Theatre of Yemen

Theatre has been performed in Yemen since the early years of the twentieth century. It is, as elsewhere, a public and social genre: performances take place in cultural centers, at universities, at schools and language institutes, in public parks and squares, as well as at more intimate gatherings, such as wedding celebrations. By the count of one scholar of Yemeni theatre, a minimum of five hundred plays of all kinds have been performed in Yemen over the course of the last century, around three hundred and seventy of which are by Yemeni authors; there are also around one hundred published Yemeni play scripts.^[1] Some of these plays have taken uniquely Yemeni themes as their subject matter: particular moments or celebrated figures from Yemeni history, like Bilqis, the legendary Queen of Sheba; the 1962 revolution against the Hamid al-Din Imamate in the North; or the 1967 revolution against the British colonial forces in the South. But Yemeni performances have also drawn upon other traditions, including Egyptian drama, like the works of Yusuf Idris, Alfred Farag, and Tawfiq al-Hakim, and on texts by European playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Bertolt Brecht, and Luigi Pirandello. Performances vary in type from tragedy to improvised comedy, from musical to experimental theatre, from naturalistic plays to theatre of the absurd.