ABSTRACT
The modern theater of the Middle East, developed from European roots, has not surprisingly generally reflected the changing trends in European theater, including the so-called theater of the absurd. Only one Middle Eastern dramatist, the Israeli Amos Kenan, actually participated in the launching of this movement in Paris, most of the leading dramatists of this region subsequently produced works clearly related to the work of Ionesco, Beckett and others. Although Tawfiq al-Hakim, Egypt’s best known playwright de-emphasized the absurdist influence in his 1962, The Tree Climber, it has been widely described as the first absurdist drama in the Arab world. Al-Hakim himself wrote a number of other plays in this mode, and he was followed by a number of other Egyptian dramatists, most importantly Yusif Idris and Rashad Rushdi. The leading dramatist of modern Syria, and the only Arab dramatist of the past century to rival al-Hakim in importance, Saadallah Wannous, combined absurdist techniques with Brechtian elements in a strongly engaged political theater. In Israel, Kenan was soon overshadowed by other dramatists with a distinct interest in the absurd, first Nissim Aloni and then the leading Israeli dramatist of the 1970, Hanoch Levin. Although occasional Middle Eastern plays such as Josef Sobol’s internationally popular Ghetto (1984) continued to show the influence of the absurd, the flowering of this approach was generally over in this region by the early 1980s.
