Theatre-Making and Theatre Translation in Turn-of-the-Century Egypt

It was not until the 1940s that theatre criticism in Egypt found its name and started to take shape, which was mainly due to the efforts of a small group of Egyptian academics who had direct contact with Western academia through education and endeavoured on their return to Egypt to establish the conceptual and institutional structures of Arabic theatre criticism as we know it today. Although commentaries on theatre practice before that time remained limited to impressionistic press reviews that mainly served propagandist purposes, they had an impact on the then emerging theatre field and played a significant role in conditioning its dynamics. However, these early attempts at engaging with theatre practices in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt have been generally eclipsed in mainstream historiography of Arabic theatre for at least two reasons: first, the absence or lack of consistent archiving efforts that make these writings available for scholarship; second, the long-standing and uncontested assumption embraced by the Arabic theatre community that Muḥammad Mandūr’s (1907–65) writings mark the earliest recognised efforts of academic theatre criticism in Arabic, with the direct result of disavowing critical contributions before the 1940s. Now that these theatre reviews have been recently made available, thanks to the efforts of the National Centre for Theatre, Music and Folk Arts in Egypt, an alternative historiography of theatre criticism and practice is still to bear its fruit. ¹