Inherited and immigrant dialectics in the Egyptian performance theatre

This study examines an inherently problematic issue, namely the origin of Egyptian theater, especially the vaudeville theater. The study hypothesizes that the formation of the Arab theater in general, and the Egyptian theater in particular, was influenced by the two most prominent intellectual trends in the mid-nineteenth century in the fields of Arab thought and culture in general. In this context, the trends of authenticity and modernity, as intellectual trends, are inherently influencing Arab creativity in its various forms. This produced is called the western elements and heritage dialectic of the Egyptian vaudeville theater; where the formal and substantive structure of the texts of these plays was evident, relying in their formation on a dialectic/controversy between the Arab heritage and the western elements. Thus, the study seeks to analyze these plays in order to unveil the dialectic/controversy between the heritage and western elements, which are the actors that shaped these texts in both aesthetic and substantive terms. In view of the above, this complex formation of the Egyptian vaudeville theater, especially Ali Al-Kassar’s Theater, has forced the researcher to use a complex methodology that proceeds from the analysis of the formal and substantive aspects of these vaudeville plays, on the one hand, and the application of the concept of dialectic adopted in this study, on the other.