France is celebrating the centenary of the birth of playwright , an intriguing influence on modern Arabic literature, writes David Tresilian in Paris The centenary of the birth of the Romanian-born playwright , one of the best-known exponents of the "theatre of the absurd" that swept across world stages in the 1950s and 1960s, is offering France a fine excuse to draw renewed attention to his work. An exhibition in Ionesco's honour was at the Bibliothèque nationale de France until January and revivals of his plays are planned in Paris theatres. However, it would be a pity if against this background of renewed interest in Ionesco and the theatre of the absurd there was no mention of the latter's influence on the Egyptian drama of the 1960s, one of its most successful periods, and particularly on the work of one of the theatre of the absurd's most notable Arab exponents, the Egyptian playwright and man of letters Tawfiq al-Hakim. Over the course of what was by any standards an exceptionally long writing career --his first plays date from the 1920s and his last from some 40 years later in the 1960s -- al-Hakim is often considered to have almost single-handedly created serious theatre in Arabic. He also experimented with a variety of dramatic styles, something which the critic M. M. Badawi, one of al-Hakim's most authoritative interpreters, explains by quoting al-Hakim's determination "to undertake in 30 years a trip on which the dramatic literature of other languages had spent about two thousand years" and to create an Arabic dramatic literature that could stand comparison with that in other languages. While al-Hakim's early plays developed out of time spent in Paris in the 1920s, when, instead of studying law according to his father's wishes he seems to have spent his time at the theatre watching plays by Pirandello and other European dramatists, these soon gave way to more ambitious plays on philosophical and historical themes. According to his contemporary Taha Hussein, al-Hakim's 1933 play Ahl al-Kahf (People of the Cave) is "the first work in Arabic literature that may be properly called drama," though Badawi is more guarded in his views on al-Hakim's other plays from the period. It was out of al-Hakim's sometimes notorious "tendency to philosophical rambling," rendering even Ahl al-Kahf full of "undramatic philosophical discussion," in the words of British critic Paul Starkey, that the idea was born of al-Hakim's plays as belonging to a "theatre of the mind" that went hand-in-hand with their author's self- estimation as a detached observer of human affairs from an ivory tower. This self-conception did not always survive the political and social changes of the 1950s, and al-Hakim began to produce works that called upon all social classes to sink their differences and support the egalitarian project promoted by the 1952 revolution. He also began to experiment with more demotic language. Plays such as Al-Aydi al-na'imah ( Tender Hands ) attempted to revalue manual labour, while Al-Safqah ( The Deal ) shows villagers receiving land from the post-revolutionary government. Like other writers of his and younger generations, al-Hakim began to receive increasing official recognition, money being spent on the theatre as part of an ambitious programme of support for the arts. By 1966, there were nine theatres in Cairo that received state support, themselves supporting ten public companies. A new generation of dramatists, including Nu'man Ashur, Alfred Farag and, in his role as playwright, Youssef Idris, grew up to provide new plays. When al-Hakim was appointed Egypt's representative to UNESCO in Paris in 1959, it might have seemed that history was about to repeat itself. Al-Hakim's first steps as a dramatist had come in the 1920s when a visit to Paris had revealed forms of theatre that called into question the theatre of the boulevards, the melodrama and the "well-made play." When he went to Paris again in the late 1950s, this time to attend diplomatic meetings rather than to study law, al-Hakim again seems to have absented himself from his official functions in order to attend the theatre, this time the theatre of Ionesco, Beckett and Genet, which soon was brought together and labelled the theatre of the absurd. Resigning from his UNESCO post, al-Hakim returned to Egypt and began a new phase in his writing, with plays such as Al-Sultan al-ha'ir ( The Sultan's Dilemma ), Yatali al-shagarah ( The Tree Climber ), Masir sarsar ( Fate of a Cockroach ), and Bank al-qalaq ( Anxiety Bank ) that exhibit many of the characteristic features of the theatre of the absurd. Together, these plays raise intriguing questions both about the shape of al-Hakim's career, which in old age seemed to have returned to the meta- theatrical direction indicated by his early interest in Pirandello, and about the meaning of the theatre of the absurd when transported onto the Egyptian stage. *** The label itself was the work of a critic, Martin Esslin, who claimed that a whole generation of European dramatists had created work filled with a "metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition," their work being a dramatic reworking of the existentialist philosophy in the work of novelist Albert Camus. The absurd was a form of theatre, Esslin wrote, that developed the modern movement's suspicion of language. It established a new form of relationship with its audience, and it could be put together out of even "slapdash and perfunctory materials." In fact that was part of the point. "Within a decade...the stages of the world from Finland to Japan, from Norway to the Argentine," had eagerly adopted the theatre of the absurd, Esslin wrote, indicating that various traditions had found something attractive in it as literature, as stage technique and as a manifestation of the thinking of the age, though he does not mention the Egyptian theatre and al-Hakim. Concerned to establish the integrity of the new movement, Esslin plays down the different priorities of the authors he examines, as well as their debts to surrealism, dada and parts of Hollywood cinema. Ionesco for one was reluctant to accept the label of the absurd as appropriate to his work, which he preferred to think of as being "anti-plays." These were plays that called the idea of a play into question, negating or reversing it, more often than not mocking it, in order to reveal the suffocating linguistic and other conventions that governed ordinary social interactions, particularly those presented in Ionesco's plays. The recent Paris exhibition, interestingly presented in the shape of heaps of cardboard boxes supporting the materials on display, drew attention to the best-known example of Ionesco's habit of driving dialogue up against the bounds of sense and even beyond them. In La Cantatrice chauve, Ionesco's first major play, he introduces Mr and Mrs Smith, an English couple, who utter banalities at each other in an atmosphere of escalating hysteria. However, the line between sense and nonsense is not easily drawn, as Ionesco himself pointed out. In his notes, Ionesco wrote that La Cantatrice chauve and its English characters originated in an attempt to learn English by the "Assimil" method, still a successful company today, which asks learners to memorise sentences from the target language before trying them out for themselves. Whatever the virtues of this procedure for average language- learners, for Ionesco it had unexpected and extraordinary results. Re-reading his sentences, Ionesco wrote, "I learned not English but some astonishing truths... To my astonishment, Mrs Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr Smith was a clerk, that they had a servant, Mary, English like themselves... In the fifth lesson, the Smiths' friends the Martins arrive; the four of them begin to chat and, starting from basic axioms, they build more complex truths: the country is quieter than the city," for example. All this material finds its way into the dialogue of La Cantatrice chauve, and one of the highlights of the Paris exhibition, made up of holdings from the Bibliothèque nationale and from gifts from Marie-France Ionesco, Ionesco's daughter, was the author's original copy of La pratique de l'anglais by Alphonse Chérel. Annotated by Ionesco, this contains a note that reveals his state of mind before the new direction suggested by Chérel's English characters and the success of La Cantatrice chauve. "I should start all over again," Ionesco wrote. "I feel empty and exhausted. Too many setbacks and dead ends. At the age of 35, I am already old." For anyone interested in the French and European culture of the 1950s and 1960s or in Ionesco and his milieu the exhibition was essential viewing, though the materials brought together also had a wider resonance. In addition to those by Ionesco himself -- his manuscripts and lecture notes, for example, dating from the period when he had become an established figure on the international lecture circuit -- the exhibition also contained letters and other items from figures such as Raymond Queneau, François Ponge and Samuel Beckett, the latter apologising for missing a performance of Ionesco's play Le roi se meurt in almost unreadable, rune-like handwriting, and original theatrical material and theatre bills. There were materials testifying to Ionesco's growing international eminence in the shape of materials from the 1960 London production of Rhinocéros, with Laurence Olivier and directed by Orson Welles, and there was a copy of Harold Hobson's 1958 review of the first London production of Les Chaises. Visitors to the exhibition may well have found themselves charmed by now long-forgotten debates, urgent at the time, such as that launched by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan's 1958 attack on Ionesco's work on the grounds that Ionesco, unlike Brecht, was not a "committed" writer. *** To mark the centenary of Ionesco's birth, in addition to the exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale the Athénée Theatre revived Jean-Luc Lagarce's 1991 production of La Cantatrice chauve, though in fact this play has never left the Paris stage. Almost every night since 1957 the tiny Theatre de la Huchette in the city's Latin Quarter has been performing the play, and a recent visit revealed that the actors were still giving spirited performances of Ionesco's 60-year-old text before dedicated or simply curious audiences. Perhaps al-Hakim himself visited an earlier incarnation of this production during his year in Paris in 1959. Visiting the production today, now in the centre of the Left Bank tourist district and surrounded by Greek restaurants, one gets a real sense of period, though possibly one rather too neatly packaged as heritage. Even those entirely innocent of theatrical nostalgia can still appreciate the play. A group of charmingly well-behaved French children found much to enjoy in the famous dialogue in which Mr and Mrs Martin are able to deduce from otherwise inexplicable circumstances that they must be married to each other. Ionesco's plays are thus firmly installed in the repertoire, but one wonders whether the same can be said for al-Hakim's 1960s plays, most of which have been helpfully translated by veteran translator Denys Johnson-Davies. Two of them ( The Sultan's Dilemma and The Tree Climber ) have been given renewed circulation in his 2008 collection The Essential Tawfiq al-Hakim. It has sometimes been argued that al-Hakim's plays of the 1960s, like Ionesco's from a decade before, had an unavowed political meaning, obvious to the initiated but overlooked, in al-Hakim's case, by the censors, despite the plays' apparent rejection of social or political themes. In La Cantatrice chauve, Ionesco presents a situation in which communication has given way to mis- communication or the avoidance of communication, and in Les Chaises he shows a lecture taking place in front of an audience of empty chairs. In Rhinocéros, his most ambitious work in this vein, Ionesco presents a world in which people turn into rhinoceroses, leaving only a single human character. Similarly, in his play The Tree Climber al-Hakim presents a detective investigating a murder that has not taken place, and in Fate of a Cockroach he constructs a cockroach society modelled on a human one, complete with religion, politics and domestic arguments. In a situation in which political misgivings could not be expressed directly, but where the theatre played a significant social role, al-Hakim's plays of the 1960s, undermining conventional patterns of thought and constructing versions of events only to collapse them in contradictions, have sometimes been seen as playing an indirectly political role. From a stage-play world of "senseless talk," of questions "to which there is no answer and to which there is no way of knowing the answer," as one character puts it in The Tree Climber, the certitudes of the regime, beginning to drown in the contradictions of a rhetoric at odds with reality, were not immune to processes of deconstruction, if only as a result of extra-theatrical contagion. If it was possible for al-Hakim to set up elaborate parallels between the world of cockroaches and the world of humans in Fate of a Cockroach, it was not beyond the capacity of audiences at his apparently non-political 1960s plays to draw their own conclusions. Ionesco, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, until January
