Tawfik Al-Hakim

The theatrical art of al-Hakim consists of three types:

1- Biographical Theatre: The group of plays he wrote in his early life in which he expressed his personal experience and attitudes towards life were more than 400 plays among which were "al-Arees", (The Groom) and "Amam Shebak al-Tazaker", (Before the Ticket Office). These plays were more artistic because they were based on Al Hakim's personal opinion in criticizing social life.

2- Intellectual Theatre: This dramatic style produced plays to be read not acted. Thus, he refused to call them plays and published them in separate books.

3- Objective Theatre: Its aim is to contribute to the Egyptian society by fixing some values of the society, exposing the realities of Egyptian life.

Al-Hakim was able to understand nature and depict it in a style which combines symbolism, reality and imagination. He mastered narration, dialogue and selecting settings. While el-Hakim's earlier plays were all composed in the literary language, he was to conduct a number of experiments with different levels of dramatic language. In the play, El-Safqah (The Deal, 1956), for example - with its themes of land ownership and the exploitation of poor peasant farmers - he couched the dialogue in something he termed 'a third language', one that could be read as a text in the standard written language of literature, but that could also be performed on stage in a way which, while not exactly the idiom of Egyptian Arabic, was certainly comprehensible to a larger population than the literate elite of the city. There is perhaps an irony in the fact that another of el-Hakim's plays of the 1960s, Ya tali el-Shagarah (1962; The Tree Climber, 1966), was one of his most successful works from this point of view, precisely because its use of the literary language in the dialogue was a major contributor to the non-reality of the atmosphere in this Theatre of the Absurd style involving extensive passages of non-communication between husband and wife. El-Hakim continued to write plays during the 1960s, among the most popular of which were Masir Sorsar (The Fate of a Cockroach, 1966) and Bank el-Qalaq (Anxiety Bank, 1967).

List of works

1. A Bullet in the Heart, 1926 (Plays)
2. Leaving Paradise, 1926 (Plays)
3. The Diary of a Prosecutor Among Peasant, 1993 (Novel) (translation exists at least into German and Swedish)
4. The People of the Cave, 1933 (Play)
5. The Return of the Spirit, 1933 (Novel)
6. Sharazad, 1934 (Play)
7. Muhammad the Prophet, 1936 (Biography)
8. A Man without a Soul, 1937 (Play)
9. A Sparrow from the East, 1938 (Novel)
10. Ash'ab, 1938 (Novel)
11. The Devil's Era, 1938 (Philosophical Stories)
12. My Donkey told me, 1938 (Philosophical Essays)
13. Braxa/The problem of ruling, 1939 (Play)
14. The Dancer of the Temple, 1939 (Short Stories)
15. Pygmalion, 1942
16. Solomon the Wise, 1943
17. Boss Kudrez's Building, 1948
18. King Oedipus, 1949
19. Soft Hands, 1954
20. Equilibrium, 1955
21. Isis, 1955
22. The Deal, 1956
23. The Sultan's Dilemma, 1960
24. The Tree Climber, 1966
25. The Fate of a Cockroach, 1966
26. Anxiety Bank, 1967
27. The Return of Consciousness, 1974