Bye Bye London: Theater & Imperialism in the Gulf

Introduction

Kuwaiti actor Abdulhussain Abdulredha (1939-2017) is a crowning figure in the history of Arab theater. In the last act of his renowned play Bye Bye London, the protagonist, Kuwaiti businessman Sharid bin Jum‘ah, bids his farewell to a city that not only made him confront the continued legacy of British imperialism, but also exploited him every step of the way. The audience, forty years later, with memory of the beloved actor’s passing in the same city, are sure to shiver when Abdulredha ends the play by saying, “bye London, and bye for eternity.”¹ Since it premiered at the Kaifan Theater in Kuwait in 1981, Bye Bye London, co-authored with Egyptian playwright Nabil Badran and directed by Tunisian director Moncef Souissi, has achieved unprecedented success. A political and social comedy about a Khaleeji tourist running away from his family to lavishly enjoy the wealth he attained late in his life, reflecting the changed economic status of Khaleejis a few generations after the discovery of oil, the play was received positively by Arab audiences for its Pan-Arabist and anti-imperial sentiments. What is often not discussed is the local and regional – Kuwaiti and Khaleeji – contexts that the play emerges from, and is in dialogue with, throughout the performance.

This essay examines how the play was an attempt to negotiate, and form, a national, Pan-Arabist, and anti-imperialist identity that draws from the shared history of the Gulf and the Arab World. It also investigates how the play honors the often unacknowledged Kuwaiti and Khaleeji theatrical experiments that paved the way for Bye Bye London’s critical reception. Particularly, I look into how the play was both an extension of Kuwait’s intellectual and theatrical history, and also a political response to cultural imperialism and global, neocolonial realities.

(Neo)colonialism & Arab Theatrical Heritage

Coined by former President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), neocolonialism is defined as the continuation of indirect imperialist rule after a state gains its independence.² It is often the control of less developed countries that takes the form of economic, cultural, or military imperialism. Bye Bye London is a work that creatively touches upon these three systems of dependence. While the play focuses on foreign capital operating in the former British empire, it also features the characters’ intrigue with Western culture and ideals. Moreover, it delves into military imperialism through a scene of a high-tech arms deal that ultimately fails for the Arab merchant, or State. There is an illusion of incompetence, whether it was the capacity to produce weapons, the belief in one’s own creative history, or, as an early scene in the play suggests, the reliance on British and Euro-American consultants. The latter was revealed through a scene between Sharid and the British hotel manager, Adam, played by Kuwaiti actor Mohammad Jaber, particularly when Sharid is shocked to hear the hotel’s food menu, which consists of Arab and Khaleeji dishes. Adam tells Sharid that because many Arab guests, or “Arabo” as he refers to them, stay at the hotel, they decided to hire Arab chefs. Sharid responds by saying that “now it is not only us that seek out Western experts, it is the other way around, which means that in the future if there are any tensions between Arab and Western nations, we can threaten you by recalling our chefs.”³ The scene points to a historical tendency, which came to be known as the ‘Khawaja complex,’ an expression that speaks to a presumed psychological sense of inferiority, coupled with the admiration of everything that is Western, and the rejection of all that is Arab-born. 

Significantly, cultural imperialism not only included the production of theater, but also the exclusion of Arab narratives and truths from the social understanding of performative arts. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the performative arts were often viewed by Eurocentric and imperialist narratives as alien to the Middle East, and many artistic forms were treated as being imported. The institution of Western theater was advanced when European colonial missions arrived in the region, and when many Arab intellectuals witnessed the art as a professional medium during their visits to Europe. In 1846, Lebanese merchant Marun Al Naqqash was inspired by the theater he saw in Italy, and came back to Beirut a year later to produce the first drama text in Arabic, written in the Western model.⁴ Al Naqqash’s experiments began with creative adaptation of Molière’s L’Avare, known in English as The Miser,⁵ but then shifted to the Arabic genre of hikaya. Bringing onto the stage how the fifth Abbasid caliph, Harun Al Rashid, was depicted in One Thousand and One Nights, Al Naqqash is credited as a pioneer in a tradition that involved not only the Arabization of the masterpieces of world theater, but also the inventive localization of what was then believed to be a solely Western creation. Al Naqqash’s tradition commenced with awe of the new, yet a century later, it uncovered the overlooked, non-European, ‘theatrical manifestations’ in the Arab World. 

In the second half of the twentieth century, scholarly attempts aimed to demolish the stereotype of the absence of comparable, and even more sophisticated, literary and artistic forms and mediums in Arab and Islamic cultures. Dramatists were delighted to be acquainted with the figure of the hakawaty, or the charismatic oral storyteller. It is notable to acknowledge that Abdulredha himself has incorporated the Khaleeji hakawaty in some of his works, the most remembered of which is the television drama Al Aqdar, meaning fates, which involved his career partner, Kuwaiti actor Saad Al Faraj. There is also the discovery of the theater of khayal al-zil, or shadow puppetry, in Egypt, alongside a number of folkloric arts that were practiced before the arrival of colonial missions in the Arab Maghreb.⁶

By the 1970s, the Arabs uncovered their theatrical heritage, carefully dismantling the Western projections of the Middle East, designed, as Edward Said argues in Orientalism (1978), to rule over their part of the world by ways of controlling how it is viewed or imagined.⁷ In Bye Bye London, Sharid echoes the character of Mustafa Sa‘eed, the protagonist of the 1966 postcolonial novel by Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North. Like Mustafa, Sharid attracts women by appealing to their orientalist viewpoints, capitalizing on Euro-American misrepresentations. For Mustafa, a Sudanese Ph.D. student in London, these perceptions were based on Africa’s misconstruction in the British imagination at the time, while for the Kuwaiti businessman, orientalism manifested through the stereotype of presumed wealth. Sharid tells the women he encounters in one scene, “me rich, man me,” and announces at another point in the play, “my checkbook is my weapon!”⁸ Sharid’s pursuit in London, accompanied by his drinking and gambling, can be seen as an identity crisis, suggesting from a Pan-Arabist standpoint the complex relationship between Arab states and Western nations. An awareness of the regional impact of British imperialism, and a desire to reclaim the narrative in theater and in politics, is thus powerfully presented in Bye Bye London. There was a collective identity in the making, a tension influenced by Arab nationalist movements that hoped to reassert the lost glories of Arabs, subvert existing power dynamics, and seek out political and cultural liberation. Bye Bye London was produced, and received, with these conscious ideas in mind. After the model of Western theater was successfully localized, it was time to set the foundations for a unique and authentic Arab theater that acknowledges its sources of inspiration, its heritage, its ideological concerns, and its development, to which Abdulredha’s contribution is no exception. 

Khaleeji Theater & The English Language

It was through educational and cultural exchanges among Arab and Gulf states in the early twentieth century that theater in the Arabic language, which was flourishing in Egypt and the Levant, was introduced to the masses. Before that, in Kuwait and in 1924 specifically, there was an amateur, yet notable, attempt to do so by Kuwaiti educator and historian Abdulaziz Bin Ahmed Al Rasheed (1887-1938). Al Rasheed wrote Muhawara Eslahiya, translated to A Dialogue for Reform, as a school activity performed by his pupils. The play engages with different points of view concerning education and criticizes religious teachers, known as mullas, who advocate against the establishment of modern schools that teach subjects such as Geography and English. Convincing people that these disciplines are associated with ‘infidel’ colonizers, or the kuffar, Al Rasheed’s play reveals how such schools would threaten the income generated from the antiquated forms of education that religious teachers monopolized for centuries.⁹ It was not, as Sulaiman Al Shatti argues in his recent book about the history of Kuwaiti theater, an intellectual resistance. The religious teachers wanted to “preserve their interest and influence” in the pre-oil villages of Kuwait, and modern education was a warning that things were about to change.¹⁰  

What followed Al Rasheed’s experiment, from the 1930s to the 1950s, was a thriving tradition of school-run, but sometimes government-sponsored, theatrical initiatives that were attended on special occasions by the Emir himself, Sheikh Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah.¹¹ It was during that time that Pan-Arabist ideology resonated with audiences, and Kuwait reflected trends in the larger context of Arab theater adapting and engaging with the then-successful plays of Ahmed Shawqi, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Mahmoud Taymour, and Tawfiq Al Hakim. World theater was also present, and Kuwaiti school students would perform the works of Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, and Henrik Ibsen.¹² These plays were translated into Arabic and performed for a diverse audience by students and teachers. The second nahda in Kuwaiti theater in the 1960s, led by Zaki Tulaimat (1894-1982), was when the stars of Bye Bye London, then young and inexperienced, found their break. The play that Tulaimat chose to initiate this new era of professional theater with was Saqr Quraysh, translating to The Falcon of Quraish, and it starred Abdulredha, Ghanim Al Saleh, who twenty years later will play the character of Sharid’s comrade, and Mariam Al Ghadban, one of the first actresses in Kuwait’s history, who plays the character of Sharid’s wife.¹³ Saqr Quraysh, written by Mahmoud Taymour, was a play about the historical founder of an Arab state in Medieval Spain, and it represented, according to Tulaimat, an Arab hero who not only made history in Europe but was also surrounded by a foreign enemy;¹⁴ the ‘Other’ in the Arab imagination. Tulaimat not only established professional theater in Kuwait, he was also invited by the Emirati Ministry of Media and Culture in the 70s to do the same in the United Arab Emirates.¹⁵ Pan-Arabism and an awareness of the former empire are thus found in the theatrical history of the Gulf states, and numerous artistic collaborations alongside initiatives, such as the annual festivals of Khaleeji theater, are evidence of how actors and playwrights thought of themselves as emerging from the same context and speaking to similar cultural concerns. However, there is a lack of documented research in regional academia on how dramatists in the Gulf states influenced one another in the early stages of constructing their own artistic identity.

In Bye Bye London, Abdulredha’s drama maps the world on stage, featuring Europe, Asia, Africa, and even the Caribbean. English, however, becomes associated with parody and imitation. In one scene in the play, Sharid lays out in a comedic manner all the English vocabulary he knows to Janet, a Kuwaiti student abroad whose actual name is Wafa, disguised as a British woman who is interested in him. The plan was designed by Safi, Sharid’s nephew, to protect his uncle from potential scammers and conmen. Noting the names of these characters is illuminating. Sharid means the man who ran away, Safi means pure, and Wafa means loyalty. Sharid tries to talk to Janet/ Wafa in the lobby of London’s “Black and White Hotel,” but ends up listing words: 

“Car.. Apple..Water..Father.. Mother.. Donkey.. Monkey..Rabbit.. Crocodile.. Elephant.. Street.. I am.. He is.. He him.. She shim.”¹⁶ 

Admitting his inability to communicate in English, Sharid recalls his mulla teacher, and says, “may you rest in peace Mulla Marshad, twelve years we were taught by you.” He then reenacts how Mulla Marshad taught them with a disciplinary cane, and shouts, “why haven’t you added some English for a day like this!”¹⁷ thus referencing the first theatrical experiment in Kuwait — Muhawara Eslahiya — and suggesting that the character is a product of a pre-theater and pre-English education. What follows the list of words is one of the most memorable scenes in Khaleeji memory. Sharid takes out a note from his pocket written by a friend in Kuwait for such situations. In hopes of winning the affection of Janet, Sharid tells her that he is a rich man from Kuwait, a land where one can swim in a sea of petrol, which is communicated through Sharid’s imitation of swimming in a pool or an ocean. Moreover, Sharid tells Janet that as an infant he did not drink water or milk, he drank petrol. Comedic as it may seem, the orientalist imaginary is taken to the extreme by Abdulredha, humoring audiences while conveying that Western powers are only interested in the Gulf states for their natural resources. The scene can also be studied as a reference to significant plays in Kuwaiti theater history, Isht wa shift, or I lived and I saw, which premiered in 1964 and is considered the play that declared the birth of Kuwaiti professional theater, and Kuwait 2000 (1966), both written by Saad Al Faraj. The first work depicted the poverty and harsh conditions of life in the pre-oil period and the dramatic transition, while the latter, which involved Abdulredha as an actor, was about a future in which, after decades of abundance, the primary economic source of oil was exhausted and depleted.¹⁸ 

Knowledge of English and theater are interconnected in this context, and the playwrights and director of Bye Bye London crafted a performance where language is infused with each character’s degree of theatricality. Sharid’s comrade in London, the charismatic Khaleeji merchant who pursues the fraudulent arms deal, Nahash “Fata Al Jabal wa Al Barari wa Al Qifar,” which translates to “Nahash the Lad of the Mountain, the Deserts, and the Wastelands,” is more fluent in English. He is also a more theatrical character, given the carnivalesque colors of his traditional Bedouin clothing worn in a Western environment. Nahash’s elaborate name and background as an adventurous traveler resembles the mythological Sindibad the Sailor, which succeeds in reminding the audience of their own tradition of the Arabic hikaya. The link between English and theatricality is more evident with Safi and Wafa, the two Kuwaiti university students living in London. The pair, the most fluent in the language, are disguised in the first and second acts of the play in a meta-theatrical performative strategy that calls attention to the work’s nature as a drama. Their aim is simply to safeguard Sharid from being robbed. Safi transforms into Al Araby Al Sidiqi, meaning the honest Arab, and Franco the Spanish guitarist, and Wafa becomes both Janet and Francesca Barbarosa, the flamenco dancer. Conscious and strategic transformation is thus associated with the mastery of the European language, which means Sharid is the least theatrical and the least capable of change. This hints at a compelling idea; those in positions of power can undergo dynamic and swift change, whether such change was intended for economic progress or pursued, through disguise and deception, to conceal political and neocolonial goals. Unlike Safi and Wafa, Sharid’s fascination with Britain does not come from a place of assimilation; he did not absorb British or Western culture, yet he surrenders to the superior image of the recently fallen empire when he says, “Oh the English! Our former masters!”¹⁹ 

It is a generational distinction that reveals how Khaleeji identity was being altered by a new political reality. Once the protection of Sharid’s wealth is perceived as the perseverance of cultural, as opposed to material, wealth, the mission of Safi and Wafa assumes a new significance. Nahash and Sharid are pessimists; they spent their lives witnessing the failures of Arab dreams of victory and unification, but they engage in discussions that reveal their inferiority complex and victim mentalities. Safi and Wafa, on the other hand, represent innocence, purity, and the new beginnings of a generation that dreams about a better future for the Arab World, but is also equally loyal to what Sharid represents; the cultural past and the traditions that they do not want to change. 

Conclusion

Throughout the play, Nahash and Sharid sing a popular Arabic tune by Syrian artist Fahd Ballan, Waylak yal Ta‘adina, translating to Woe To Those Who Oppose Us. The song celebrates the valor and heroic traits of Arab peoples. Ironically, these characters, amidst their lavish lifestyle in the city of the former empire, end up being tragically deceived and robbed by the very individuals they had warned about. Chased by the police to Sharid’s flat, and surprised that she was also scammed by the British in a store on Oxford Street, Samira, Sharid’s daughter, brings the play to its conclusion. Wafa explains to Samira that scamming is a universal language that “targets both individuals and nations,”²⁰ suggesting, once more, that the characters are representatives of communal and national matters. At the end of the performance, the characters collectively present a speech about how Arabs must trust one another, and not rely on Euro-American consultants or experts, and further how, ultimately, they must understand the potential of their foreign capital investments and employ them instead for the prosperity of their own region. The play, though a comedy, continues to be remembered and celebrated for its ingenious ways of pushing the boundaries of political drama in the region. Bye Bye London remains significant today for its continuation of an Arab, Khaleeji, and Kuwaiti theater tradition that is referenced and honored throughout the performance.

To access the works cited & endnotes, download the full report.

The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.