Chris Ryman (tailor),
Simon Trinder (beg-
gar) and Harvey Virdi
(tailor’s wife), RSC
Arabian Nights.
“i hAvE triED to bE truE to thE CulturE AND soCiEty whiCh of CoursE
wAs vEry islAMiC. thE lEvEl of sophistiCAtioN iN lAw iN thosE
CulturEs wAs rEMArkAblE; EvErythiNg wAs vEry MEAsurED.”
who wouldn’t have considered it. We get 3,000 unsolicited tales meant there would be obvious limitations when it came to
scripts a year at the Royal Court but what we weren’t get- adapting it. Cooke had to keep in mind a family friendly audi-
ting were many plays from BME writers and specifically from ence when selecting the stories, “there was so much to choose
Muslim writers, so we’ve got a scheme for them,” he explains. from that I wanted to do an adult version, but got distracted!”
“It’s because we want to get those stories and voices on our stage. The play, which is split into two acts, contains six tales
Often people whose voices are excluded from the mainstream including the story of Ali Baba and Es-Sindibad the sailor
have the most interesting things to say and the most urgent (both of which were added in much later versions of the text in
need to be heard.” Indeed, it was a participant of this very Europe), and the Woman Who Wouldn’t Eat. Cooke was able
scheme, Alia Bano, who won for the Royal Court one of its four to revise his previous adaptation to a grander scale for the RSC
awards at the Standards Theatre Awards for Most Promising production and was keen to make it as authentic as possible,
t
z
Playwright of 2009. keeping the shape of the original written versions. “I went back
u
rt
E
k
The narrative device employed in the epic is one that has to the original stories in more detail and did further research
E
lli
been frequently adopted throughout literature and the oral tra- about what medieval Arabic society might have been like, and it
o
N
/
dition. The story within a story has been used far and wide, informed what we did. My favourite tale is the Envious Sisters
is
from Homer’s Odyssey in the 8th century BC to Emily Bronte’s - it’s a piece about growing up and evolving as a human being
A
t
t
h p
Wuthering Heights in 19th century Victorian England. Cooke into an adult, and learning from the struggles in life. It’s very
E
i
t
acknowledges the far reaching influence of the text. “The story redemptive.” He also cites the morals of each tale and the explo-
y k
of Arabian Nights informed a lot of Western literature and ration of the human condition as its broad appeal: “For me,
there’s also the journey the other way. It’s wonderful - it’s like what’s wonderful about these stories is that they deal with uni- r
A
p
h
y b
Russian Dolls; there’s seven generation of stories within one versal situations and they are spiritual in that they are talking t
og
another.” However, the depth and breadth of the collection of about higher values in life and what is important. These key p
ho
40 emel magazine |
www.emel.com
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