Khaled Al -Ruwaie
Throughout the years ago. I had an urgent desire to write another on the theater in Bahrain. A desire to discover the causes and stages, it was not understandable for me that the convoy of culture and arts pass without reviewing the causes of evolution, without opening the windows that have been stuck in struggles that were reduced in a literary, political or social context as if the arts and theater were specifically estimated to remain in its entertainment context, or thus what the majority of society thinks even those intellectuals from them.
This writing desires about a hundred years of theater in Bahrain motivated by the deep belief that the theater, as a mirror of collective awareness, and a field of cultural identity manifestations, did not enjoy enough systematic history contemplating its development and transformations. The theater in Bahrain, which extends since the beginning of the twentieth century, was not just an entertainment or educational activity, but rather a cultural project that contributed to the formation of national and social awareness, and stimulating intellectual and political transformations in society.
Despite my deep belief that art is the one that produces awareness to give the credit primarily to everything that is artistic, but the experience is a carrier and no harm in that. And here I am writing about a hundred years of theater in Bahrain because I see that this theater, despite the modernity of his relative experience compared to Western theatrical traditions, has produced unique intellectual and artistic models that deserve to be read within its local, Gulf and Arab context. I also aspire to restore forgotten experiences and dismantle the major paths through which the Bahraini theater: from the school theater, to the private theater, to the institutional theater, the pioneering theater.
Here I am not documented. Despite my belief that the documentation of this march does not only mean recording events and facts, but also dismantling the questions posed by the theatrical experience on itself and its society: questions of identity, freedom, expression, and modernity. Likewise, this writing represents an attempt to equate the generations that established, created, and confronted social and political challenges with the culture of theater.
Consequently, writing for a hundred years of theater in Bahrain is not just a celebration of a time ago, but rather a summons to the spirit of aesthetic and intellectual adventure that still inspires us in our endeavor towards a more starting theater, and more able to express the human being and his multiple identity.
In every play I watched or participated in its manufacture, I felt that I was continuing a long thread that others started before me. A thread of dream, passion, and experimentation. From here, I was born my deep desire to write about a hundred years of theater in Bahrain: not as a cold documentation of dates and events, but rather as an attempt to understand the human journey that the first theatricals fought, and those that are still fought to this day.
I write because I realize that the theater in Bahrain was never marginalized despite its continuous marginalization attempts, but rather was always at the heart of the community movement, breathing its transformations, and carving its questions on the stage. I write because I believe that every theatrical performance, no matter how simple or temporary, has an effect that accumulates in the memory of culture, and pushes us towards the accountability of ourselves: Who are we? What do we want to be?
I write about this theater because I believe that a hundred years are not just a chronological extension, but rather a journey of searching for meaning, which was fought by school boys, the pioneers of cultural clubs, the civil teams, then the professionals, each in his own way, and all of his passion, in the face of social, political and cultural transformations.
With this writing, I aspire not only to review what happened, but to light a cold darkness, to hear the voices that disappeared, and to present a reading that tries to see the theater in Bahrain not only as an artistic producer, but as a living part of the Bahraini spirit, in its resistance to the state, and in its adherence to the dream.
The story is not merely a history of theatrical performances or teams that were formed, but rather the biography of a homeland who chose to express himself through the stage, and to see himself through the actor, and the tone of voice at the height of the event. The theater in Bahrain was not a transient spectrum in the space of culture. Rather, it was – over a full century – a mirror of society’s transformations, and a secret book in which the Bahraini person wrote his hopes, concerns, and concerns.
I claim this, because at least I lived around me and read these secret notebooks that are crowded in the issuance of his books. How did she say in the movement of an actor’s hand that did not say a journalistic article or an inserted speech that promoted the future as a sacrifice and forgot the present as a trap.
Beginnings
(1925-2025) is a hundred years on the stage in Bahrain, and not all countries want their luck to have that. 100 years are not a few. In the beginnings of the theater, it occurs that the care of these performances is always in the name of the owner of the greatness, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa (the first), may God rest his soul. It occurs in this year that the theater is during the reign of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa (the second), may God protect him. The first seed began in a land that did not know the stage yet, but rather knew the word, and the eye that looks to a new horizon. To start with a shy journey, but it is charged with hope. Despite its simplicity, in cultural soil, deep roots were planted.
When the curtain rose for the first time – and this is definitely a metaphorical expression – at the Al -Hidaya Al -Khalifiya School in 1925, the scene was not merely the beginning of school performances, but rather a moment of birth that was said to be a theatrical in the midst of a volatile Arab time, in which the Arab mind is curious about the meanings of identity, power, and justice. The teachers of the school – and they are the educational elites saturated with the ideas of renaissance and reform – chose a remarkable text of their first play (the judge of the ruler by the command of God). Which may be the choice in itself is an intention and is not without significance, and it is not without boldness. No one knows who wrote the text despite the weighting of Dr. Muhammad al -Salman until it is quoted by the Egyptian author Ibrahim Ramzi (1), but I tend to be a poem that was formulated in a theatrical rhetorical manner performed by the school students.
In the time after the fall of the Ottoman caliphate, and amid the rise of the Arab national tide, societies were looking for symbols that established their new discourse: the discourse of liberation from tyranny, and a return to the essence of justice. Hence, Islamic history was a fertile time theater to represent this conflict, in a symbolic form that mimics the present through the past. The ruler, by the command of God – the Fatimid Khalifa, known for his political and religious fluctuations – represented a complex model of the absolute colonial authority, while the “judge” came as an imaginary figure walking over a tight rope between the authority of the ruler and the requirements of justice.
The theater here was an intellectual educational tool, more than it was an entertainment activity. The teachers in the Khalifiyah guidance realized that the stage is able to move the residents in the awareness of the students, so they formulated a symbolic scene that highlights the eternal tension between conscience and power, between the jurist who fulfills what satisfies the Sultan, and the judge who weighs matters with the balance of justice.
The theater was not a public space in the full sense, but it was a small window that overlooks big questions. Most of the Arab countries were either under British mandate, British colonialism or French colonialism, and the educational modernization was going at a hesitant pace, but national education began to form quietly, carried on the shoulders of men who knew that reform starts from consciousness, and that art – when it is investing its employment – is able to instill values that the curricula alone cannot communicate.
Othman Al -Hourani .. The spiritual father of the Bahraini theater
According to Dr. Abdul Hamid Al -Maadin and Mubarak Al -Khater, no one will mention exactly when Othman Al -Hourani arrived in Bahrain. But it is likely that between 1925 and 1926, but I tend to reach in 1925 and he was behind the presentation of the play “The Ruler’s Judge by the command of God”. It was not known in that era before his arrival that others took care of the theater until he transferred the theatrical activity to the girls ’school at the time.
Othman Al -Hourani, according to Mubarak Al -Khater, after his struggle in the Syrian revolution against the French occupation and his exit from Syria forced Iraq and from there to Bahrain. He practiced his cultural, literary and social activities within the framework of education and outside, until his intellectual, educational, political and cultural influence in the Bahrain society became a great weight, until he took over the management of Al -Hidaya School, then Director of Bahrain’s acquaintances in 1928, the most important of which was the sending of the first official Gulf mission in 1928 to the University of Beirut, American, and he also developed the school theater and presented several plays in the historical theater, and was behind the emergence of the first modern education for the girl in Bahrain in 1928. In addition to its founding Al -Khulaifi Sports Club in 1928.
The choice of the play “Judge of the Ruler by the command of God” was at the time, as a moment of early awareness in Bahrain, a moment when the educational elite said its first word, not only in the field of education, but in the emerging space space. The moment when these elites realized that the theater could be a parallel court, through which history and reality are asked together.
With this, the Bahraini theater was born in the womb of the major Arab transformations, and from the beginning it was clashed with human issues, identity and justice. It was not long passed until the first seed grew, and school performances continued in 1927 in the two playgrounds “Western West on Kisra” and “Imru Al Qais”, then in 1928 in the play “Abu Al -Qasim Al -Tanbouri” and “Thaalbah”, calling on the birth of a passion for an acting art.
(1) Historical features from the Bahraini theater – d. Muhammad Hamid Al -Salman.
the pictures:
– The owner of greatness, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa bin Ali Al Khalifa, when attending the graduation ceremony of students, which includes theatrical performances.
– The poet Ibrahim Al -Areed
– The poet Abdul Rahman Al -Ma’awida
Professor Othman Al -Hourani, average of his colleagues.
