22 August 2006 Written by Andrew Eglinton Print This Post  Email This Post

Kalila Wa Dimna (The Mirror for Princes) was performed by Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre Company at the Barbican Pit from the 10th to the 27th of May, before going on to the Oxford Playhouse. The play was written and directed by Anglo-Kuwaiti Sulayman Al-Bassam in collaboration with designer and video artist Julia Bardsley, assistant director and performer Nigel Barrett (also a member of the Shunt Collective), lighting designer Chahine Yavroyan, and music composer/performer Lewis Gibson.

Before getting to the discussion about specific parts of the production, I want to explain the basic plot and background history to the play.

• Background & Plot

The play opens at the dawn of the Abbasid Revolution (750 AD) and ends just after the murder of the play’s main character, the court scribe and creator of the Kalila Wa Dimna tales, Ibn Al-Muqaffa (circa 759-762 AD). According to the entry in Wikipedia, ‘Abbasid’ (Arabic: العبّاسيّون Abbāsīyūn) was the:

dynastic name generally given to the caliphs of Baghdad, the second of the two great Sunni dynasties of the Islamic empire, that overthrew the Umayyad caliphs from all but Spain. It seized power in 750, when it finally defeated the Umayyads in battle, and flourished for two centuries, but slowly went into decline with the rise to power of the Turkish army they had created, the Mamluks. Within 150 years of gaining power across Iran they were forced to cede power to local dynasties who only nominally acknowledged their power and cede the Maghreb to independent Aghlabids. Their rule was finally ended in 1258, when Hulagu Khan, the Mongol conqueror, sacked Baghdad. While they continued to claim authority in religious matters from their base in Egypt, the dynasty’s secular authority had ended. Descendants of the Abbasids live in modern day Iraq.

Amidst the Abbasid revolutionary fever that has spread throughout Iraq and neighbouring lands, the poet/scribe Ibn Al-Muqaffa and his fellow poet Bashar are walking through the streets of Basra where a grand, bloodlust reception for the first Calipha Al-Saffah and his elder brother Al-Mansour is being prepared by the governor of Basra, Sulaiman, and the scheming courtier Sufyan. Sufyan intercepts the wandering scribes and challenges their presence as Persian imposters, but Al-Muqaffa’s alluring rhetoric wins Sulaiman’s approval and grants them safe passage. Asia, cousin of Al-Mansour follows Al-Muqaffa and persuades him that he is needed in Basra to rally the people through the ‘power of the pen’ against the brutal Calipha and his general who threaten the lives of Umayyid sympathisers. Muqaffa is rapt by Asia’s beauty and desires her love, but Asia is defiant and says “only in Basra would I love you”. Her plea is for Muqaffa to infiltrate the Calipha’s ranks and use the power of his stories to quell the tyrannical regime from the inside. Thus the fables of Kalila Wa Dimna become a political weapon, with a chance to change the political landscape. The history behind the Kalila Wa Dimna tales is complex and the entry in Wikipedia gives a mere whistle-stop tour of their history:

Kalilag and Damnag in Syriac or Kalila wa Dimna كليلة و دمنة in Arabic, is the name of the translation into Syriac of the Sanskrit Panchatantra literary work of fables originating in India. It was translated to Pahlavi Persian then into Syriac, then into Arabic, and from there to European languages. Thomas Irving (1980) further states that from North Africa the stories were carried south to Sub-saharan Africa, and on to North America by African slaves.

The book is about symbolic wisdom fables put in the mouths of animals. All the tales have a moral message, and many have a political undertone.

Two main figures are the jackals Kalila and Dimna (Sanskrit: Karataka and Damanaka). The main narrator is the philosopher (Hakim) Bidpai (Arabic: Baydaba, French Pilpay), who is asked for a fable by the king Dabshalim.

Later on in the play and Muqaffa has become the official court scribe and advisor to the Calipha. Al-Mansour demands a performance of Kalila Wa Dimna in honour of the military high-commander, Abu Muslim, but the performance is sabotaged and Abu Muslim killed. Al-Muqaffa is told by Asia that in one of her ‘visions’ his writing will cause a revolution and bring with it ‘the real religion’ and ‘the real empire’. In reaction to her vision, Muqaffa pleads with the Calipha to retire from the court and take leave. This request is denied and Muqaffa and Asia are kept in a room under surveillance and forced to finish the animal fables. Muqaffa hears that his tales are spreading amongst the people, and the political messages are beginning to take root, just as in Asia’s vision, but before Muqaffa can witness the effect of his words, he is summoned to court by Sufyan (now Governor of Basra) who tries Muqaffa for heresy and Muqaffa is murdered. Asia and Bashar continue to spread the tales after Muqaffa’s death in an attempt to put an end to Al-Mansour’s empire.

• The Space

Entering the space, the first impression I got was one of ‘depth’ and ‘energy’. The sense of depth came from the very simple yet effective use of black, gauze-like curtains drawn around the three sides of the stage (see the rough diagram from my notebook below). A simple change in lighting state would allow the curtains to invite or block the audience’s gaze, adding the potential for distinctive ‘background’ and ‘foreground’ layers to the performance. Sometimes these background ‘corridors’ were inhabited by the performers, sometimes they were the object of video projections and/or puppet and mask scenes, but by isolating parts of the space in this way and superimposing them as alternate layers to the whole performance canvas, the audience experienced alternate, meta-theatrical narratives that ran parallel to the play’s main story and action. Pluralism of action in space, in my view, is a pillar of any living, breathing theatre - it is part of the definition of a theatre ‘environment’. Part of the reason for this is the way we perceive life as pluralistic - in any given situation there are a mulitude of facets and angles, life is ‘chaotic’ in essence and exists in stark contrast to minimalism or singularity which is a man-made and heavily contrived state only sustainable and effective in short, sharp bursts. Finding the balance between the two states is vital in all art forms, and Kalila Wa Dimna is in that sense a well balanced piece.

The impression of ‘energy’ came from the live musicians tucked away behind the curtains stage left. Their space was small and barely lit by pilot lights; the effect was almost cave-like, a ‘cave’ in which the audience caught the occasional glimpse of silhouettes concocting mesmeric sounds. Live music, and the inclusion of the musician in performance is another pillar of the living, breathing theatre environment. Recorded sound is equally as valuable in contributing to the world of a performance, but by cancelling out the human source of the music we are stripping away another layer of the kernel of theatre: the experience of other people telling a story - and music is like language, another storytelling device that covers the gamut of human emotion. I would have liked to see even more inclusion of the musicians in this piece, perhaps with heightened lighting states that bring the muscians into focus at key points.

• Performance ‘Memory’

In the main performance space there were four mirror-like (but transparent) movable screens arranged side by side, with a rough contour map of the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia to Iraq inscribed on them from the beginning. These screens not only served as a changing dynamic in the architecture of the main performance space, but they became locus of ‘performance memory’ - silent and statuesque.

As the play evolved, the ‘Jackal’, a wandering character wearing a full-faced black jackal mask, ‘orchestrated’ the history of the performance by writing pivotal words, expressions and diagrams from the play, over the screens, so that by the end of the performance when the screens were lined up right at the front of the stage and a beam of light moved slowly across them, the audience had one last look at the ‘memory’ of the play. It felt almost like a testament or epitaph to the life of the performance, a statement reminding us that life exists within the walls of this theatre and it is worthy of celebration and remembrance just as it is on the outside. I have seen the device of writing on stage used time and time again in performance, but never with this level of focus and integration into the piece as a whole. In Kalila the inscriptions enhance the environment, they bring texture to the set, and meaning to play, and they form the leitmotif of the power of the written word.

• The mythical dimension

The tales of Kalila Wa Dimna are “animal fables spun around the two Jackals and their dealings in the court of their king - the Lion. They are stories within stories; each tale unfolding and leading another beast’s dilemma, anectdote, tribulation.” (Excerpt from the Programme) The concept of a story within a story is what prompts the mulitude of layers in Sulayman’s Kalila, not only physical layers with action in space but also psychological layers within characters and overlapping stories. One clear example of this is the Jackal character. This is a silent character, fully masked and dressed in black that roams freely around the space, at times intervening in the action in the main space by moving objects or simply watching other characters and, as mentioned before, by writing on the screens. The Jackal was extracted from the original Kalila tales, which feature a pair of Jackals, and personnified/physicalised on stage. The form of this figure with its dark and mysterious demanour, and the iconic shape of the mask was reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis:

“The jackal-god of mummification, he assisted in the rites by which a dead man was admitted to the underworld. Anubis was worshipped as the inventor of embalming and who embalmed the dead Osiris and thereby helping to preserve him that he might live again.

Anubis is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal holding the divine sceptre carried by kings and gods; as simply a black jackal or as a dog accompanying Isis. His symbol was a black and white ox-hide splattered with blood and hanging from a pole. It’s meaning is unknown.

Anubis had three important functions. He supervised the embalming of bodies. He received the mummy into the tomb and performed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and then conducted the soul in the Field of Celestial Offerings. Most importantly though, Anubis monitored the Scales of Truth to protect the dead from deception and eternal death.”(Quote taken from www.egyptianmyths.net)

Through its recurring appearance in ancient mythologies, from Egypt to India and probably other cultures too, the presence of the Jackal on stage is in some ways the representation of an archetype; a figure whose primary function may not be fully understood by the spectator (and indeed does not require the ‘inflcition’ of clarity) but whose form with its mythological ramifications conjurs emotions that relate to a deeper/spiritual side of humanity. Thus, for me, the Jackal became a hinge between the animal tales of Kalila Wa Dimna being recounted and discussed on stage and the evocation of an underworld, a darker mythical element in the performance.

• Poetry, formalism and anachronism

Given the depth and multi-faceted nature of most elements I have discussed so far, it is unsurprising that the language of the play should also operate with varying modes and layers. The overall feel of the language was archaic in its formalism, deeply poetic with constant recourse to metaphor and similie and an acute awareness of rhyme and rhythm, and contrasted with moments of ‘anachronistic’ speech (in the sense of it feeling distinctly modern), especially from Muqaffa in his asides and casual dialogue with characters such as Asia and Bashar.

Two of the most arresting metaphorical images that remained in my mind after the performance were as follows. The first was in Act 1 scene 3:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Three things are perilous: entrusting yourself to a woman, and be-friending Kings.

ASIA: What’s the third?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Testing poison for strength.

Particularly the last line quoted here, which for me portended to Muqaffa’s fate; his words become his own poison that out-do him in strength.

The second was in Act 5 scene 5:

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: Palace. The perimeter is the halo and the palace is God.

BASHAR: Why is it on fire?

IBN AL-MUQAFFA’: To see it! They used ropes of wool doused in tar. The sky is orange.

BASHAR: Black night opened its wreaking orange gob
Wide as an oven stoked on poor human sods!

Without the changes in register of language and the contrast they created in performance, this text could have suffered from being over-dense, but instead Al-Bassam never allows the audience to get too ‘comfortable’ with one style or tone and in this sense the language of the play has its own dynamic within the overall performance.

• Multimedia

As I mentioned in the beginning, this performance was the result of a collaboration between artists, one of whom brought a fascinating visual depth the piece through the use of video and image projections, this was Julia Bardsley. Most notable were the projections of Arabic writing over the whole stage during major transitions, these moments worked as the ‘glue’ that held the hinges of the play together; then there was the more isolated video projection of a human eye - a very simple but strikingly evocative moment in the flow of the play. The eye, when seen up-close, has a rhythmical, mesmeric quality with the batting of the eyelid and the retraction/dilation of the pupil, it is also symbolic of the gaze - watching and being watched in a surveillance state and finally it represents the archetype of the all-seeing, omniscient god. In the latter sense the eye in Kalila reminded me of the great eye that appears between the hills of Hiroshima in Kurosawa’s last film Rhapsody in August - it is the eye of the storm, of destruction, but also of knowledge and power.

• Final Word

I’d like to extend my thanks to Sulayman for his kind consideration and invitation to the performance. You will be able to see his latest piece of work, The Baghdad Richard as part of the RSC Complete Shakespeare Season from 08-17 February 2007 at the Swan Theatre Stratford-Upon-Avon.