Emirati art has covered the gamut of human experience. But rarely, if ever, has it tackled the mundane quite like the new play Hamour Doesn't Leave the Cubicle, written by UAE playwright Ahmed Al Madloum.
His new theatrical project, which will hit the stage for the first time at Black Box, NYUAD Arts Centre, this weekend, tackles the human side of bureaucracy and what happens to people who get caught up in systems that operate beyond their control.
But does art tackle something so tedious and superfluous? There's no easy answer. For as long as systems such as these have existed, artists have been attempting to document and even lampoon, to very mixed results.
Luckily, some brilliant examples have cropped up over the years. In Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian film Brazil, bureaucracy is ridiculed as a large mindless machine whose mistakes, even the small ones, could alter the course of people’s lives. It is that type of satire that Al Madloum felt was needed when he wrote his play Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle.
Al Madloum, who previously worked in bureaucratic settings himself, tells The National that “every country has its own bureaucracy piece, and I thought that we needed one here". He also mentions works like Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and some of German writer Bertolt Brecht as inspirations for his play.
Al Madloum had been working on this script since 2021, and says that he went through many rewrites and improvements to reach this point. His drive to make it funny and accessible comes from his belief that theatre can be a force in soft power that enlightens as well as entertains.
“Bureaucracy exists everywhere now, at work, or even at home, we deal with some form of it and we all have stories about our experiences,” says Al Madloum. "Humans create the bureaucracy they live in, but then that bureaucratic system creates problems for them.”
Al Madloum says that he once thought the vignettes in his play could be performed at actual workplaces at the end of the workday, or as performance art pieces, before settling on a traditional theatrical setting. “I think theatre is the most durable form of literature after poetry. The novel is a new thing by comparison, but theatre has always been around," he says. "Theatre never dies, it could lay low for a while but always has a surge back to the top."
Al Madloum says that theatre shows in the UAE have been mostly restricted to two genres, academic theatre and comedic improvisational theatre. But he hopes this play, and others, can carve a space for a new movement of Emirati theatre that is satirical and smart. He also insists that satirical theatre can be prestigious and lean away from being hurtful to be informative rather than insulting.
Hamour Doesn’t Leave the Cubicle is directed by NYUAD alumnus Reem Almenhali, the play’s cast includes Emirati actors Abdullah Al Qassab, Shahad Alsaqqaf, Mohammad Arwani, Hassan El-Tahir and Mad-Rabdan. The play features a series of vignettes set in office space that include Emirati-centric cultural cues.
On working with Almenhali, Al Madloum says the perception when it comes to theatre is that the playwright’s work ends once that script is ready and then the director takes over completely. But for this project, he says there was a mutual effort from the two to bring the script to life. “We treated it like an open source without one singular commanding voice, each of us contributed without upsetting the other,” he adds.
Both shows are sold out and Al Madloum says they have received many invitations from other emirates to perform the play there, adding that he’s thrilled that the tickets have been hard to come by but assures there will be more shows in the future. And the play's journey won't stop there. Most notably, he says the play will be performed in New York next year, setting a potentially more ambitious course for the playwright's future.
