One thing I love about Toronto: it is exceedingly generous with books. EXAMPLE: I found THIS book in a pile by the side of the road. Quality literature! On the curb! The police should be called.
SO this is a collection of plays by noted Egyptian playwright Tewfik Al-Hakim. The titular play is just about the longest, and is certainly the oddest. We begin in the microcosmos, a miniature kingdom of sorts where a self-proclaimed cockroach ‘king’ is trying to sort out, with the aid of his ministers and queen, how to solve the problem of the ants (ie. ‘There are ants everywhere and they keep eating us’). Things proceed haphazardly; eventually one cockroach falls into a massive, white canyon which, of course, is somebody’s bathtub. THAT bathtub belongs to a middle-aged couple, the husband is brow-beaten, and the wife FREAKS out when she sees the cockroach, but the husband can’t get enough of watching the little fellow struggle and…things get weird.
There are other plays, including a short drama about a son inheriting the mantle, and responsibility of bloody vengeance and a longer piece concerning a Sultan, slavery, and a very curious sex worker. I will be the first to admit that I was missing a LOT of the cultural contexts of these plays: there are references I didn’t get, and metaphors whose meaning, or at least TOTAL meaning, I could tell I often missed. For me, then, these plays were more interesting than gripping, though I could admire their ambition and outre characters and setting (the kafkaesque FATE OF A COCKROACH is a particular highlight). I didn’t love them, but I can consider them a part of a process of learning more about drama in Egypt. Academic, perhaps, but, despite its reputations, academia can be good for something! Me like books.
Me Like Books 