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.


Mikhail Romane

1.Mikhail Romane had great difficulty getting published or produced. . This is the problem when the Arab dramatist does not use an accepted format (e.g. Arabian Nights, village life, popular entertainment) but develops his own unique and critical vision. Or, at least, if he uses a format very unfamiliar to his culture.

Tewfiq al-Hakim felt that the most avant-garde European forms of the 1920's and 1930's, which he had read and seen at the time, could not be transplanted to Egypt: but towards the end of his career he did publish an accomplished 'absurdist' drama, The Tree Climber, which was successful in production and is considered by many his best play.

What is more important is that Arab dramatists generate their own avant-garde forms. In many countries where drama has flourished, it first began as a foreign import and then developed its own form. Mikhail Romaine's THE NEW COMER is an adaptation of Kafkaesque nightmare and Ionesco's Absurdist method to the Arab theatre. The two plays in the 'other' volume, The Night Traveller and Strangers Don't Drink Coffee, also one-acts, are similarly Absurdist. Mohamed Maghout's THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW shows a native dramatic form emerging. I know of no Western drama like it - though one scene, the arrival of the Bird Woman, it seems to anticipate by fifty years the most famous scene in Angels in America.

With the exception of Diab's THE STORM Arab dramatists have not seemed interested in developing REALISM, at least INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL realism. This has made them able to respond to an avant-garde absurdist drama of ideas as an alternative to such 'parable' forms as THE WINES OF BABYLON. Mikhail Romane's THE NEWCOMER is, I believe, impressive as absurdist drama while remaining within an Egyptian context.

Another aspect of Arab drama so far has been its 'communal' nature, the drama of the group or the community, the native Arab tradition (A Thousand and One Nights or folktale) or a current political situation shared by the whole society. But with the 'Absurdist' plays, The Tree Climber, The Newcomer and the other two plays I mentioned, we have the drama of the isolated Individual (as in Ionesco), where the Individual feels alienated from a sinisterly distant and inhuman power structure, a faceless bureaucracy with its inexplicable but lethal regulations. This is the drama of the anonymous dweller in the big city, as with Pinter's London, Ionesco's Paris or Albee's New York (The Zoo Story).

2. Though Arab civilization has been a city civilization longer than has Europe since Rome the middle east only recently has been a modern city civilization in the technological, bureaucratic and political sense, with nation states (carved out by European colonialists) and with all the problems and opportunities of the western modern world, including the horrors of modern warfare.

3. Tthe major problem of the modern metropolis, evident already in European nineteenth century literature, is the theme of anonymity, of aimlessness and alienation - the themes of THE NEWCOMER. In the 20th. century, for example, CAIRO has increased its population from half a million to ten million: that is, it has developed from a fairly intimate urban space about the size of present day Pittsburgh to an entity more like NEW YORK. In the 19th century it was one of the world's most exotic and hedonistic playgrounds for wealthy Europeans as well as Arabs: for its own people, up to about 1940, it was still made up of numerous intimate communities: described in a fine novel by the Nobel prize-wining novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, MIDAQ ALLEY.

These little communities were made up of the 'extended family' structure of the rural villages, such as we found in THE SONG OF DEATH and THE STORM, Here, though independence was not very easy to attain, one could never feel alienated, isolated, abandoned. The Newcomer, in Romane's play, recalls life in one of these villages, where everyone was a comrade and looked after each other. This still exists to a great extent in the Arab world.
In MIDAQ ALLEY the heroine feels trapped, hemmed in by the close control of her family, but she is destroyed, socially, when she moves out of it into the seeming freedom of the Europeanized city outside the alley.

4. CAIRO is an urban sprawl in which the individual can be totally swallowed up as much as in London or New York. There is a way in which T.V., by narrowing its focus on events, falsifies them. For instance, we hear of demonstrations in Tehran or Cairo or Damascus, and we imagine a whole city rising up in wrath. But if you lived in the huge city such a demonstration is a very remote event you might not even know about, happening miles from where you are working and living.

My first experience of this, in fact, was as a child growing up in London during the German blitz, the BATTLE OF BRITAIN. Horrified Americans saw on the newsreels the whole city going up in flames, day and night, thousands killed, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, and thousands of people living in Underground shelters. But a huge city can 'absorb' a tremendous amount and still keep up its daily routines.

That is the plus side. So are the adventurous freedoms offered by the metropolis, free from the restraints of watchful relatives and neighbors. In the huge city one's neighbors are strangers who like to keep to themselves. As with the cult of the DANDY in 19th. century Europe, one can live a pose, like the dandyfied dress of the NEWCOMER, who can develop finicky tastes in food, sustain oneself in a role, or pose. p. 514. "he is a man of between thirty and forty, good-looking, elegant....... That is, he has constructed an Individual Identity that is his own, that gives him a sense of himself, of assurance and poise.

The role of the Customer to the Hotel is a perfect example of the way one can sustain a pose in an anonymous setting, in front of the WAITER, the MANAGER and so on, expecting to be able to demonstrate a respected impersonal presence. It is a game in which both sides, the HOTEL STAFF and the CUSTOMER, know the rules. It is a game in which not being known, being ANONYMOUS, is very desirable. One can exchange polite conversation without having to be confidential, be observed without one's space being invaded, observe others and so on. In this game, both CUSTOMER and STAFF are putting on an act, performing roles separate from their inner identities. It is a very performable stage situation.

The negative aspect of this anonymity is the theme of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land or the novels of Franz Kafka: of a sprawling place without a center, of a huge entity functioning without meaning or justification, of a vast organization which somehow is sinisterly powerful, which is even hostile and destructive of the individual. Men and women become ominous strangers, whose rules of speech are difficult to decode. This can throw the individual off-balance.

It puts the individual on the defensive, eroding his or her sense of self-worth, of identity. This is the Kafkaesque theme. The anonymous CITY seems a sinister bureaucracy, or organization that does not identify itself, yet has some kind of knowledge about you that it keeps hinting at without quite revealing. It keeps records which you are not allowed to see.

And it turns one's anonymity into vulnerability so that the NEWCOMER, who begins by repelling the intimacy someone claims with him, once he has been thoroughly unsettled from his pose of impersonal assurance, desperately tries to forge an intimacy from the village past with the MANAGER and the EXPERT. With the MANAGER it is a patriotic alliance, of fighting against the British occupation. With the EXPERT it is both the heroic past of the resistance and family intimacy. Both of these attempts evaporate into the sinister bureaucratic system that has turned all these interlocutors into zombies.

SCENE
Hotel. 'With or without sets'. (Which would be best?) Sinister mountain visible through window, referred to, which will glow with strange activity. (Does one need see it?)

ACTION ONE: 514
HOTEL REPRESENTATIVE
Strategy: to throw the NEWCOMER off balance. A stranger
invades the Newcomer's space, with unwelcome intimacy, a claim of an appointment "I'm sorry not to have met you as agreed" and seeming knowledge of him, expecting hom to recognize and know details, especially about a ‘MIKHAIL ROMANE’ and a ‘MIKHAIL BEY’. This begins to undermine the NEWCOMER'S stance of aloofness, isolation.

517. The next strategy is to suggest "everyone" knows MIKHAIL ROMANE, and that there is something odd in the NEWCOMER'S ignorance of him. Further aggressions: taking down the home phone number, smelling the NEWCOMER'S breath. Intrusive intimacy. And the REPRESENTATIVE ominously implies the NEWCOMER should know what he does not (Mikhail Romane.)

ACTION TWO
WAITER. SECOND AGGRESSION
Immediately undermines the 'power relationship' usual to CUSTOMER-WAITER roles. First words, "Come with me."
First moves NEWCOMER from the table of his choice, with a barrage of absurd reasons: the multitude of people who will be sitting at the one the NEWCOMER has chosen, by appealing to his finicky tastes (hating to queue up for food) to all the elements of his urban 'pose'.

The WAITER'S first victory is to get this finicky customer to accept the drab and empty alternative table.
520. Though, at his new and shabby table, the NEWCOMER tries to adopt a pose of an epicure of refined culinary taste, he is sufficiently disoriented, disturbed, to suddenly become defensive and voluble, needing to confide - breaking a rule of the CUSTOMER-WAITER relationship. In a sinister analogy, he likens his hunger to that of a condemned man. (520)

He starts on an extraordinarily elaborate account of the meal he would like to order, but breaks off to express his annoyance at the REPRESENTATIVE'S intrusion. This is a tactically false move - he is bringing the WAITER into a personal confidence, crossing the line between the two roles, and it gives the WAITER a chance to assert power.

THIRD AGGRESSION
"If I can't take your order Ill go, right away."
The order for food becomes increasingly absurd in both its extreme detail and its preposterous fastidiousness, a fantasy meal that becomes a kind of prose poem - the actor could play as if he's retreating to a private dream world of epicurean self-confidence. The whole preposterous order collapses (p. 524) when the WAITER asks

THIRD AGGRESSION
524. "Er, excuse me ...are you a guest at the hotel.?"

This leads to a highly aggressive interrogation by the WAITER, who has "taken over' from the REPRESENTATIVE, and carries the aggression further. The NEWCOMER now is totally on the defensive as he finds himself forced to explain when and how he arrived at the hotel. the NEWCOMER'S story is absurdly detailed (525-26) which even includes a biography of the cabhorse that might or might not have driven him from the railway station to the hotel.

This represents the NEWCOMER'S total loss of authority, to embark upon a needless, elaborate justification of his arrival, to a WAITER. It is an example of what the German avant-garde writer, Peter Handke, calls MIND TORTURE, concluding in the NEWCOMER running away in panic to find himself standing in a blinding light (527) and screaming, with the WAITER ordering:
"Get back where you were.."

527 - FULL AGGRESSION NOW UNDER WAY.
Now the HOTEL is revealing itself as the sinister ORGANIZATION which mysteriously includes or excludes its guests. Like a giant bureaucracy that never explains its motives or its basis of power. THE NEWCOMER now is thoroughly undermined.

528- 530 The hungry NEWCOMER then, gives up his bid for food. He now finds himself having to justify his own identity, completely in the power of the WAITER, pathetically obeying his orders.
Behind this whole action is the analogy of a police interrogation, but 'enlarged' to suggest its powers extending to every aspect of life.
Similar to Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL and THE CASTLE


530-533. The NEWCOMER is now delivered over to the MANAGER. Now the NEWCOMER tries to recreate an intimate, rural, even heroic Egyptian background that long predated the urban world represented by the HOTEL.

"There's not a man from our village that heard another calling for help and turned a deaf ear; not one that shut his door in the face of a guest, nor even shut his door at all."

He also recreates a heroic intimacy with the MANAGER, how they fought together against the British and were betrayed by traitors. The details are taken from the Egyptian resistance to British colonialism. But the NEWCOMER still doubts that the MANAGER really knows him, so that his whole intimate and heroic past is possibly a fabrication

The MANAGER and the NEWCOMER 'absurdly recreate this heroic past and their patriotic fervor - an IDENTITY that can restore all the pride to the humiliated NEWCOMER - like a last desperate attempt at recovery from the nightmare of bureaucratic fearfulness. This scene builds up into an elaborate Egyptian 'hymn' of patriotism between the two, cruelly deflated just like the prose poem on food was collapsed by the WAITER.

NEWCOMER (shouts) Egypt...for ever.
MANAGER (his ardor cooling) For ever.(Looks at his watch)

So The great PATRIOTIC friendship between NEWCOMER and MANAGER collapses with the MANAGER asking, what has become a form of torture: "You're with us in the hotel?"

MANAGER'S ASSERTION OF POWER - INVASION OF INTIMACY

As the NEWCOMER collapses in despair, the MANAGER "lifts up the NEWCOMER'S chin slowly. The NEWCOMER lets his head fall backwards in complete surrender; his eyes are shut; he does not resist and his head is as far back as it will go) Do you shave with a cut-throat razor or a safety blade?
What in other circumstances would be a harmless question now takes on a sinister aspect.
"Your chin ...it will hurt a bit."

and then modulates into an unnervingly absurd and precise distinction about having a cigarette lit by a match or a lighter. It is the seriousness and deadpan finickiness that suggests a cruel game being played on the NEWCOMER, who now has given up his own claim to finickiness
It is almost a parody of his earlier epicurean order of food.
"I used to be, until I came here. But not now....."

FULL ASSERTION OF POWER BY MANAGER
"Eating's obligatory here".
"You'd be taken to the doctor.................magazines or..."
By first making it impossible to eat, setting up all kinds of protocol barriers, then making it obligatory to eat, the HOTEL has the NEWCOMER in a trap.
Romaine's dramatic method is in interesting contrast toHarold Pinter's theater of menace, where the menace is all in vagueness and implication.
Here it is in precision and particularity, as in KAFKA: precise, if absurd forms, rules, protocols, procedures - all the 'logical' apparatus of a sinister bureaucracy. as in THE TRIAL or THE CASTLE, where the functionaries that one would prefer to feel disdain for, such as the WAITER and MANAGER take on alarming power while remaining petty functionaries.

Thus they are impervious to the NEWCOMER'S strengths, his initial fastidiousness and self-esteem: these are gradually removed from him by means of a pedantic set of rules, formalities, that don't make sense and so are hard to combat. It is the way any bureaucracy asserts its power through its mediocre functionaries:

"nine copies if a statement which is countersigned by two witnesses who are of legal age, has a fiscal stamp affixed to it and then is cancelled.....etc"

NEWCOMER'S desperate defence; To assert his language against the Organization's faceless language.
538-39 The NEWCOMER now tries to use his POETIC imagination against the bureaucratic language of rules and regulations used by the MANAGER. He insists he has an identity that precedes all history, all civilization.

540 Then the language of Science 'beyond' the MANAGER'S bureaucratic comprehension

The MANAGER thinks only in terms of 'instructions' received, an infinite regression of authority, as in Kafka,
The effort of the MANAGER and the others is to remove the NEWCOMER'S individuality, to reject his indivIdual language, whether that of his culinary tastes, his poetic sensibility, his scientific knowledge, and to oppose to these the language of rules and regulation. The trivialdetails of time of arrival, method of arrival, registration at the hotel , all are weaponms f the language of bureaucracy. The sheer weight of trivial regulation and requirement becomes oppressive. The bureaucrat controls the larger world by reducing it to mediocre routine he or she can handle. Anyone imaginative is like a fly caught in the spider's web: helpless to either understand or accept the reduction of life to triviality: but it is here that organizational power, whether communist or capitalist, lies.

542 MANAGER "Look beyond this curtain"
NEWCOMER "All those people sitting down and waiting. All
of them looking at me. With exasperation and anger in their eyes.
Hewre, the theater audience is made complicit with the torturers and oppressors.

THE VITAL TRAIN TICKET: By making siomething indispensable what will prove impossible to find,the Manager has got his system of rules to ensnare the NEWCOMER
By this process, the MANAGER prepares the NEWCOMER for the EXPERT (545)
First the recognition of 'old friends' then the erasure of this past as Hassane proves himself to be just another cog in the machine.
His language too, has become one of group slogans (549) and of regulation that have no interest in individuality.
"As if I were a nonentity"
"You are a nonentity" (551)

Whereas the Damascus of DELILAH in The Wines of Babylon had been 'Western' and corrupt, at least it had been humanly corrupt, with HBAZLAM, and YASMIN and DELILAH. But the world of the bureaucratic 'machine' and the 'glowing mountain', which demand the sacrifice of individuality, seem faceless, inhuman, reducing individuals to zombies and life to a lethal maze of trivial regulations. The two modern systems the Arab world found itself caught between was the capitalist and the communist, and both controlled the present through soulless mechanism and regulation.

To live effectively in the present, under either system, entails the renunciation of authentic identity and of the 'heroic' past. So-called fundamentalism, in the Arab world, is an attempt to rescue Muslim identity from this faceless modernity. Like all fundamentalisms, (e.g. Christian in the U.S.) it retreats into a simplification of the past, to an imagined 'purity' before corruption took place.

In both plays the heroic past is erased for a soulless present. The NEWCOMER'S memories of past heroism against the British have become helpless anachronisms in the new world of push-button efficiency and anonymous identity. In this play no-one has a name for certain. And the name NEWCOMER carries the sinister hint that he is only new to the organization and will be absorbed into it after a moment of resistance.

EMERGENCE OF THE GLOWING MOUNTAIN, THE NEWCOMER'S LAST STAND

Mikhail Romaine seems to concede the demise of the past, at least in this play. (553-4) THE NEWCXOMER desperately and defiantly evokes the natural world of simple but basic human experience:
"A simple line in a poem, a song on the lips of a young girl, a
wild flower in the desert: every one of those is far greater
than what you are doing. You with all your machines and
your buttons and your instruments and equipment........."

The play ends on an almost hysterical note of rejection of the group, a refusal to enter into any contract or solidarity with this dehumanized order. 551. As the NEWCOMER'S resistance collapses "the mountain in the background begins to glow."

All the functionaries of the Hotel, REPRESENTATIVE, WAITER, MANAGER, OTHER PEOPLE, now gather round the NEWCOMER as if waiting for his death and absorption into the machine and mountain.

Is the nightmare that he will become one of them?
Is the NEWCOMER'S last speech a desperate attempt not to become absorbed with them, not to 'die' as they have done? Are they former individuals who have been sacrificed for the 'machine' or mountain?

IS THAT WHY HE IS CALLED THE NEWCOMER? He is only the latest arrival of all those who have been turned into inhuman automata - who now appear on stage staring at him in a kind of gathering of zombies. Like Kafka's 'Parables without a lesson', THE NEWCOMER does not so much point to a meaning - it is not an Allegory - but to a nightmare vision. Similar to Peter Handke’s KASPAR.

Theatrically, I think it is strong. The finicky, even fussy civilized aspect of the NEWCOMER represents everything the ORGANIZATION would want to break down, to defeat: and it forces the NEWCOMER into dramatically effective extravagant speeches. His urban and urbane fussiness, finickiness, is the NEWCOMER'S form of defense of identity: his tastes, his predelictions - his alone. And it is this that the ORGANIZATION must take from him. When he declares "I don't want to die" the "I" has definite meaning, identity.

His last speech, we notice, has evolved from pleasure in the fussy and epicurean, to the simple and natural, the value of which he has now remembered. And with his recognition of simpler values, his defiance is increased.
(Resembling Beringer’s last stand in Ionesco’s Rhinosceros.}