A Tongue-in-Cheek Take on The One Thousand and One Nights: ‘Hakawatis’ Review

★★★✰✰

‘The history of The Nights in English is largely one of misrepresentation…translators have truncated or embroidered the text to suit their own concerns. Visual language allows me to confront these issues more concretely than I can do in writing. […] Cut up and reshuffled, the text finds new things to say.’

So says Yasmin Seale, the artist reworked Edward Lane’s translation of The Arabian Nights (1838), whilst producing her own in 2021. It is one of the countless (and better) iterations of the stories The One Thousand and One Nights. Now, another takes to the stage of the Sam Wanamaker Theatre, the cavernous, candlelit core of Shakespeare’s Globe.

Hakawatis begins with the tyrannical King, who revenges his wife’s infidelity by wedding, bedding, and beheading a new bride every night. We never see him, nor the infamous Scheherazade, the woman who uses her wit and storytelling to save her life and the lives of other women. We go behind them both, into the shadows, where only five brides-in-waiting remain.

Writer Hannah Khalil’s titular hakawatis are Arabic storytellers; but here, they speak through both the long oral tradition of storytelling, and contemporary improvised theatre. Pooja Ghai’s direction joyfully indulges in its medium, letting the women playfully construct tales together, scrapping over whether the terrifying jinn should be of black or green smoke. Even mistakes in delivery somehow work, fitting with the uncertain naïveity of the youngest bride, and the spontaneous nature of storytelling.

The design is the unspoken, and essential, sixth character. A Candle Consultant, Matt Haskins, makes light work of the setting. Licking flames are gradually put out as tales are told, and women’s fates are met. Rosa Maggiora’s ambers and embers design is smoked by percussion by Kareem Samara and co. The musicians are Hakawatis’ only men, heard but hidden behind the scenes.

The women speak in their own words, their stories reclaimed in visceral, bodily form. As Wadiha the Dancer, Houda Echouafni’s hips tell how belly dancing came not from men’s wishes, but to lubricate women’s bodies for childbirth. (Her movements helped by Sabia Smith’s lavish costumes.) Backs arched, they groan, in live explorations of their sexuality as women.

It shouldn’t be, but it is still refreshing to hear women talk sex on stage. Their advice to each other is more realistic, frankly brutal. Fatah the Young’s romantic expectations for her first night with the King vanish – he finishes, ‘not here, not with you’. Other bits veer into the bawdy. Roann Hassani McCloskey’s Naha the Wise is a borderline nymph, using a cocktail of contemporary language to conjure up the sauciest stories. A sexually-neglected wife is licked to orgasm by the king’s dog – she accidentally kills him, crushed under her weight.

Indeed, The One Thousand and One Nights has always had more adult content, censured into children’s stories in and by Western translations. ‘Books from Europe? They don’t have such things there!’ a tongue-in-cheek remark fired at the youngest bride, as she shares her approach to (self-)sex education.

For all their solidarity, their different and complex relations embody the plurality of womanhood. They both collaborate against, and compete for, the King’s affection. Nor is Scheherazade further mythologised – she’s ‘any woman, every woman’ – and the quintet claim most of her material as their own. (Khalil too took contributions from three other writers.) Pomegranates are pinched, grapes groped, and citrus fruits too eroticised in its slow motion advert, playing up to now well-worn symbols of contemporary feminism, commodified online. 

Sarah Forcella and Anthony Bale add some welcome context in the programme. Shakespeare never read The Nights directly, translated into English from French only in 1706. But Arabic stories swirled around sixteenth century London, long traded between empires via trade, pilgrimages, and wars as the Crusades. The Bard was deeply inspired by Chaucer – whose own works draw from The Nights.

Tamasha, a theatre company of Global Majority artists, takes aim at this false binary between East and West. With sarcasm and repeated beats, its storytellers challenge the personal duality prescribed by orientalism. Is the King tall, dark, and handsome? Is he religious, hairy, and aggressive? He’s both, he’s either, ‘like all Arab men.’

Hearing these stories in the home of the ‘world’s greatest storyteller’ matters. ‘Men don’t like to think they’re being taught, especially not by women.’ That is the power of a good story – to seduce us out of our expectations. This rampant production reminds us how much seduction there is left to do.

Words by Jelena Sofronijevic

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