Following a comparative approach, this chapter foregrounds transcultural translation as it examines three different productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ play Rituals of Signs and Transformations in English, French and Arabic that were staged in Beirut, Chicago, Paris, and Cairo. The chapter argues that Wannous’ play carries a prophetic warning about the chaos that is released when rigid political, religious, and gender structures are undermined in a society deformed by a long experience of despotism.

In this chapter, Sa’dallah Wannous’ friend Farouk Mardam-Bey, one of Syria’s foremost intellectuals living in exile, who is also the most respected doyen of Arabic literature in French translation, shares anecdotes about Wannous. He focuses on the years Wannous spent as a student in Paris from 1966 to 1968, a formative period in his apprenticeship, during which he immersed himself in the rich and tumultuous cultural and political life of Paris. Mardam-Bey argues that in addition to questioning the ambiguous relationship that existed between Europe and the Arab world, Wannous also interrogated the relationship among literature, theatre and spectacle in the contemporary world and was particularly intrigued by the association between political protest and theatre, both in conventional theatres and on the streets. The chapter's purpose is to highlight that Wannous’ encounters and friendships with a host of writers and artists from France, the Arab world and other post-colonial countries deeply affected his trajectory and writing.

This chapter draws on the author, Sahar Assaf's, experience directing two significant contemporary productions of Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays in English in Beirut, Rituals of Signs and Transformations and The Rape.

The private library of the Syrian playwright and public intellectual Saʿdallah Wannous arrived at the American University of Beirut in 2015. This chapter sets out to read Wannous through his library. After presenting a brief overview of the books in Wannous’ library, their subject matter, and their provenance, it examines personal book inscriptions, which unravel a rich intellectual network and provide insight into Wannous’ trajectory and recognition as a playwright and public intellectual. It then explores the conditions under which Wannous’ library came into existence and flourished in a Syria marked by the Baʿth party and the Assad regime’s authoritarian control of the political and cultural fields, under which it migrated from Damascus to Beirut in the wake of the 2011 Syrian revolution-turned-war. Wannous’ library, the chapter argues, opened an Arabic and world literary space, both physical and metaphorical, from which Wannous emerged as a modern Arabic and world-renowned playwright.

This chapter is a conversation between book editor Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Mohammad Al Attar, one of the Arab world’s most celebrated younger playwrights. It is based on a talk Al Attar gave at the American University of Beirut in April 2015. In the conversation, Al Attar offers valuable insights into the significance of Sa’dallah Wannous’ plays and their legacy for a younger generation of playwrights in and from the Arab world. He shares his views about how Wannous’ language, style of writing, and ideas on the politicization of theatre impacted him as a student at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus and later as a renowned playwright. Al Attar also attempts to read Wannous’ influence on the political, cultural, and literary scene of the 2011 Arab uprisings, especially the Syrian revolution.

In the introduction to their edited book The Theatre of Sa’dallah Wannous: A Study of the Syrian Playwright and Public Intellectual, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Robert Myers trace the importance of studying the life and works ofSa’dallah Wannous. They argue that for those who care about the role of culture, especially as manifested in literature and theatre in various global traditions, as a key indicator and explicator of the dynamics of societies, it is imperative to examine the work of artist-intellectuals like Wannous as a means of measuring the extent to which theatre and literature still matter today. Through introducing the wide-ranging topics of the chapters of their book, the editors highlight the significance of the thought, work and legacy of Wannous not only in the Arabic tradition and in world literature and theater but also in Arab politics and history, especially in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the recent Arab uprisings.

This chapter discusses the figurative and literal silence manifested in the period in which the Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous ceased to write plays altogether. It places this silence within a political framework and identifies historical events related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict such the Camp David Accords and the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of 1978 as the main trigger for Wannous’ literal silence. The chapter also interprets the playwright’s literal silence as a meaningful event rather than an intellectual aporia and points out that during this period, Wannous continued to write critical essays in addition to co-founding and directing the most important theatre school in Syria, the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts.

This chapter examines Sa’dallah Wannous’ use and interrogation of history as means of carving out a space for critical reflection on pressing contemporary issues such as state violence. It focuses on two of Wannous’ late plays, Historical Miniatures and Drunken Days and argues that Wannous’s highly literary dramatic language consistently interrogates history and tradition. The chapter also includes an analysis of two significant productions of Historical Miniatures, one in Beirut in 2000, staged by the renowned Lebanese director Nidal al Achkar, and the other a daring site-specific production in the prison area of the actual thirteenth-century citadel in Damascus where the play is set, by Syrian director Naila Al-Atrash, which was staged shortly after Wannous’ death in 1997. Since the citadel had been used to house political prisoners during the early years of the regime of Hafez al-Assad, who died three years later, Al-Atrash’s production was inevitably interpreted as a pointed critique of the Syrian state’s continuing use of violence and incarceration as means of suppressing dissent.

This chapter investigates the nature of the well-documented influence of the German playwright, theorist and director Bertolt Brecht on the Syrian playwright Sa’dallah Wannous. In addition to examining theoretical and indirect links between the two, such as Wannous’ interviews and friendships in France with Brechtian theatre artists and scholars such as Jean-Marie Serreau, Jean-Louis Barrault, Peter Weiss and Bernard Dort, this chapter looks at Wannous’ creation of innovative hybrid works that utilized Brechtian dramaturgical techniques alongside traditional Arabic performative modes. The chapter also analyzes manifestations of these re-workings of Brechtian dramaturgical models in performance in two very different stagings, one in former East Germany and the other in the former Soviet Union, of one of Wannous’ most innovative plays, The Adventure of the Head of Mamlouk Jabir. It also highlights Wannous’ participation in the Brecht Dialogue in 1968 in East Berlin, which commemorated the playwright’s seventieth birthday, and the documents and theatrical programs from that event that were recently found in Wannous’ personal library, which is now housed at the American University of Beirut.

This chapter by Elias Khoury, who is one of the most important living Arabic novelists and a perennial candidate for the Nobel prize in literature, is adapted from an essay first published in the cultural supplement Mulḥaq, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahār, in 1997. The chapter, which has as its starting point a description of Sa’dallah Wannous’ funeral as a means of explicating his significance as a playwright and public intellectual, offers a particularly vivid portrait of Wannous. It includes descriptions of Khoury’s first reading of An Evening’s Entertainment for the Fifth of June in the cultural journal al-Mawāqif in Beirut in 1968, a meeting with Wannous in Paris at Farouk Mardam-Bey’s house, and of being informed of Wannous’ premature death in 1997 on May 15, which, in the Arab world, is Nakba Day, the ‘day of catastrophe,’ when the state of Israel was created.