Last month, for the first time, Maggie Hannan, the founder of Abu Dhabi's Resuscitation Theatre, was not at the company's casting call for the new season's play – an Emirati take on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors.
The long-time theatre director – who popularised the Emiratisation of classic texts with adaptations such as Trojan Women and Playboy of the Western Region in the capital – announced her departure for a new adventure in Turkey last year.
But not before handing the reins to her prodigy Faisal Salah. The 24-year-old is the youngest Emirati director of a theatre company in the capital.
“Gosh, how they have grown,” says Hannan, as Salah and Faisal Al Jadir, the assistant director of the company, walk into a cafe one afternoon before she leaves. “They have become incredibly professional, from stumbling around and being under my feet all the time to now taking ownership of the company. I’ve really loved mentoring them.
“I’m relieved the job is done. The boys don’t need me any more and I’m not really sad.”
Hannan brought the theatre company she had set up in the United Kingdom to Abu Dhabi when she moved here in 2009.
“I wanted to do something interesting with the classics,” says Hannan about her motivation.
“I was also keen to make classic texts more fun for students. I was frustrated by mainstream directors who thought that a modern version of a Shakespeare play meant just putting the actors into modern dress with modern scenery, without paying any attention to the text or the shape of the play.”
What had started as a student theatre company in the UK took on a more mature form in the Emirates when she began attracting regional talent and experimenting with moulding classics into the context of local culture.
That's when Salah, a young rookie actor who had just dropped out of an economics programme at Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, turned up to audition for her play Cocktail in 2011.
“I read for the role of Alex, a wild, crazy character,” says Salah. “It was so foreign for me to be someone else, but it was worth trying.”
But he says his heart wasn’t in acting. “I wasn’t much of an actor. I think it takes a certain amount of vanity to be one and I’m not vain enough,” he says with a grin.
He decided to stay on but as an assistant to Hannan in the day-to-day running and creative process of the company. When they began reworking scripts with an Emirati take, and translating Arabic plays by Emirati playwright Saleh Karama Al Ameri, he pitched in.
"The first play I worked on was The Rivals," he says. "We wanted to work on Emiratising scripts from 200 to 300 years back. I began by adding references, names and places. The costumes were really wacky. That was the beginning of my learning process.
“The experience has been great and, looking back, I don’t know what I would be doing if it wasn’t for this theatre.”
Salah is now is enrolled in a media-studies programme at Zayed University.
His first order of business as Resuscitation’s director is to encourage young Emiratis, especially women, to take up acting as a serious career. Hannan interjects at this point, saying she doesn’t see them overcoming that challenge anytime soon.
Saleh agrees he has a difficult road ahead.
“We usually have girls who haven’t told their parents that they want to act and so they have to make excuses to come and rehearse,” he says. “And then they can’t have their pictures in the media. They usually hang around for one show and then it becomes too hard for them to continue.”
Saleh also wants to change the misconceptions about theatre among traditional families.
“Within the Emirati society, unless the parents are into art or theatre, it is always viewed as lowbrow comedic street theatre,” he says. “I refer to it as ‘the dancing monkey theory’. Khaleejis who aren’t exposed to performing art see an actor or play as something that is just cheap entertainment. And it is hard to convince them that it is more than that.”
Salah and Al Jadir say they intend to get more Emiratis interested in classical theatre by making it more relatable to the audience.
“We are self-professed comedians,” says Al Jadir. “So our first play will be a bit of comedy to flex our brain cells with, The Comedy of Errors. We will put that in an Emirati setting with Emirati actors. Hopefully, it’ll be a success.”
“Within a year we want to secure an office where we can store our files and props,” Salah says. “We want to come off as legitimate and for that we want a sort of black box theatre space where we can put on shows without having to rely on expensive venues.”
“Our work has been intimate,” says Hannan. “We work in small spaces because we like audience interaction, and so we cannot fill spaces such as the Emirates Palace, which sponsors look for. That has been our issue with private funding.”
Salah says he is in talks for government funding and hopes to establish a grass-roots initiative in the art hub at Saadiyat.
“Theatre is as important as the museums in adding value to the culture of the city,” he says.
aahmed@thenational.ae
