The present paper will explore some of the re-enactments of the so called ‘Arab Spring’ in selected performances from Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, with their seamless connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among the concepts examined are Habermas's ‘public sphere’, Deleuze's ‘revolutionary-becoming’ and Rebecca Schneider's ‘re-enactment’. The remediation of revolution in performance reveals the material conditions and geographic locations of social unrest. Significantly enough, artistic re-enactments of the revolution have already been inflicted by ‘techno-imagination’, whereby most of us have become either spectators or citizen journalists of public dissidence, and yet we have been connected to the unprecedented upheaval by watching mediated images or implementing and re-editing them for distanced audiences.

This article treats the Egyptian 25 January revolution as a struggle over the right to produce signs within an Egyptian cultural landscape long plagued by the state's attempted monopoly over meaning. Like an actor onstage who acquires a new sense of agency through performance, the individual citizen in revolt performs an existential act aiming to reclaim the uninhibited, free body from the regime and its cognitive hold. The revolution thus lends itself to analysis via the tools of theatre and performance studies. This theatrical mode of knowledge can be achieved in at least two strategic ways. First, by regarding the revolution as a battle between two distinct powers, each deploying its own discursive and cognitive weaponry – the revolution, qua conflict of wills, can be analysed as an event with discernible dramatic dimensions. Second, by viewing the revolution which took place in a specific time and place as a theatrical event capable of transforming mundane bodies into creative ones, while also reconfiguring place into a theatrical space and thereby subverting oppressive state power.

In November 2011, on the brink of a new wave of conflict over Egypt's future, an obviously energized audience crowded into Cairo's Rawabet Theatre for The Tahrir Monologues, a documentary play celebrating the Eighteen Days leading to Hosni Mubarak's ouster. Apparently a premature celebration, the show turned out instead to be a self-conscious nostalgia exercise meant to register the decay of revolutionary ideals. This essay analyses The Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unravelling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to an American University in Cairo production of Sa'adallāh Wannūs's 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012–13. Why this play now? The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion and, ultimately, I argue, its prophetic pessimism.

Tuqus al-Isharat wa-l-Tahawwulat, one of the last major plays by the Syrian Sa'dallah Wannus, published in 1994, is one of the most innovative plays from the Arab world in the twentieth century. Based on a historical incident, it dramatizes the story of the fall of the Naqib of Damascus when he is arrested with his mistress Warda. The Naqib's enemy, the Mufti, saves him from disgrace by substituting the Naqib's wife, Mu'mina, for Warda, although Mu'mina leaves the Naqib and becomes a notorious prostitute. The play also overtly treats male homosexuality. Previous analyses of Wannus's plays have focused on the influence of Brecht and the Thousand and One Nights, and criticism of this play's feminist theme. This article argues that much of the play's novelty and aesthetic power derive from aspects of Shakespeare, principally Measure for Measure, and from motifs, lexicon and ritual theatricality derived from Sufism as aesthetic form and religious practice.

Ahmed and Mohammad Malas, two Syrian actors who have made themselves the unofficial clowns of the revolution, have emerged from a vibrant culture of cyber-activism. They have made use of Facebook and YouTube to circulate work that simultaneously reflects on the possibilities for, and failures of, social media and satellite television to forge a new idea of Syrian identity – one that prominently features active participation in the public sphere. I argue that unlike earlier Syrian plays that employed similar tropes (the interrogation scene as emblematic of the state–citizen relation, the failed actor as symbol of the disheartened citizen), the Malas twins use these tropes to demonstrate the necessity of resistance. Their plays assert that Syrians will persist in resistance because new technologies have provided new options and have transformed Syrian identity.

This article explores two plays, Khamsūn (Fifty/Bodies Hostages) and Yaḥia Yaïsh (Amnesia), by Jalila Baccar and Fadhel Jaïbi, and a street performance (‘Ben Ali Fled!’) by a Tunisian citizen who was filmed celebrating the defeat of Ben Ali. The article examines Khamsūn's expression of fear of Islamic fundamentalism. Yaḥia Yaïsh not only shows the figure of a government leader who abuses his power, but also foretells the imminent fall of this leader, followed by an attempt to run away from being brought to justice, remarkably predicting the real-life events that soon materialized during the Tunisian Revolution, with slight differences between the two falls. Finally, the article considers both plays as theatrical experiences that are not enclosed within a confined space, but were re-enacting events happening in the streets of Tunisia.