Not long after its appearance on the English stage in 1956, John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger was translated into Arabic and produced on the Egyptian radio. In Cairo during recent drama seasons the repertoire of the various local theatrical companies included Arabic translations of plays by authors ranging from Shakespeare, Chekhov, Sartre and Arthur Miller, to Dürrenmatt, Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Arabic plays modelled on the theatre of the absurd have been attempted not only by the young avant-garde, but also by a veteran of the Arabic theatre like the Egyptian Taufīq al-Ḥakīm. In short, a cursory look at the modern Arabic theatre, as it is reflected in Cairo, is sufficient to show how open to foreign, and specifically western, influences modern Arabic culture is at present. This is clearly seen in other branches of literature as well. For instance, there is already at least one translation of Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago. Most of the work of Sartre and Camus is available in Arabic. The Lebanese poetry quarterly Shi‘r (1957–69) published together with its experimental original poetry, translations of works by established French and English poets, often side by side with original texts, even works (for instance, by John Wain) which had not yet appeared in their authors’ native countries. One of the regular features of some Arabic literary reviews, like the Lebanese monthly al-Ādāb (1953–), was for a long time a letter from each of the main capitals of the western world, giving a summary of the main literary and cultural events there.