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Khayaal actors in action |
The Khayaal Theatre Company has become a household name among Muslims in the United Kingdom. It is the only theater company that draws upon a worldwide Islamic tradition not defined by nationality or ethnicity. It was recently applauded at the Globe Theater’s Shakespeare and Islam season. This season it is performing dramatizations of four stories from the Muslim world at the Globe and three other theaters in a production called Tales from Muslim Lands.
Setting up a successful theater company is by no means easy in an environment that is known for its snobbery and politics. Setting up a Muslim theater company that seeks to convey a spiritual message is even more difficult. Although many cultural and educational organizations have shown their support for Khayaal and a desire to collaborate in potential projects, and although its plays are popular with both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences, financial and moral support from the Muslim community in general is still shamefully lacking.
Khayaal Theatre Company treads a fine and difficult line, with many in the secular arts world not wishing to see a successful Muslim company on their territory and many Muslims criticizing it for being “un-Islamic.” Yet it continues to attract attention.
Tales from Muslim Lands adapts the Gizo story from the Hausa tradition; a tale from The Arabian Nights set in Iraq; a Hui tale from China; and the story of the merchant and the parrot from Rumi’s Masnavi. The order of the plays is intended to represent the soul’s movement from the material to the spiritual realms. The play takes place against a dramatic backdrop based upon a map drawn by Al-Idrisi. Onto the sail of a dhow, stills are projected of the landscapes of each country and traditional music is played in order to give the audience a taste of each culture.
The story of Gizo can be described as a “physical play” in that it is filled with comedy and action. In Incey Witty Spider, Gizo the spider manages to survive a famine by tricking elephant and hippo out of their surplus supplies of grain and fish. The acting in this play is lively and accompanied by Hausa drumming. Sam Adams plays a poetic and artful spider, while Tobin Saunders and Rob Marni are hilarious as elephant and hippo. This play immediately draws the audience into the drama.
Bling Bling Blind tells the story of blind Baba Abdalla and begins to move towards the spiritual realm. Abdalla, an Iraqi profiteer who is driven by greed, meets a dervish who uses his mystical powers to reveal hidden realms of abundant gold and jewels. While the profiteer is busy filling up his camel panniers, he notices that the dervish has tucked a little box of ointment into his jacket. The dervish explains that if it is applied to the right eye, the profiteer will be able to see all the wealth of the world; but if it is applied to left eye, he will go blind. Obsessed with gaining wealth, the profiteer insists on applying the ointment to both eyes, convinced that the dervish is merely trying to hide more riches. The merchant is then struck down with blindness and reduced to a humiliating state.
Sam Adams, Ruth D’Silva, and Andrew Joshi are excellent as camels, while Tobin Saunders effectively plays an Abdalla who becomes increasingly aggressive in his obsession with acquiring the treasure, then finally becomes broken, reduced to begging in the street.
A 20-minute interval takes place after these two plays, and the second half of the evening begins with the story of Hassan, a Hui boy whose father dies, leaving his mother struggling to make a living. Hassan remembers a piece of valuable advice his father once gave him: if they fall on hard times, they must go to the old man of Nanshan Mountain to seek an answer to their difficulties.
Peony Garden on Nanshan Mountain is a tale is about the barakah (blessings) that one receives for pursuing the path of selflessness. On his journey, Hassan meets a girl who cannot speak, an old woman whose jubjub tree mysteriously refuses to flower, and a fish that longs to fly. When Hassan goes to the old man of Nanshan Mountain, he receives the answers to all these quandaries, but he is not allowed to ask about his mother because he has used up the three questions that he is allowed.
Heartbroken, he begins his journey home. The fish cannot fly because its belly is weighed down with jewels. Hassan helps to take them out and he is allowed to keep them. The old woman’s jubjub tree does not flower because there is gold buried beneath its soil. Hassan helps to dig it out and he is allowed to keep it. As he returns to the girl’s house, she cries out—the old man of Nanshan Mountain said she would speak when she saw her bridegroom. Hassan finally returns to his mother with the means to help them out of poverty and he has a beautiful bride!
Sam Adams, who plays Hassan’s mother, particularly manages to convey a sense of desolation at having lost her husband and at having to survive as a widow. Andrew Joshi, playing Hassan, effectively uses mime and acrobatics to dramatize the effort of swimming rivers, climbing mountains, and enduring storms on his quest. Equally, he conveys a powerful sense of grief when he realizes that he has let his mother down by having used up his three questions—this is the loss that is felt by many on the journey of life. The audience enjoyed the matchmaking part, beginning when the mute girl cried out on seeing Hassan return and ending when they were married with the blessing of her father.
The final story, Man Take Thy Flight, features Leyli, a parrot kept in a cage by her devoted master, a merchant. Director Luqman ‘Ali has modified this story. In it, the merchant is a master weaver whose hands have become paralyzed with arthritis, yet this condition can be seen as a physical manifestation of spiritual paralysis. When he goes to India, he passes on a message from Leyli to the parrots in the forest, and one falls from a branch as if dead. On his return to Persia, the merchant tells Leyli what happened and she falls to the floor of her cage, as if dead. When the merchant takes her out, she is able to fly away. As she flies away, the merchant realizes that he himself has been trapped in materialism and the desire for social status. He determines from then on to change his life.
The actors are predominantly non-Muslim, demonstrating that the vision of Khayaal includes all—although I feel that if they had some love for Islam this would add more emotional depth to the drama.
It is easy to underestimate these apparently simple dramatizations, but they clearly speak to their Muslim and non-Muslim audience. They provide a sense of relief from the stresses of daily life in a world dominated by brutality and greed, and they remind us of a certain blessedness, which is all too easily forgotten in the culture of cynical materialism that has reached many parts of the globe today.
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