Entertaining Egyptians: Modern Cairene Theater at the Turn of the 20th Century

My work asserts that modern theater was integral to shaping modern Egyptian identities. While many claim that stage theater in the Middle East was simply an unmediated European import or forced colonial imposition, I argue that its development in Egypt at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century was born of complex interactions between Egyptian, Ottoman, French and Italian performative practices and of artists who both shaped and responded to indigenous aesthetic preferences, social concerns, and political agendas.

The period was one of dramatic change for Egypt as it transitioned from long membership in and subjugation to the Ottoman and British Empires, to political independence and nationhood in the 1920s. In this period of transition, the new, Western-educated effendi emerged.  The effendi’s pedigree of indigenous rural roots and secular, urban, Western education produced a group of young men who found themselves in a cultural and intellectual middle-ground, estranged from their homes but also unaccepted by urban elites. They used this position to claim responsibility for leading Egypt to political, economic, and cultural independence.  The effendiyya—as playwrights, translators, performers and audiences—participated in new spaces, like theaters, where they defined and propagated a self-reflective “modern” Egyptian national identity.

Modern Egyptian theaters mixed European-style vaudeville and local folk themes and presented them to a wide, mostly urban, Arabic-speaking audience. Performances took place in new venues, particularly along ‘Emad al-Din Street, and served to entertain as well as reflect upon society at large.  In this paper I will argue that Cairene theaters of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were not simply emulations of elite Western cultural forms. Instead, they stood at the heart of a new effendi culture and critical debates over Egyptian and modern identities.