Cultural Encounters on Stage

Works of the renowned Egyptian playwright, Tawfiq al-Ḥakīm (1898-1987), are rich sites of cultural encounters between the local and the global, and the Egyptian traditional folk dramatic conventions and the Western models. Many of his literary productions like Ahl al-Kahf [The Men of the Cave] (1939), al-Malik Udīb [Oedipus the King] (1949), Yāṭāliʿ al-shajarah [O’ Tree Climber] (1962) reflect not only how the local and the global interact but also how they overlap and transform each other. The aim of the research paper is to examine how al-Ḥakīm in his book Qālibunā al-masraḥī [Our Theatrical Mold] (1967) utilizes the long-standing European theatrical discipline in his reworking of many canonical plays including Hamlet. The theoretical concepts of appropriating, contact zones, borderlands narrative, and counter canonical texts are employed to describe how al-Ḥakīm’s Hamlet in moving from its British context to the Egyptian morphs, changes, and incorporates local performative elements into the “European mold” (Qālibunā al-masraḥī 1967, 14). Thus, it produces “new theatrico-cultural system” (Balme 1999, 18) that suits the Egyptian cultural identity and bridges the gap between the indigenous performative traditions and the European paradigms. The study concludes that al-Ḥakīm’s revisiting and reworking of Hamlet along with the other excerpts showcases the complexities of cultural encounters.