Why Egypt embraces Edward Albee

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/14/egypt-edward-albee

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It may seem odd that when Egypt's military rulers are cracking down on American NGOs and threatening to disqualify a presidential candidate on the grounds that his mother held a US passport, a play by the American dramatist Edward Albee can be staged in Cairo to such acclaim.

The fact that Albee is not only American but gay too seems to have caused no damage to his enormous popularity among Arab audiences.

The recent production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Gomhouria theatre in Cairo was preceded, last September, by another at El Sawy Culturewheel. In fact, during the past 12 months there have been more professional productions of Albee's plays in Cairo than in London.

Egyptian encounters with Albee began as early as the 1960s. Even one of his obscurer plays, Everything in the Garden, was broadcast on Egyptian state television and was later sold to other channels in the Middle East.

Albee has also inspired original Arabic works, such as Yusuf Fadhil's novel, <em>Qissat Hadeeqat al-Hayawan</em> ("The Story of the Zoo"), about a troupe of actors performing The Zoo Story in 1970s Casablanca.

How is it that Albee proves so popular in the Middle East, even as the American context fundamentally grounds his plays, whether in the New England campus drawing-room of Virginia Woolf or New York's Central Park in The Zoo Story?

Moreover, Albee betrays no interest in the Middle East, bar one remark in his collected essays criticising US sponsorship of King "Farouk & Co" and a casual, figurative allusion to Egyptian camels in Seascape.

In fact, Albee's works attract Arab audiences not in spite of their distinctly American identity, but because of it. In The Zoo Story, America is Jerry, the middle-class executive, but America is also his vagabond interlocutor, Peter. They are gradually exposed as moral doppelgängers, US nihilism laid bare.

That unpopular message ensured Albee couldn't find a producer in the United States (the play premiered in Berlin). In 1961, Republican grandee Prescott Bush, George W Bush's grandfather, denounced it in the US Senate as "filthy" and tainted with communism.

But The Zoo Story's unpopularity at home underwrote its Arab acclaim. It is, for example, a staple of the Syrian stage, from the notable 1978 production by Walid Kowatli (the Soviet-trained doyen of Damascus drama) to Dar al-Assad's 2010 production which was successful enough to go on tour, including to Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

The Zoo Story has never been produced for television in the US, yet Syrian television had already broadcast a version by 1979. Credit for the first-ever TV production, however, goes to Pakistan's state broadcaster for a 1968 adaptation by a then-unknown Cambridge graduate called Salman Rushdie.

The Zoo Story is the most celebrated of Albee's plays in the Middle East because it best satisfies a penchant for his caustic critique of American bourgeois respectability.

The Albee phenomenon in the Middle East is perhaps a mirror image of the enthusiasm with which the Muslim misery memoirs of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and others are received in the west; they confirm prejudices about the other. Rushdie's western popularity and Islamic infamy is, in some ways, the counterpart to Albee.

Trust a teacher, Maureen Flanagan, to draw the right lesson. Following a spell at Alexandria University, where her Egyptian students singled out Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for praise, she cautions how "presenting a worst-case scenario or engaging in fairly vicious satire" – as Albee does – "can be accepted by another culture as simply a true portrait of the entire society". That is as much a lesson for western admirers of ex-Muslim critics of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Salman Rusdhie as for Albee's Arab acolytes.

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