The Thousand and One Nights as a Source for Sa‘dallāh Wannūs’s Play The King is the King
Abstract
This article aims to explore the intertextual relationship between one of Sa‘dallāh Wannūs’s best known plays, The King is the King, and the collection of popular stories known as the Thousand and One Nights, especially “The Story of the Sleeper and the Waker,” on which the play was based. The dramatic work was written as a part of Wannūs’s theatre of politicization project (masraḥ at-tasyīs), in which he managed to merge the elements of Arabic popular narrative tradition and European modernist theatrical techniques. The paper examines how the concept of Brecht’s epic theatre and his alienation devices affected Wannūs’s work. The article seeks to analyse the play with respect to Wannūs’s socio-political, artistic and aesthetic views and, at the same time, it attempts to trace the scope of the influence of the Thousand and One Nights on the work. The article argues that while the play was most certainly inspired by the popular tale, the political message of the original story has been subverted.
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