Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle will have its premiere this weekend with two sold-out shows. Photo: NYUAD
Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle will have its premiere this weekend with two sold-out shows. Photo: NYUAD
Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle will have its premiere this weekend with two sold-out shows. Photo: NYUAD
Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle will have its premiere this weekend with two sold-out shows. Photo: NYUAD

Emirati play explores the beauty and mundanity of bureaucratic life


Faisal Salah
  • English
  • Arabic

Emirati art has covered the gamut of human experience. But rarely, if ever, has it tackled the mundane quite like the new play Hamour Doesn't Leave the Cubicle, written by UAE playwright Ahmed Al Madloum.

His new theatrical project, which will hit the stage for the first time at Black Box, NYUAD Arts Centre, this weekend, tackles the human side of bureaucracy and what happens to people who get caught up in systems that operate beyond their control.

But does art tackle something so tedious and superfluous? There's no easy answer. For as long as systems such as these have existed, artists have been attempting to document and even lampoon, to very mixed results.

Luckily, some brilliant examples have cropped up over the years. In Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian film Brazil, bureaucracy is ridiculed as a large mindless machine whose mistakes, even the small ones, could alter the course of people’s lives. It is that type of satire that Al Madloum felt was needed when he wrote his play Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle.

Al Madloum, who previously worked in bureaucratic settings himself, tells The National that “every country has its own bureaucracy piece, and I thought that we needed one here". He also mentions works like Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and some of German writer Bertolt Brecht as inspirations for his play.

Al Madloum had been working on this script since 2021, and says that he went through many rewrites and improvements to reach this point. His drive to make it funny and accessible comes from his belief that theatre can be a force in soft power that enlightens as well as entertains.

Bureaucracy exists everywhere now, at work, or even at home, we deal with some form of it and we all have stories about our experiences,” says Al Madloum. "Humans create the bureaucracy they live in, but then that bureaucratic system creates problems for them.”

Emirati playwright Ahmed Al Madloum's new play is a satirical look at the workplace. Photo: Ahmed Al Madloum
Emirati playwright Ahmed Al Madloum's new play is a satirical look at the workplace. Photo: Ahmed Al Madloum

Al Madloum says that he once thought the vignettes in his play could be performed at actual workplaces at the end of the workday, or as performance art pieces, before settling on a traditional theatrical setting. “I think theatre is the most durable form of literature after poetry. The novel is a new thing by comparison, but theatre has always been around," he says. "Theatre never dies, it could lay low for a while but always has a surge back to the top."

Al Madloum says that theatre shows in the UAE have been mostly restricted to two genres, academic theatre and comedic improvisational theatre. But he hopes this play, and others, can carve a space for a new movement of Emirati theatre that is satirical and smart. He also insists that satirical theatre can be prestigious and lean away from being hurtful to be informative rather than insulting.

Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle is directed by NYUAD alumnus Reem Almenhali, the play’s cast includes Emirati actors Abdullah Al Qassab, Shahad Alsaqqaf, Mohammad Arwani, Hassan El-Tahir and Mad-Rabdan. The play features a series of vignettes set in office space that include Emirati-centric cultural cues.

On working with Almenhali, Al Madloum says the perception when it comes to theatre is that the playwright’s work ends once that script is ready and then the director takes over completely. But for this project, he says there was a mutual effort from the two to bring the script to life. “We treated it like an open source without one singular commanding voice, each of us contributed without upsetting the other,” he adds.

Both shows are sold out and Al Madloum says they have received many invitations from other emirates to perform the play there, adding that he’s thrilled that the tickets have been hard to come by but assures there will be more shows in the future. And the play's journey won't stop there. Most notably, he says the play will be performed in New York next year, setting a potentially more ambitious course for the playwright's future.

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Electric scooters: some rules to remember
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Countries recognising Palestine

France, UK, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Belgium, Malta, Luxembourg, San Marino and Andorra

 

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Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais

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Who was Alfred Nobel?

The Nobel Prize was created by wealthy Swedish chemist and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel.

  • In his will he dictated that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund "prizes to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind".
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  • Nobel died in 1896 but it took until 1901, following a legal battle over his will, before the first prizes were awarded.
The Sand Castle

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Coffee: black death or elixir of life?

It is among the greatest health debates of our time; splashed across newspapers with contradicting headlines - is coffee good for you or not?

Depending on what you read, it is either a cancer-causing, sleep-depriving, stomach ulcer-inducing black death or the secret to long life, cutting the chance of stroke, diabetes and cancer.

The latest research - a study of 8,412 people across the UK who each underwent an MRI heart scan - is intended to put to bed (caffeine allowing) conflicting reports of the pros and cons of consumption.

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It also raises blood pressure, which is largely problematic for people with existing conditions.

So the heaviest drinkers of the black stuff - some in the study had up to 25 cups per day - may want to rein it in.

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The smuggler

Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple. 
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.

Khouli conviction

Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.

For sale

A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.

- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico

- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000

- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950

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How Alia's experiment will help humans get to Mars

Alia’s winning experiment examined how genes might change under the stresses caused by being in space, such as cosmic radiation and microgravity.

Her samples were placed in a machine on board the International Space Station. called a miniPCR thermal cycler, which can copy DNA multiple times.

After the samples were examined on return to Earth, scientists were able to successfully detect changes caused by being in space in the way DNA transmits instructions through proteins and other molecules in living organisms.

Although Alia’s samples were taken from nematode worms, the results have much bigger long term applications, especially for human space flight and long term missions, such as to Mars.

It also means that the first DNA experiments using human genomes can now be carried out on the ISS.

 

Updated: October 19, 2024, 3:04 AM