ABSTRACT
Although there are significant differences in the cultural attitudes regarding Western theatre in China and in the Arab world, one must begin with an appreciation that an awareness of Western based theatre is a relatively recent phenomenon in both cultures, and is still largely confined to a rather small selection of the population, mostly the educated and European-oriented dwellers in the larger cities. It is of course a part of the colonialist project to assume a position of Western cultural superiority and many students in the former colonized world, raised in that tradition, naturally expect a Western teacher to accept and promulgate that position. Most students from the Arab world naturally have a far better acquaintance with Arabic theatre than Western students do, even when they consider it as necessarily inferior to Western theatre.
