Naguib Mahfouz – un théâtre sur lui-même

Abstract

Naguib Mahfouz – A Theatre About Himself
The article reads Naguib Mahfouz’s “Project for Debate” (“Mashrūʿ li-l-munāqaša”) as a form of strategic metatheatre shaped by the post-1967 crisis. Set in a theatre’s administrative office, the play lifts the curtain on production mechanisms and converts plot into a debate on the aims and limits of representation. Its five figures – Playwright, Director, Actor, Actress, and Critic – operate as theatrical functions competing for symbolic hegemony, hybridizing “theatre-within-the-theatre” and “theatre-about-the-theatre”. The analysis stages a tension between the Playwright’s text-centrism and the Actor’s stage-centrism (the primacy of presence), engaging Sartre, Pirandello, Ionesco, and – at a theoretical horizon – Artaud and Brecht. The play unsettles single-center realism, builds a mise en abyme of making a show, and positions the spectator as a co-constructor of meaning. It ultimately frames Mahfouz’s modernity as an open negotiation of artistic powers and as an “anti-cogito” of the stage – presence before idea – deliberately keeping truth plural, partial, and provisional.