Yusuf al Ani's THE KEY is a call to the Arab world, after the defeat of 1967, to leave behind its traditional past and to catch up with the rest of the world.

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.


Yusuf al-Ani, THE KEY. (1967-8)
The play was written at the time of the 'Six Day War" - the same time as Farouk Khorshid's THE WINES OF BABYLON. The '67 war was a major defining point in the Arab world. It exposed the corruption and the shameful lack of preparedness of the Arab leaders who used the Palestinian catastrophe for their own domestic and rhetorical purposes while doing nothing for the Palestinian cause. It was out of this disgust that the Palestinian Liberation Organization came into being, challenging the right of the other Arab leaders to adopt the Palestinian cause.

Yusuf al Ani's THE KEY is a call to the Arab world, after the defeat of 1967, to leave behind its traditional past and to catch up with the rest of the world. It is not an attack upon the enemies of the Arab world but an injunction to engage in consciousness raising and self-transformation. The play needs to be popular, to be entertaining to an audience not used to the theatre, and to deliver its message. I think it succeeds.

1. Yusuf al-Ani is an Iraqi, and Iraq was not directly affected by the Six Day War in the way that Egypt was. This is reflected in his different approach to the events. Khorshid had created an angry, if amusing, parable on the decline of Arab culture under the pressure of Western materialism and corruption. To reach a popular audience he used the THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS genre - and also as a way of veiling his attack upon his own government and culture.

2. Yusuf al-Ani, while angry at the events of the war, is more detached, more an observer of the Palestinian suffering, and his major reference to the war (apart from Nouar's account to the seven grandfathers) is at the opening of the Second Part of the play, the halfway point where the characters begin the return journey, now disillusioned with their past. This return journey will be a 'negation' of the first part - the stages of the journey to the Garden (274) which turns out to be barren until the sudden storm.

The play, in fact, is structured somewhat like the much later Sondheim musical, INTO THE WOODS, which also is divided between a fairy tale first half and a somber second half. The second half of the play rejects the premises of the first.

There is a somewhat similar structure in the Egyptian Shawky Abdel Hassim's play, HASSAN AND NAIMA, where the dramatist takes up a folk ballad based on an actual murder, in which the young singer, HASSAN, is killed by a wealthy peasant family who feel he is unworthy of their daughter, whom he is courting. The play recalls a murder that actually took place but now has passed into folk ballad. The 'fatalist' nature of the ballad form encourages the belief that the events tragically "had to happen". A chorus of peasant women throughout, represents their Village's fatalist attitude. In the popular ballad form, the story was told as one of tragic fate, like similar ballads in English. That is, the very genre of ballad 'closes' the story within fate - a form of thinking typical of folk consciousness everywhere, as in J.M. Synge's THE RIDERS TO THE SEA.

By turning the ballad into drama the author allows it to open up, allows the protagonist, NAIMA, to reject the ballad ethos, deny fatalism and choose freedom. This is what the Greek dramatists did with their epic heritage, making the stories a site for new interrogation. So HASSAN AND NAIMA "acts out' the familiar story but then rejects its fatalist theme. As the ballad is well-known to the audience, the play does not have to reenact the events or retell them very clearly. The play need only dramatize the moment when NAIMA breaks free from the lethally repetitive balladic ethos of fatalism. The guilty parents and NAIMA are imprisoned in the past crime. NAIMA refuses to allow the MOTHER and FATHER to escape from their crime which she witnessed without trying to stop. So she continually forces the crime to be recreated.

Even HASSAN, the young victim, allowed his murder to happen because of his own fatalism: the older culture's belief that one cannot change one's fate. Three young girls represent a new way of thinking and urge NAIMA to break free. I don't know the ballad, but assume it tells of the tragic death and NAIMA'S endless grief.

The play shows the PARENTS on the day they decide to escape their daughter's merciless gaze and go willingly to their deaths. On that same day NAIMA decides to leave the village and its fatalistic outlook and go her own way. The play, therefore, sets itself against the ethos of the ballad and advocates a new way of living: in freedom and responsibility. The dramatist, at the end of the play, wants the audience to reject this fatalistic folk consciousness And it makes the heroine, NAIMA, reject the fatalism of both her parents and of HASSAN, who went to his death fatalistically.

NIAMA finally refuses to accept that the murder was fated, accepts her guilt for not having saved her lover, and leaves the village community. The play, therefore, is addressed to the peasant consciousness of Egypt, by taking up one of its well-known tragic ballads, and denying its tragic fatalism: insisting we are free to make our destinies.

Yusuf al-Anii’s THE KEY is also a play about breaking with the traditional consciousness of the folksong it is dramatizing. Just as much as HASSAN AND NAIMA, it sets out to be a popular entertainment. Like the 'Parables' of Brecht, ('The Good Person of Setzuan' and 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle') it tells a simple folk tale through sophisticated theatrical effects. This is to make sure the 'message' gets to the right people - the relatively unsophisticated workers and peasants, who will be those who might change the culture.

To be popular, the play must draw upon familiar material, rooted in the people's traditions and memories, even in their childhood. So it takes up the Childrens' folk legend. "Once upon a time, long long ago" the NARRATOR begins in the conventional folktale way, but then proceeds, "these events happened, like a delusion, or like a dream once the darkness has vanished, or like the truth once the morning sun has risen." We are warned in advance, therefore, that the fantasy story will be shown as illusory. It is, he tells us, "based on an old folk legend everyone's familiar with, an ancient fable everyone knows by heart." (256)

The dramatic method will be to lead us from the familiar ancient convention to the unfamiliar modern truth. The play itself, therefore, is not just dramatizing A Quest Tale - it is a quest in its very structure - exploring beyond the folk tradition it starts out with. The child's poem the play is dramatizing is one of those cumulative sequences where one condition requires a prior one in a whole series, rather like THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT or the song 'There's a Hole in my Bucket'. As it seems to be one of those children's poems traditionally sung on playground swings, it is first sung by a group of children on swings.

The reason for the Quest is the husband, Hairan's refusal to beget children, because the world of 1967 is not a world fit for children. So the opening vision of happy children, with colored balloons, singing, suggests an ideal of child-consciousness and the future generation that the husband, HARAIN, refuses to bring into being. The problem is, how to find a world fit for this child-consciousness. While the children are singing, in the middle of the stage, is a small empty crib. For Hairan, this is NOT a world to inflict upon children (257).

HAIRAN and HAIRA are a traditional couple, bewildered and frightened by the modern world. They search into traditional sources - the folk song -for reassurance and security. Hairan's younger brother, NOUAR, on the other hand, is more familiar with the modern world and is more optimistic about its future. So he puts no faith in turning back to folk legend, to the familiar ways of the culture. In a new world of THE UNITED NATIONS (258) "the rights of the nations will win out in the end." NOUAR represents that section of the Arab people that ardently believed the UNITED NATIONS would bring them justice. In 1967, that seemed a possibility, especially as the UNITED NATIONS quickly passed a resolution insisting that the Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homes and must be allowed to do so. Since then, of course, the UNITED NATIONS, though it has passed one resolution after another on the refugees, has shown itself impotent to do anything about it in the face of American opposition.

The message of the play is disarmingly simple, but the presentational method could be theatrically effective. For the theater, the stage, becomes a sort of enchanted ground of sights and sounds, from the opening image of the singing children. When the wife, Haira, rocks the crib she sings the song as a lullaby to the FUTURE infant, and the theater itself echoes her words, and then continues the song, up to the words about the place of the Grandfathers in Erbil (Acca in the original). The Song will lead them on a false Quest but it will be a theatrically magical one.

The play very early drops all attempt at plausibility, and announces its freedom to defy realistic logic:
259 HAIRAN; But - how do we get there?
HAIRA : The story will take us there.

We will be following the sequence of the song, not a logical sequence. And the audience, who knows the song, can anticipate seeing the song's sequence magically realized. HAIRA and HAIRAN go off accompanied by invisible singing.

SECOND SCENE
To establish that they have reached Erbil, the actor playing NOUAR merely carries a sign "with Erbil written on it."

NOUAR So- we've reached Erbil
HAIRAN How do you know?
NOUAR It says so on the sign.
HAIRAN So it does.

It is a simple and playful device for immediately establishing place. The author's use of this device is actually quite sophisticated. You have to be very confident about the theater to get away with such simple effects.

260: ENTRY OF THE SEVEN GRANDFATHERS
The grandfathers enter on a hill, with rhythmic tapping of their canes, all dressed in white. First humming, then speaking, all in unison, to establish their UNREAL, theatrical nature. Not only are they unreal, they are totally out of touch with a modern world in which women are becoming equal with men (261a) but also in which there are new terrors and tyrannies 261b. NOUAR recites the catalogue of horrors but maintains optimism. The playwright devises a way of talking about events on the minds of the theatre audience, while maintaining the folktale quality.

The Grandfathers belong to the ancient world of the folktale, not of the modern world that frightens HAIRAN and which NOUAR wishes to adapt to and to change. Dressed in white, all alike, they have an unreal quality about them. They are seven generations of Grandfathers, and therefore represent the history of HAIRAN'S family. When they give the robe and cake to the couple, they pass it, one to another, as if handing them down generation after generation (263). And as they exit, not to appear again (263) the effect is theatrically stylized, with the same rhythmic beating of their canes as they made when they entered. The grandfathers are theatrical creations, summoned up by the theater's ritual, and then dismissed.

264b. In the FOURTH SCENE the Blacksmith and his shop are similarly brought into being through theatrical ritual. The actor playing the BLACKSMITH mimes the NARRATOR'S and his own description of his work. He knows he is only a character in the child's folk song, handing on the questing couple to the next stage in the Song (265b. which will be the BRIDE'S castle.
So the next scene (265) brings on the walls of the Castle and the bridal procession.

SCENE FIVE
By now the play has put its 'ordinary' ‘realistic trio, HAIRAN, HAIRA and NOUAR into a kind of Wizard of Oz setting and sequence. Their responses to the strange scenes they find themselves entering, and the strange characters and objects they encounter is similar to the audience's itself: seeing the folk song come to life, stage by stage, and reacting with very ordinary surprise and bewilderment. THE BRIDESMAID sequence is accompanied by music, conjuring up a world fabulously different from the ordinary world the trio, like the audience, inhabits. THE purpose of such scenes is theatrical wonderment and mild intrigue (as the BRIDESMAID flirts with NOUAR) and the unreality of these scenes and their ultimate irrelevance for the present day world, will be more clearly exposed in Part Two.

SCENE SIX, SEVEN EIGHT Last three stages of the Quest.
The Well, the Herdsman and his Bulls, and the Garden and its Rain are all brought into being with sounds and simple sets. These three scenes are the last stages of the Quest half of the play. The SECOND PART - THE RETURN in effect destroys the world magically created in the First Part, as the modern world intrudes to ravage the fairy tale world.

The first act of destruction is the 1967 war and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, and the scene directions suggest other destructive world events, such as Vietnam - and now the HERDSMAN becomes a modern figure, trying to hold onto the rest of his land, and not a folktale figure. The rest of the return journey is a demystification of the folktale details. The Castle and the Princess seem to have become corrupt government or high society with modern technology and in no need of folktale lamps. The Blacksmith has been made bankrupt by crooked financiers and though he makes the all-important key, the trunk with the gifts of robe and cake from the legendary Grandfathers, has disappeared. The play ends with the simple moral to the audience that it is only by changing ourselves and by our own hard work that we will build a world fit for children (like the Prologue in Brecht's CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE).

NOUAR points the moral: to leave behind the traditional world, from which the folktale came, and to start "running" to catch up with the future generation.

The play has been a 'consciousness-raising' popular entertainment, going back to a pre-theatric folk consciousnes of the countryside, taking one of its most familiar Childrens' songs, and then using the resources of the theater 'magically' to bring the song into theatrical life. It then both creates and destroys this magical world by bringing it into brutal confrontation with the actual modern world. At the end of the play everyone who has appeared in it joins the three protagonists in running into the future: only the bridesmaid is left standing still, unable to enter the future. The play's 'message' is that the future requires leaving behind the world of folk-consciousness, and that the corrupt world represented by the bridesmaid has no place in this future.

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