Texts used in this course:
1.M.M.Badawi, Editor; Arabic Writing Today: The Drama. (Princeton, New Jersey: Arabic Research Center in Egypt. 1977)

2. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Roger Allen, eds.: Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology (Indiana Series in Arab and Islamic Studies) 1995 (9780253209733):

3. THEATER THREE (No. 6. Spring 1989) there are a number of essays on the drama of the Arab World.

Mahmoud Diab: THE STORM 1964
Mahmoud Diab is a generation younger than Tewfiq al-Hakim and his dramaturgy strikes me as being more assured. Our anthology tells us that he has written experimental drama, as well as novels and that he also has written a comedy in which many of the characters in The Storm re-appear. In fact there is a great deal of comedy in The Storm: it is one of its distinguished aspects that it can develop its themes on many levels.

THE STORM was immediately recognized as marking a break with the Absurdist and experimental drama Arab writers were creating, and to have established a realist form for the drama. Not only is it a realist work, but it is an accomplished one - it is in fact one of the best examples of 'ensemble' realism. Yet, while being completely faithful to the rhythms and details of actual village life, - the kind of world Diab knew from his childhood - the play very finely works in a metaphoric pattern: nothing less than the Day of Judgment that, for a Muslim as for a Christian, awaits humanity at the end of all history.
It is a Realism of a very impressive and original order.

COMPARISONS WITH 'WESTERN' DRAMA
It might help students unfamiliar with Arab literature to suggest plays from more familiar cultures that employ a similar method to Diab's. The theme of the terrifying judgmental visitor appears in THE INSPECTOR GENERAL by Gogol, or THE VISIT by Friedrich Dürennmatt. Similarly ensemble dramas are Maxim Gorky's THE LOWER DEPTHS, Eugene O'Neill's THE ICEMAN COMETH, Gerhardt Hauptmann's THE WEAVERS - all dramas of whole communities. Like Dürennmatt's play there is a scapegoat that the community creates to hide its own guilt, unlike THE VISIT, the community comes to accept its own guilt. Whereas Dürennmatt ends the play with the community prosperous but damned Diab impels the community to a form of repentance and salvation.

The play describes an almost ritual 'confessional' action by the community as it finally faces its guilty identity. The result, I think, is very moving: the ugliness of what the villagers did becomes more and more apparent, as with their cowardice and their vindictiveness: but, gradually, we, as audience, get to identify with them, sometimes to laugh at them, but also to sympathize with them and to be glad that they work their way to a form of redemption.

1. The Choric orchestration of the piece is finely rendered: it begins with the outcast Saleh's alienation from the village that is piously and complacently celebrating the return of a prominent member from his Hajj pilgrimage. The stage directions often suggest that the crowd is speaking in one voice, as in Greek tragedy, but in a realist performance, this must just mean anonymous voices from the 'Chorus'. The opening section, with the villagers gathered round Hajj Saleh is wonderfully ironic. It is like a musical opening statement of themes that will be mordantly developed.

It sets up in the audience questions that the play will answer: why is Saleh’s family; the grandmother, imprisoned father and his children, ostracized? Why does Saleh hate the Village and urge his sister to leave it? Why is it so difficult for him to join in the crowd congratulating Hagg Shaalan? He recounts his grandmother's explanation and her hatred, but this still leaves the past as a mystery that needs explaining. The opening image, then, is of an individual family's ostracism on one side of the stage, and, on the other, of the group in happy congratulation of an eminent and prominent member, Hagg Shaalan. The action of the play will finally invert this image: the village will come to be outlawed and Saleh and Sabha, not Hagg Shaalan, will be urgently solicited, begged, to bestow some mercy on the community. Finally the play will end in reconciliation as the outcasts join the village community for a future of better self-knowledge.

The title of the play THE STORM, implies a slowly gathering, major, single agitation, an outburst, then a settling down again; though, as we will see, in very different terms than before the storm.

The play is structures of two widely contrasting 'returns': the congratulated return of the fraudulently pious Hajj Shaalan, and the horrifying reported vengeful return of Saleh’s father. The movement of the play beautifully uses the realistic dynamics of the group while the individual characters in the group are vividly and realistically sketched and are in themselves interesting. Even the anonymous voices articulate the play's movement to self-knowledge.
The satire and comedy is finely muted.

The genre of communal or ensemble realism' we find in Lope de Vega's FUENTE OVEJUNA, in Schiller's WILHELM TELL, in the plays of Hauptmann, Gorky, Dürranmatt, etc. In all these plays the Individualism of bourgeois drama, which is centered on prominent central characters, is set aside for an a drama of the collective. Yet though it has much in common with those European communal plays, THE STORM is highly original and faithful, one feels, to the rhythm and texture of the Arab village life in which Diab grew up.

The plot of the play emerges through the simplest means: a terrifying piece of news from the past drops like a bombshell and the guilt of the present community gradually is revealed through their reactions to the news and to each other. The play demonstrates how the psychology of the Group can be as interesting as the psychology of individuals.

WHAT IS ‘HAGG’?
The title 'HAJJ' is given to any man or woman who has made the pilgrimage to MECCA. A woman's title is 'HAJJA' (HAGG AND HAGGA respectively in the Egyptian text). Hagg Shaalan and Hagga Sabha, the terrifying old grandmother of Saleh and Sabha have made the pilgrimage. To go at least once in a lifetime on a Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, is the major event in a pious Muslim's life. The house of Hagg Shaalan is decorated to celebrate this wonderful, holy event in the life of the Village, something of which the whole village can be proud for it has put the village in contact with the holy center of Islam.

In the ironic movement of the play, we will discover that Hagg Shaalan, far from being a holy man, is guilty of a crime and cover up while Hagga Sabhan is consumed with hatred and a thirst for vengeance, much like Asakir in Tewfiq el-Hakim's THE SONG OF DEATH. The play contrasts the superficiality of such an external bid for salvation as a trip to Mecca with the authentic route to salvation that will lie in the journey of self-knowledge through terror, guilt, remorse and pity that the village will be made to undergo.

2. The group initially seems to be a laudable one, with only the strange tension between Khalil Abou Omar and Hassan El Aarag unexplained. The little reverent phrases with which the 'chorus' surrounds Hagg Shaalan all paint a picture of a pious and decent community. It celebrates God as merciful who can wonderfully fulfill a man's life as it seemingly has fulfilled Hagg Shaalan's. The young man, Saleh, seems a sullen fool to be outside this happy group. But this community is to have its facile piety stripped away as it undergoes the terrifying experience of
Allah as God the Judge, before arriving at God/Allah the Merciful.

Saleh’s father, Hussein, becomes increasingly the approaching agent of God the Judge, forcing the village through a "dark night of the soul" though terror and shame to ultimate self-knowledge. The final image we have of the purportedly 'terrifying' and 'vengeful' Hussein is, instead, of his ultimate forgiveness of the Village. Though his identity brings terror and self-knowledge, he finally is revealed as merciful. It might be said that the terrifying and fearful image of Hussein that the village so fears is the projection of its own guilty spiritual condition which the wronged Hussein already has transcended.

Though the whole village (at least its older men and women) are concealing a very despicable crime and quailing before imagined ideas of vengeance, the dramatist does not despise them: you might say that the terror the village undergoes is a form of salutary self-knowledge, something not just the village but humanity in general sorely needs. The conclusion of the play is therefore the opposite of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s THE VISIT where the community has learned nothing.

In an admirable touch, the news of the terrible Avenger returning to the village is brought by the two comic brothers, Ahmed and Mahmoud who cannot resist trying to outdo each other - all through the play - quarreling as to who saw what. It becomes apparent, later in the play, that they really are not the most reliable of witnesses; that they love to be the center of attention and to embellish the facts for dramatic effect. So, the first description of the wronged Hussein is worked up by them almost gleefully for maximum terror:

AHMED His face was blazing with the wrath of God
MAHMOUD: The very Devil
(All draw back murmuring invocations)
AHMED: And how his eyes glared, Abou Omar, how
they glared..."(p. 216)

In other words, the gentle, kindly God of the Hajj is now turning into the frightening God of the Day of Judgment, together with the Devil, both God and Devil glaring punishment, scaring the daylights out of the Village. (The religious parallels are hidden behind the realism of the play).

And as this 'divine' pattern emerges, the ostracized Saleh becomes more and more the Intercessor who will mediate between the village the wrathful avenger. Hagg Shaalen, the man blessed with the pilgrimage to Mecca whose house was treated almost as a holy place at the beginning of the play, the Village's point of contact with God, is frightened in Act 2 into admitting he cheated Saleh’s family of its land, and seeks to make restitution. The pilgrimage was unable to work this change in him: his and the village's true contact with God emerges only through the terror they are now undergoing.

Saleh insists that his father is not vengeful, yet he has his doubts. As Hussein was wrongly imprisoned for twenty years, sentenced for a murder and theft the Village knew he did not commit, his ultimate act of forgiveness is saintly. This finally brings the Village to a sense of shame and repentance and a desire for justice and reconciliation with Saleh.

The village is being 'dragged' from self-congratulatory piety over the Hajj visit to Mecca, through a truly religious experience at home; that of terror over past guilt festering in the coimmunity; then trying criminally to ward it off (setting out to stop and even kill Hussein and so doubling their earlier crime) then desperately making up to and pleading with Saleh and his sister Sabha. Gradually, their innate decency emerges and they will be chastened at the end of the play. All through the play the saintly but rather ineffectual blind Sheikh Younes intones verses from the Koran - he was the spiritual leader the village was able to ignore but soon his God will manifest himself. At the end of the play, with the arrival of the messenger, Sayed, Sheikh Younes (true piety) is restored to his respected place in the community, displacing Hagg Shaalan.

3. At the beginning there are just a few unexplained details: Saleh's father and his son's disgrace; why do Saleh and his sister, Sabha have no home of their own; why cannot the grandmother forgive the village from her sickbed? These are minor mysteries within the generally placid-seeming community. Why do El Aarag and Khalil seem to hate each other?

4. Then the bombshell as Ahmed and Mahmoud the comic pair of brothers) drop the news: Hussein Abou Shama, Saleh’s father is out of jail and vengefully returning to the village. This news is conveyed by Ahmed and Mahmoud continually disputing the details of their sighting of Hussein, each wanting to get the credit for seeing him first. This dispute cleverly prepares for the revelation of Act 3 for we later will reflect on what unreliable witnesses these two really are. They are also the ones who will find the body of El Aarag in Act 2 and once again they can't give their report without quarreling over it. By contrast, the final messenger, Sayed, is the accurate one, not wishing to gain the spotlight, but merely narrating what happened, without imaginative embellishment.

On hearing the news of the avenging Hussein, the community at once disintegrates and reveals itself to have been living a lie, a sham. The formidable grandmother, Hagga Sabha eerily enters, looking like a vengeful corpse and even denouncing Hagg Shaalan’s pilglrimage as a fraud. The pious structure of the play's opening now collapses.

Ahmed and Mahmoud gleefully built up the monstrous nature of the Avenger (p. 215):
Ahmed: He has whiskers bold enough for a hawk to perch on
Mahmoud And his head has grown as big as this, (Indicates an
exaggerated size with his hands)
Mahmoud Not quite as big as that, man; a little smaller.
Ahmed And the palm of his hand is twice the size of mine.
Mahmoud Three times, easily.
Ahmed: If he brought it down on a fellow like me he'd squash
him level.
Mahmoud: Pound him flat.

This news rouses an excitable young man, Okasha, into conventional histrionics of vengeance:

Okasha: My father's killer is coming back to town.... Heaven be
praised!

Okasha’s impetuous histrionics, however, are squelched again and again by the others, who tell him to be quiet. The play that seems to promise a revenge plot or melodrama, instead takes another path altogether.

In Act 2 Okasha will be suspected of the murder of El Aarag who was the accomplice in the actual robbery and murder of his father. Okasha is thrown into a panic, and begs Saleh to help him. The brothers, Ahmed and Mahmoud join in. (253-54)

Ahmed (pointing at OKASHA) Does this look like someone who'd
kill a man?
Mahmoud: Or even a chicken?

All through the play this vein of comedy that keeps emerging.

As Saleh the 'idiot' and outcast, is vindicated and begins to recover his sense of self-worth, the villagers panic and, in a reversal of situation, the young men are sympathetic to Saleh.

As the awareness of the avenger's return works through the community, Khalil’s growing fury and alarm turns to panic and his accomplice El Aarag will find final relief at confessing and being able, at last, to enter a mosque. Their perpetual mysterious quarrel now is explained - a good dramatic holding back of information until the right time.

The tremendous entry of Hagga Sabha is a frightening dramatic confrontation but Diab's theatrical method and the human situation in the course of the play, subdues such histrionics into something much more subtle.

THE PLAY ACT BY ACT
ACT ONE
1. A very gradual and humanly interesting revelation of the village.
The Scene is the exterior of two houses, of two patriarchs.
(Sheikh = head of family or tribe; or a respected older man; it also can mean a priest.)
(a) Sheikh Younes is the blind but true 'patriarch' of the village whose guidance has been neglected by the village. He has taken in Saleh and Sabha, the son and daughter of the imprisoned Hussein Abou Shama.
Sheikh Younes represents a spiritual (non-materialist) ethic from which the Village has long strayed - ever since it framed Saleh’s father.

(b) Hagg Shaalan, just returned from Mecca and the object of the village's admiration as they flock to his house. The house is freshly whitewashed and decorated with the naive paintings of ship and caravan, images of the returned pilgrim. Little pious phrases are also scrawled on the walls, all suggesting the newly won sanctity of Hagg Shaalan. So Sheikh Younes is neglected for Hagg Shaalan who carries the aura of piety from the pilgrimage.

Saleh, sitting on the bench of Sheikh Younes’ house, ostracized by the Village, is burdened by his doubt about his father's criminal guilt. He is the opposite of the revered Hagg Shaalan; he is the disgraced individual whom the village shuns. He has also ostracized the village and he will be shown to be justified. He has been dispossessed of his rightful property. Yet he is dismissive of the third member of this ostracized family, the Grandmother, the vengeful Hagga Sabha. Obviously the village has singled out Saleh and mistreated him because of its own guilt: he is a living reminder of the wrong the villagers have done his father, though we will not find this out fully until Act 2. So the opening scene is a Prologue to the whole action, outlining its hidden oppositions.

Sabha, his sister, has been unable to marry because she is without property: a situation which makes the village’s guilt even more inexcusable.. Halima, daughter of Sheikh Younes, is 'subtextually' in love with Saleh and her reluctance to join with him, and her interest in another young man, adds to Saleh’s alienation.

When two Watchmen pass by, we hear of the guilt the village has projected upon Saleh and that he has had to grow up with. The action shifts to the feast being given by Hagg Shaalan where the crowd representing the village, begins to gather. There is no hint anything is hypocritical or wrong with this crowd or with Hagg Shaalan who enters, laughing, with Khalil Abou Omar.

The crowd emerges from the house, murmuring pious phrases about the trip to Mecca and arguing about business - all very normal. They gather about Hagg Shaalan, asking about the pilgrimage, fondling their prayer beads, and so on, exhibiting a wonder and piety that is sincere but will be revealed as an evasion of their unexamined lives.

Only the bickering between Hassan El Aarag and Khalil Abou Omar slightly disturbs the tranquility of the gathering. The whole scene, pp. 200 -210 is a fine piece of enacted communal portraiture. And it is into this relatively placid scene, with its minor tremors, that the pair of brothers, Ahmed and Mahmoud drop the bombshell - the news of the imminent return of Saleh’s father, Hussein. (210) This announcement itself is finely done, with the two brothers, always together, each anxious to be the one to break the news and contradicting the other. They keep up this comic characterization throughout the play – a good realistic, non-melodramatic device, to have the fatal messengers be comic, contradicting each other, and totally wrong.

The crowd's reaction is complex. Abou Omar is the most disturbed while El Aarag is the most conscience-stricken. Okasha is a hot-headed young 'avenger' who doesn't need prompting but who is thoroughly put down by everyone. Okasha’s language (212) is luridly melodramatic: "My father's blood is here in front of me....and it's crying to high heaven" but this is the wrong language for this play and this is immediately deflated by Sheikh Younes. This "melodramatic plot" will not be allowed to take off! Okasha is merely acting the part he thinks is expected of him, putting on a show of righteous bravado which will be semi-comically deflated in Act 2 when he is actually thought to be the avenger.

216 Ahmed and Mahmoud, meanwhile, are immensely enjoying being the center of horrified attention and so they give a blood-curdling description of Hussein 'His face was blazing with the wrath of God."
"And how his eyes glared, Abou Omar, how they glared.." so that Hussein is melodramatically remembered and terrifyingly re-imagined in the minds of the villagers (217) as El Aarag repeats Husein’s oath of revenge.

221- 225. It is now, when the crowd’s imagination is most fearfully roused, than the awful figure of Hagga Sabha emerges from her sickbed to denounce the entire village and to gloat over their impending destruction. She seems the driving spirit of Vengeance; but the play refuses to go along this melodramatic path. Hagga Sabha serves, rather, to fearfully awaken the villagers’ guilt and fear, and to force them to make the reparations to Saleh and Sabha that will re-instate them in the village, not impel them to the exile that Saleh at first intends. Like Okasha’s, Hagga Sabha’s gloating threat of vengeance is an extreme the play won't permit.

228. El Aarag now confesses that he and Khalil are the guilty killers, not Saleh’s father. But all the others are guilty too. For various reason's (they resented Hussein and his forceful ways with them) they would not speak up when they knew he was innocent, and they profited from his wrongful 20 year imprisonment. The 'pious' Hagg Shaalan and others seized Hussein’s property, stealing it from his children.

The Act ends with the young men of the Village sympathizing with Saleh and expressing disgust at the older villagers. This could now be a drama of Crime and Punishment, but the play is interested in something else entirely - in bringing out a latent good within the guilty villagers.
It is already there in El Aarag's inability to enter a mosque ever since the crime. The crowd is not only fearful but also ashamed (223)

ACT TWO
In this Act all the same characters will re-appear, but this time they have lost all their complacency and are fearful and alarmed at the prospect of Hussein's arrival. The whole celebration of the Hajj is now forgotten. (It rightly should go on for days). To keep them on edge, Hagga Sabha has been going round the village, 'trilling' and proclaiming her son's imminent vengeance on all of them.

The outcasts, Saleh and Sabha post themselves on the outskirts of the village, both to greet their father and to warn him of the villagers' attempt to ambush him. Now the villagers try to placate Saleh and Sabha, giving back to them what they owe them, or trying to make up for giving false evidence against Hussein at his trial. But at the same time Saleh now is becoming quite prominent. The old woman Zakeya comes up with money she kept from his mother - or at least almost all she owed, for as Sabha won't let her forget, she keeps back one pound.

(241). There is a very nice touch as the crowd is both ashamed and timid before Saleh. He has become an INTERCESSOR for them to his "enraged father". like a Saint before the Day of Judgment.- an analogy the play strongly implies.

The community’s fear makes a sickening lurch when it is discovered that El Aarag has been murdered, in the mosque; a great act of sacrilege. This seems to confirm that a vengeful Huassein is on the loose, secretly bumping them off, one by one. Saleh and Sabha are placed in the position of having to deny their father’s guilt a second time, even though this is working to their advantage. It is a delightful touch that the news of the murder is relayed again by the irrepressible Abou Rabie brothers, greatly enjoying the spotlight as bearers of terrifying news. They can't convey the news without bickering over completely irrelevant details and are delighted at the whole commotion they create in the village (p.252). The scene directions often indicate Ahmed and Mahmoud are speaking simultaneously. Not so, but it shows it hardly matters which of the pair is talking: they are a 'team'.

The disappearance of Khalil Abou Omar is kept ambiguous, and remains so. The play is not interested in showing "who killed El Aarag?" but in watching how this new murder deepens the fear and confusion of the community and ironically raises Saleh’s status.

One of the funniest episodes (252-54) is when Okasha rushes in, terrified that he is suspected of murdering El Aarag. At the end of Act 1 he strode off ominously and determinedly but this, it seems, was just playacting, as Ahmed and Mahmoud insist. As Ahmed remarks, pointing at the weeping Okasha, "Does this look like someone who'd kill a man?" "Or even a chicken" his brother adds.

The fact that this play can move from serious emotion into comedy and back again means that the playwright is seeing his characters complexly, seeing their situation on many levels: realistic, archetypal, comedic, ironically, mock-melodramatically, judgementally but benignantly.

PERFORMANCE
I am not at all sure quite how a performance could convey all these levels to an audience that would be tempted to see the play simplistically as melodrama. Consider the whole opening scene of ACT ONE where a performance would need to create a convincing image of traditional and conventional piety and then gradually 'dismantle' this favorable image as we realize the celebrants of the HAJJ are a very guilty community hiding their secret for over twenty years. It is not that they are hypocrites in that first scene: but that they have allowed themselves to forget and are going to be terrified and shamed into self-knowledge and making restitution.

All the reparations the villagers make are out of fear, but also out of shame. and SHEIKH YOUNES re-asserts himself as the respected village patriarch with his simple and straightforward faith. ACT TWO ends with SALEH following the SHEIKH'S advice and following OKASHA to the police station with the WATCHMEN. With this action he already is re-integrating himslelf into the community, overcoming his impotent alienation from it. At the opening of ACT THREE he expresses pity for the village and what it is suffering.

It is dramatically admirable that SALEH does not dominate the action; his identity and his evolving independence is continually 'played off' against the CROWD's evolution into shame, guilt and final generosity. The crowd is nicely characterized, either as a mass, undergoing its many moods, or as distinct individuals. HAGGA SABHA, the "spirit of vengeance" in the village, begins to diminish in importance, and in ACT THREE she will die, "having nothing more to say" (263) meaning that the time for retribution is over, that it is irrelevant to the deeper purpose of the VILLAGE CROWD'S process of working out its contrition and reconciliation.

ACT THREE
The Second Revelation
263. The suffering village. SABHA, whom the village has wronged, nevertheless pities it. One of its victims is OKASHA, whose girl friend is breaking all decorum by revealing she is in love with him (265). As SABHA observes, "Nothing stays hidden in the village anymore." The village that had managed to live a lie for twenty years, concealing its guilt, now cannot conceal anything.

Gradually, after initially rejecting the village (269) SALEH and SABHA become reconciled with it (272-73; 279) Therefore the story of the FATHER'S vengeful return is gradually working good working as a kind of communal cure, forcing the village to recognize its own guilt and forcing SALEH and SABHA to end their alienation and isolation and feel from the village.

They are going through a moral evolution, too.

(274) And, in a Chekhovian touch, two anonymous village voices talk of things happening in the outside world - the post of 'omdah' to be abolished, a new canal is to be built. This is a prelude, of recovery, that life continues to go on beyond the present crisis, before the news that Hussein died in prion yesrs ago, forgiving it.


280 - 288 ENTRY OF EL SAYED from Cairo. Final Revelation.
Beautifully delayed revelation of HUSSEIN'S death. EL SAYED is flabbergasted at the Crowd's response to his returnn, and has no idea what they or SALEH are talking about when they question about SALEH'S father. The playwright, Mahmoud Diab, is 'orchestrating' the Crowd, getting more musical 'mileage' out of the confrontation between this new arrival and the group.

For some time the CROWD believes EL SAYED is in conspiracy with HUSSEIN. Meanwhile he re-establishes the place of SHEIKH YOUNES. In his absence, the village had 'strayed' from its true and traditional ways and had seemed to revere HAGG SHAALAN more. EL SAYED greets him as the spiritual leader.

286 - 292 And then, in telling of the hardship of prison he gets the crowd to feel the wrong they have done to SALEH'S father, who had to endure twenty years of this suffering.. When EL SAYED tells them of HUSSEIN'S forgiveness, this moves them more than revenge could have done. In a sense the crowd has been made the audience at a tragedy, feeling first terror then pity. Finally, it is moved to act justly, defending SALEH agains SALEM who tries to take back the house he stole, and then deciding to help OKASHA.

At the close of the play HAGGA SABHA dies and with her died the whole spirit of revenge. The play ends with SALEH comforting SABHA and looking to the future, which will be in the VILLAGE, after all. Their father's wrongful imprisonment and death in prison does not get avenged because the play wants to transcend the ideas of vengeance that it raised.

We do not learn who killed EL AARAG because that is unimportant. He was not writing a mystery but a moral story of communal guilt, fear, shame and atonement. We are pretty sure it is KHALIL who is the murderer, and Okasha is generally disqualified for not having it in him to kill a chicken..." This second murder, of El Aarag, is only 'there' in the play to intensify the fear and ultimately the self-knowledge of the village.

The final lesson is that the spirit of the unhappy and wronged Hussein has somehow survived and is working for Good, not Evil, on the village. Sayed explains, (292)

"The day he died there was not a grain of
bitterness in his heart against any of you. But
you wronged him to the end just as you wronged
him in the beginning.

The play's message is 'simple but is very skillfully told, with an excellent feeling for dramatic group dynamics. It's as good as any play in that tradition, and there is a fine interplay of pathos, humor and suspense. The play is about the Village recovering its soul. Written in 1964, at a time when Egypt was at relative peace the play does not reflect the political anxieties of THE WINES OF BABYLON or THE KING IS THE KING.

Though the play is Realistic it also is a parable about a community's redemption. It is written for a popular audience, presenting it with a new way of seeing its familiar world . Sophisticated Cairenes are not villagers, but their roots would be the Arab village and its customs and traditions. DIAB writes thoroughly from within this culture which gives his writing its authenticity

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