This chapter presents a historical reading of theatre in the Arab world and situates Arab dramatists and playwrights in local and global contexts. It points to the significance of Lebanese dramatist Marun Al-Naqqash in Beirut and Syrian playwright Ahmad al-Qabbani in Damascus and Cairo at the time of the Arab nahda, the so-called Arab Awakening, which had its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The chapter then discusses Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays within the context of both Arabic and world drama. It aims to not only highlight Wannous as one of the most important contributors to modern Arabic theatre but to also acknowledge his indispensable influence on the repertoire of world theatre as a whole.

During most of the history of the modern theater in the Arabic Middle East, theater had been dominated by Egypt, the cultural leader of the region and the site of its most significant cultural institutions, including publishing houses, universities and theaters. Egyptian dramatists and performers have achieved the most renown, and Egyptian historians and theorists have been the most influential. At the very center of the Egyptian theater for the past generation has been a remarkable woman, Nehad Selaiha, whose death at the beginning of 2017 left an enormous void in the Egyptian and Arab theater world. She was not only by far the most widely read, widely informed and influential critic in this world, but was a figure of considerable international stature and the mentor and model for an entire generation of young Egyptian performers, playwrights and scholars, many of them women.

Born in 1945, Selaiha was attracted to theater at an early age. Like many students around the world, her first exposure to this art was the work of Shakespeare. In secondary school, she played both Rosaline and Shylock and dreamed of becoming an actress. She pursued this dream at Cairo University, where she studied English literature in general and the drama in particular. She also continued to perform Shakespeare there, appearing as Hermia and Desdemona. She also met and became engaged to Mohamed Enani, and together they attended theater performances in Cairo, reinforcing the interest both had in this art.

When Enani, as a prominent young critic and literary theorist, received a three-year grant to study in England, he and his young wife went together and further developed their knowledge and experience of theater. Nehad there pursued her academic interests, gaining an MA in English literature from the University of Sussex in 1969. She, her husband and her young daughter remained in England studying and extending their acquaintance with the theater there. They made several returns to Egypt but planned to return permanently in 1975. They found the post-Nassar social and cultural landscape much changed and many of their friends leaving for the Gulf States and elsewhere in search of more economic and political freedom.

Jalila Baccar is today generally recognized as one of the leading women playwrights and performers in Tunisia and the Arab world, and the work of her company Familia, co-directed by Baccar and her husband Fadhel Jaïbi, has attained a major international reputation.

Baccar was born in the old city of Tunis in 1952, just four years before that country gained its independence from France. She became increasingly involved in theatre during her school years. Theatre at that time was undergoing major growth in Tunisia, thanks to the support of the new President, Bourguiba, and the efforts of Ali Ben Ayad. Ayad was a Tunisian who had studied in Paris under Jean Vilar and was encouraged by Bourguiba to develop national interest in this art, which included encouraging drama in schools and establishing regional theatre centres throughout the country, following the French model of decentralization.

When Baccar graduated, she left Tunis for the first time in her life to join one of these new regional theatres, at Gafsa, the capital of the southwest of Tunisia, an historical oasis and mining centre. There she met Fadhel Jaïbi, then co-director of the company, whom she later married. They tried for several years to create a more modern and engaged theatre there, but were resisted by both the authorities and the more conservative members of their own company. Finally in 1976 they moved to Tunis, and established Almasrah al-jadid: The New Theatre.

This was the first independent professional company in Tunisia and was deeply influenced by the French and German Independent Theatre movement of the twentieth century. Most of the plays presented were either by politically engaged European dramatists such as Brecht or new Tunisian works that reworked contemporary Tunisian history, filling gaps that the prevailing ideology or official discourse had created.

In 1993 Baccar and Jaïbi formed a new group, Familia, named after its first production, a Tunisian folk comedy about three sisters. Subsequent productions moved in a darker and more symbolic direction, as exemplified by In Search of Aida(1998) which is a symbolist quest play with a distinctly political nature, insofar as it explores the question of Arab identity.

When theatre history was established as a field of study in the late nineteenth century, its focus, like that of political or social history, was upon the changes and developments in the object of study over time. A spatial understanding of this art was recognised as crucial by theatre historians from the beginning. Indeed one might argue that the essential feature that distinguished theatre history from the field of literary history out of which it generally developed was an interest in theatre as a spatial rather than as a textual phenomenon. Soon, however, this spatial interest expanded from a specific interest in the dynamics of the enacted literary text to a concern with theatre as a cultural event, embedded within a particular cultural space. The overall organisation of theatre history, from its creation as a discipline, has been geographical in nature, primarily concerned with tracing the development of theatre within a small and highly select number of modern, almost entirely Western European nation-states.

When Max Herrmann in Germany and scholars with similar concerns began developing the historical analysis of theatre, the European nation-state was the major form of socio/cultural organisation with which they were familiar, dominant in Europe and widely and usually arbitrarily imposed throughout the rest of the globe by the European colonial powers. The major divisions within theatre history were the boundaries of these states. For most of its first century of development theatre history was not only essentially organised by nation-states but was extremely selective in its choice of which such states were considered worthy of study. Very soon an almost invariable and highly restricted narrative of so-called world theatre was developed, which may still be found in the majority of textbooks on this field of study. According to this narrative, after the obligatory introductory chapters on ritual drama in ancient Egypt and the theatres of classical Greece and Rome (in fact treated as modern unified nation-states – who noted where in the world Hellenistic theatres were actually located or observed that such ‘Roman’ church fathers as Augustine and Tertullian actually came from North Africa?), standard theatre went on to cover an only vaguely geographically designated ‘middle ages’ (in fact in its details largely English), and then settled more comfortably into individual narratives of the theatres within modern national boundaries, headed by England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the United States.