post-1967 theater was to break down the traditional barrier between the stage and the auditorium and to involve the audience directly in his productions. This was one of Brecht’s innovations. While Wannus accomplished the aim in more direct ways in his earlier plays, in The King Is the King he does so through the opening Prologue and the subsequent Interludes and Epilogue. Not satisfied with some of his earlier direct methods, such as encouraging conversation between the actors onstage and his audience members, or most famously having the whole audience arrested at the end of Soiree, Wannus returns here to a technique familiar to Arabic letters, that of a frame-story. In fact, the technique is a feature integral to The Arabian Nights itself, which is framed by the famous story of the king Shahra-yar and the story-telling queen Shahrazad.
This, then, is one aspect of the genius of The King Is the King: it does not simply use the content of turath, with significant alterations, for very modern goals, but employs its form as well. By utilizing both the form—here the framing technique of Arabian Nights —and content of Arabic-language turath, Wannus is protecting himself from censorship and showing off the richness of Arab heritage. Beyond these two achievements, he is furthermore demonstrating that such works, whether they be the authorless medieval The Arabian Nights or the pioneering work of nineteenth-century Arab playwrights, have much to teach him and his contemporaries about artistic innovation. This brings us back to the importance of the debate about the close resemblance between The King Is the King and Brecht’s Man Equals Man.While modern and contemporary Arab playwrights were unquestionably influenced by Western playwrights and theoreticians of theater such as Brecht, Wannus demonstrates that similar examples of the new can also be found in the older cultural texts of the region’s past.
Literary context
The devastating military defeat of 1967 had the paradoxical effect of bringing about something of a literary renaissance throughout much of the Arab world. If the 1967 Arab-Israeli war had the short-term result of curtailing artistic activity all over the region, it was not long before writers of all genres and artists of all media began to express their individual and collective mix of grief, resolve, and disappointment
WANNUS INTERPRETS KING OF THE KING
“At the beginning of the play The King is the King Zahid announces an acting game in order to analyze the power structure In ’regimes of monarchy a and disguise.’ … What I mean by ‘regimes of monarchy and disguise’ are class societies, especially the contemporary bourgeois ones, military or not. He who has pointed to the external plot structure as proof that the play’s target is Eastern dictatorial societies, and thus based his evaluation of the play on this assumption, is mistaken. The play, as I have said, is more inclusive in the regimes that it strives to treat…The metaphor [I use to analyze these regimes] is the process of ‘disguise.’ The history of theater is full, especially the comedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of works the plots of which are built on the exchange of roles through disguise. What catches one’s attention in most if not all of these plays is that the ‘disguise’ is used to uphold the class structure, not to disturb it or to arouse suspicion as to its legitimacy. The prince would remain a prince even while in the clothes of the servant. And the servant would carry the characteristics of the servant despite the fact that he donned the clothes of the prince… Class societies [are] but a complex chain of disguises which reach their apex in a pure abstraction… the ruler… this person… is made up of a series of symbols and signs: the clothes, the sepulcher, the throne, the customs, the retinue, etc. The tragedy of the ruler begins when he mistakenly believes that he has personal abilities separate from his symbols, i.e. when he forgets that his legitimacy is based precisely on these symbols… the tragedy of the king in the play starts precisely when he becomes bored and believes that the throne has one size, i.e. his size.”
(Wannus, “Hawla muqaranat,” p. 105; trans. C. R. Stone)
over the devastating losses. As the Syrian novelist Hanna Minah has written, resistance literature “exploded after the [N]aksah of June 1967, especially through the pens of the Palestinian writers, but also generally by Arab writers. Its voice rose and rose until it drowned out all other literary voices, for the output was prolific, filling the pages of books, periodicals and magazines” (Minah, p. 221;trans. C. Stone).
Minah covers the impact of 1967’s events on all of the major literary genres. He stresses the importance of the reaction of poetry to the defeat, singling out Palestinian poets such as Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Ziyad. Of the poets outside Palestine, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, in particular his collection of poetry Hawamish ala daftar al-Naksah (Notes on the Notebook of the Naksah, 1967), are often mentioned in this regard. One poem from that collection sums up succinctly and powerfully the effect that this event had on Arab poets in general: “Oh my sad nation. You transformed me in an instant from a poet who writes poetry of love and nostalgia to a poet who writes with a dagger” (Qabbani, p. 9; trans. C. Stone).
Poetry was not the only genre to be shaped by the events of 1967. The fictional genres were greatly affected too, as demonstrated by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Men in the Sun (also in WLAIT 6: Middle Eastern Literatures and Their Times).Next to poetry, however, concludes Minah, the genre most impacted by events of 1967 was theater. For example in Lebanon, works such as Isam Mahfuz’s al-Zanzalakht (1968; The China Tree), Raymun Jabbara’s Latamat Dazdamuna (1970; The Blows of Desdemona), Jalal Khuri’s Juha fi al-qura al-amamiyah (Juha in the Front-Line Villages, 1971), and Faris Yawakim’s Akhya biladna (1971; Yikes, What a Country) can be seen in varying degrees as responses to the loss. In Egypt the reaction, due mostly to government censorship, was different. Though a clear leader in Arab theater in the decades preceding the defeat, Egypt experienced what has been called a “theater crisis” after the Naksah (Allen, “Arabic Drama,” p. 124). This is not to say that there were no theatrical responses to the catastrophe of 1967 in that country. One example is Mahmud Diyab’s 1970 Rajul tayyib fithalath hikayat (A Good Man in Three Stories).
The threat of censorship is given as one reason for the trend of using turath (heritage) in literary works after 1967. Another reason, from the early 1960s on, was dissatisfaction with Western forms and content, as can be seen in the theatrical writing of Qasim Muhammad (Iraq) and al-Tayyib Siddiqi (Morocco) (al-Ra’i, p. 400). There is no doubt, however, that the use of turath increased after 1967. A favorite text employed in this trend is The Arabian Nights, as shown in Wannus’s play and, for example, Alfrid Faraj’s (Egypt) Ali Janah al-Tabrizi wa-tab’uhu Quffah (1969; Ali Janah from Tabriz and His Henchman Quffah).
The events of 1967 seemed to speed up a process of experimentation in Arabic letters that was already underway, as evident in Egyptian works of the pre-Naksah period, such as Yusuf Idris’s play Farafir (1964; The Farfurs) and Sonallah Ibrahim’s novel Tilka al-ra’ihah (1966; The Smell of It, 1971), with its stripped down prose. After 1967, experimentalism became a more consistent feature of the region’s literature, as shown in the corpus of plays generated by Wannus himself.
Sa’dallah Wannus is perhaps the most often mentioned writer of any genre in terms of reactions to the Naksah of 1967. Prior to that date he had published two collections of plays that can be characterized as “theater of ideas,” thus placing him in a tradition of modern Arab playwrights such as the Egyptian Tawfiq al-Hakim, whose highly literary plays were very difficult if not impossible to produce on stage (Allen, “Arabic Drama,” p. 97). It was the defeat of 1967 that led Wannus to strive for a more performable and political theater, or, as he sometimes called it, a “theater of politicization,” a theater that provokes people to think critically and to strive for change. His first two post-1967 plays heralded the use of experimentation and heritage respectively. The first, Soiree for the Fifth of June, is “the most famous and notorious” of all reactions to the Naksah (Allen, “Arabic Drama,” p. 99). The inner play within the play is a drama about the 1967 war that never gets staged because of arguments between the “director,” the “author,” and actors playing audience members about how best to depict the defeat. The play ends with the actual audience, which has been tense from the beginning because the play intentionally starts late, literally being placed under temporary arrest. Wannus’s second play, Mughamarat ra’s al-Mamluk Jabir (The Adventures of the Mamluk Jabir’s Head, 1970), no less experimental, has a traditional storyteller ignore his customers’ requests for stories of past Abbasid-period glory and heroism. Instead, the storyteller weaves a macabre tale of grave injustice from that “golden age” of Islamic history. Wannus would continue to strive for ways to involve and impact his audiences as much as possible through the 1970s, his efforts culminating, say some, in The King Is the King.
THE NAME GAME
The reader may have noticed that Izza’s parents names—Abu Izza and Umm tzza—contain her own name. Their literal meaning is “father of Izza” and “mother of Izza” respectively. This type of name is known in Arabic as the kunya.Traditionally the kunya takes the form of the Arabic words for father and mother, abu and umm plus the name of the parents’ eldest male child. The use of the daughter’s name in the Kunyas in The King is the King, however, demonstrates that the rules are flexible. The kunya can also be used as a nickname without any relation to the names of one’s progeny, While there are some kunyas traditionally associated with certain names, such as Abu Ishaq or Abu Ya‘qub for Ibrahim, other people may be assigned one or more kunyas less systematically. The kunya can also be used to refer to people by a physical trait, such as “Abu Kirsh,” or “he of the paunch.” A kunya can like wise be taken or given as a nom-de-guerre without any particular meaning—Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, for example, acquired the kunya Abu Ammar. Finally a kunya can also be used to draw attention to peoples’ negative qualities or be used as an insult (Wensinck, p. 396).
While his post-1990 plays would continue to be experimental in form and in the use of Arab heritage, they show a greater focus on the suffering of individuals than his earlier plays, which are more collective in their focus. Representative of this later group of plays is his 1994 (first performed in 1996) Rituals of Signs and Transformations, which is set in nineteenth-century Damascus and which portrays the way a woman’s sexual and social liberation shakes a society to its core. The main text of reference for this female character is The Arabian Nights.
Reviews
Like much literary Arab drama, Wannus’s written texts have generally been more highly acclaimed than their production on stage. Unlike much of the theater that preceded him, however, this is not so much because his texts were not written with live audiences in mind, but rather because he was always striving to reach, involve, and affect audiences in new ways. The performance of his first post-1967 work—Soiree for the Fifth of June —received rave reviews. It eventually became clear, though, that its high topicality made it difficult to perform as successfully five or six years after the Naksah itself. This perhaps explains why his plays became less historically specific over the years; his The King Is the King, for example, does not refer to any specific historical place or events. This timelessness earned the work accolades from the Syrian theater critic Riyad Ismat: it “is a theatrical work ambitious and advanced, and carries in its depths the value of eternality, and is full of comedic, visual and dramatic enjoyment” (Ismat, p. 76; trans. C. Stone).
Those who saw it on stage tended to find fault with it, although they disagree on where blame for its shortcomings should lie. The Syrian critic Zuhayr Hasan takes the director to task. “The production,” he says summing up the problem, “was a midget compared to the giant of a text” (Hasan, p. 100; trans. C. Stone). Syrian critic Paul Shawul, on the other hand, praised the direction and production of the play, but found fault with the text itself:
The viewer feels that he is in the presence of politicized and theatricized language that alienates him from reality more than it incites him against it…. For this reason Wannus, when he wanted to compensate for the absence of a rooted vision, falls into a kind of evangelical and direct preaching.
(Shawul, p. 521; trans. C. R. Stone)
Generally, however, those evaluating the play in print rated it higher than those like Ismat who saw it performed live. Roger Allen saw it as something of a culmination of Wannus’s theatrical talents, reckoning it to be “his last truly major contribution to Arabic drama” (Allen, The Arabic Literary Heritage, p. 354). There is general agreement on the pioneering work and significant contribution that Wannus has made to Arab theater. “It will be written for him,” predicts Hasan, “that he was the first Arab writer to enter the realm of world playwrights” (Hasan, p. 95; trans. C. Stone).
—Christopher R. Stone
For More Information
Allen, Roger. “Arabic Drama in Theory and Practice: The Writings of Sadallah Wannus.” JAL 15 (1984): 94–113.
_____. The Arabic Literary Heritage.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. Trans. Sir Richard F. Burton. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
Hasan, Zuhayr. “al-Malik huwa al-malik wa-masrah al-mir’ah.” al-Adab 26, nos. 7–8 (1978): 92–103.
Ismat, Riyad. al-Masrah al-Arabi: suqut al-aqnVah al-ijtima‘iyah. Damascus: Maktabat al-Assad, 1995.
Minah, Hanna, and Najah al-Attar. Adab al-harb. Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat al-Thaqafah, 1976.
Qabbani, Nizar. Hawamish ala daftar al-Naksah. Bayrut: Manshurat Nizar Qabbani, 1970.
al-Ra‘i, AH. “Arabic Drama Since the Thirties.” In The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature:Modern Arabic Literature. Ed. M. M. Badawi. Cambridge: Cambridge. University Press, 1992.
Seale, Patrick. Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Shawul, Paul. al-Masrah al-Arabi al-hadith: (1976–1989). London: Riyad al-Rayyis, 1989.
Wannus, Sa‘dallah. “Hawla muqaranat al-Duktur al-Hamu bayna masrahiyatay ’al-Malik huwa al-malik’ wa ’Rajul bi-rajul.’” al-Mawqif al-adabi 90 (1978): 93–110.
_____. “The King is the King.” In Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology. Eds. Salma Khadrajayyusi and Roger Allen. Trans. Ghassan Maleh and Thomas G. Ezzy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Wensinck, A. J. “Kunya.” In Encylopaedia of Islam. Vol. 5. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986.
Yapp, M. E. The Near East Since the First World War. New York: Longman, 1991.