Tayeb Saddiki: Interviewed by Marina Kotzamani

The leading Moroccan theatre director and playwright, Tayeb Saddiki is currently artistic director of the Mogador Theatre in Casablanca. He has worked on fusing the Western literary theatre with indigenous performance traditions in Morocco, and has been experimenting with alternative performance spaces. His plays include The Gala Dinner (1990) and The Elephant and Trousers (1997). This interview was conducted in Casablanca, Morocco, on May 2, 2005.

* * *

How does your work relate to the Western theatre and more particularly to the theatre of the Greeks and of Aristophanes?¹⁰

I have staged, in adaptation, many plays of the Western theatre—I was the first in the Arab world to have adapted Beckett and Ionesco. But I didn't think I could do theatre without dealing with the Greeks. I wanted to render homage to the Greek theatre as the first theatre that has come down to us in written form. I had to start with the Greeks and especially with Aristophanes. Aristophanes is the essence of Greek theatre, a social theatre par excellence that speaks to people in a very direct way. When I read his plays I find myself in a society, in my society. Indeed, we must not forget that the West was introduced to Greek civilization through the translated writings of Arab authors. For five centuries the West knew the Greek plays through Arabic translation. Our culture enabled the West to understand Greek culture.

To go back to Aristophanes, you see him as a social writer. Do you also see him as a poetic writer?

Certainly. Aristophanes was a dreamer, he was dreaming of a better society. All these utopias in his works are visions of new possibilities. Dreaming is very important. If as a social writer you are not writing about the dream, you have understood nothing.

Is it relevant to you that Aristophanes is also a writer of comedy? Do you have a closer relation to comedy than to other genres of theatre?

You are raising an important issue here. It is easier for us Arabs to work on comedy than on tragedy. I have never mounted the tragedies of Shakespeare for the simple reason that I am incapable of doing it. I have staged plays by Molière, who is a lot closer to us than Shakespeare; Molière is a Mediterranean author. Gogol is also an author who talks to us as Moroccans and as Arabs. I have staged The Inspector and I am very proud of having staged The Journal of a Madman. But Aristophanes is special to me in that the structure of his work reminds me of the bsa:t, a very old, indigenous type of theatre in Morocco. The word means "entertainment." In the literary theatre of the modern Western repertory, each play has a theme: in Hamlet the theme is vengeance, in Othello it is jealousy, and so on. In the bsa:t there are 36 themes. There is a comic scene, then a tragic scene, and then a scene of dancing. It's the only theatre in the world that deals with as many themes in one piece.

I can see how the bsa:t reminds you of the Aristophanic theatre, in which there is a great mixture of themes and styles. Can you talk more about how you have staged Aristophanes' plays, Lysistrata and The Assembly of Women?

I mounted my own adaptation combining these two plays, entitled The Charming Sex. This was in 1967, in Morocco, and I took the production on tour to the Maghreb. I did a free, not a literary adaptation because I wanted to talk about my society, taking Aristophanes as starting point. Aristophanes has written about women who have no rights and this engaged me as a Moroccan and as an Arab. We have an expression in Arabic, "the woman is worth less than nothing." If you say this, it means that you regard your mother...