vallierojas: One Thousand and One Nights: Dangerous liaisons

One Thousand and One Nights is this year's big Edinburgh show. Its director tells Hermione Hoby how it was almost scuppered by the Arab spring ? and why he added big rubber penises

Directors love to moan about how hard taking a show to the Edinburgh festival is, but few of them have ever had to deal with a full-scale revolution. Six months ago, Tim Supple was in Egypt, about to start rehearsals for his production of One Thousand and One Nights (originally translated into English as The Arabian Nights). He'd spent months travelling around the Arab world, casting actors from Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Lebanon. His 25 actors were finally assembled in Egypt and all set to begin rehearsing when, on 25 January, the uprising began.

So they relocated to Fez, Morocco, rehearsing in the courtyard of the ancient El Mokri palace. The logistical challenges of a last-minute change of country were stressful, says Supple; but they were nothing compared with the "psychological and emotional heat within the company" generated by the Arab spring, as the cast followed from afar the news of often drastic events in their home countries.

We meet in Toronto, where Supple's epic production premiered in two three-hour instalments. At a cafe near the theatre, his tea grows cold as he enthuses about first reading the original stories. It was like encountering "a list of unravelling surprises", he says ? a phrase that well describes his production. Stories beget stories as the tellers of tales transform into their characters. This narrative unravelling is matched with extravagant visual unfurlings: lengths of fabric are whipped out from the stage's edge to create a palace floor, or tumble from above to form a column around the heroine Shahrazad as the king traps her in his chamber.

The tales begin in the palace, where the king, enraged after witnessing his wife's infidelity, kills her and then embarks on an absurdly violent grieving process that involves sleeping with and slaughtering a different virgin every night. Shahrazad ? whom history has painted as a cypher at worst, a sex object at best ? offers herself to the king, seeking to save herself (and therefore the kingdom's women) by keeping the king so spellbound with her stories that he keeps postponing her execution.

Supple, like many, first encountered the stories as a child. He remembers growing up with an edition whose cover had "the classic 18th-century image of the turbanned, big-bearded guy with a scimitar sword". That, he says, "is an orientalist image of an Ottoman world. The fact that it's become this nebulous exotica ? well, it speaks volumes about the last three or four hundred years of cultural relationships between east and west. Only when I started reading them properly did I discover what they really are. There's no veil of soft focus, they're bluntly frank. They are about the basic issues of adult social existence: money, marriage, justice, sex."

Particularly sex. Supple gleefully describes the tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies (in which a hapless porter follows a woman through the market and home to her two sisters) as "a sort of fantasy sex comedy, like a Carlsberg advert". Indeed, a mere five or so minutes into his show, the stage is full of men sporting enormous black rubber penises as they cavort with slave girls.

"Where to go from there?" Supple grins. But he insists that neither he nor Hanan al-Shaykh, the Lebanese author Supple enlisted to translate the stories, have upped the rudeness. As with his A Midsummer Night's Dream, the sumptuous and acclaimed 2007 show he cast and premiered in India, the production is a multi-lingual, surtitled affair, switching between Arabic, French and English. "The three languages of the tales," says Supple. (The tales were first translated from Arabic to French in 1704, and then into English two years later.)

"I wanted all the creative team to come from within, not without," he says. "I wanted to visit these places to find out and see what's there. People in these cities had a stronger connection with it from their childhood, but they didn't know it. So it was a discovery together, it always has been."

Nanda Mohammed, one of the cast's Syrian actors, struggled with the urge to return home as her country's unrest escalated; but she began to see her involvement in the show as a patriotic act. "Art is always like this," she says, referring to the way the tales' themes of democracy and the abuse of power came to resonate with world events. "I felt maybe it was fate, the chance to be in this project in this period, dealing with these very human stories."

Houda Echouafni, the Moroccan who plays Shahrazad, adds: "Absolute power is such a theme for us now in the Arab world. We've lived with it for so long. And to be speaking about it with everything that's happening is extraordinary. Of course, the sadness is that the probability of our show ever being shown in any Arab country is not very high."

I tell her I was blushing as I watched it. "So was my husband!" she says, explaining that some women at the Toronto shows came up to her afterwards to complain about the sexual content. "And it's quite funny, because I'm like, 'Have you read the originals? This is actually tame compared to them!' This is not to say that this was a project I've undertaken lightly ? I am an Arab, I have a husband, I have kids, I'm a Muslim. But these stories for me are just beyond that: they so need to be told. And I think it's wonderful to show Arabic stories, done by Arabs, with such freedom. I thought it was clear what it meant to be Muslim, what it meant to be Arab ? and these stories threw all that up in my face."

Hanan al-Shaykh echoes that thought. "They really teach you about humanity, about democracy," she says. "I mean, listen, back then any man could go to the caliph [ruler] and tell him, listen to me, I don't agree with this or that. So society was open, there was no segregation."

When asked how it felt to watch actors speaking her words for the first time, she says: "Oh, I was in tears! To see them switching between Arabic and English and French: it was like they were sorcerers or magicians. I was very, very moved. The upspringing" ? her word for the Arab revolution ? "is not just about politics, you know, it's about everything: literature, art, everything."

'Shahrazad, I love you now'

Al-Shaykh says she used to feel quite dismissive of the tales, and was rankled when book critics began to call her the "new Shahrazad". She explains: "Shahrazad to me was a cliche! She accepted that she was a prisoner of the king, she was very passive. I thought, 'I am modern, I am not like her.'"

Then she read the originals. "And I said, 'Sorry Shahrazad, I love you now!' She reminded me of so many women in my family, because they had to be wily and creative so they could survive. She was not just trying to save her sisters ? women ? everywhere. She was teaching the king, humanising him, changing his perspective."

Shahrazad is not the only character for whom storytelling is a way of saving her neck. The lives of various other characters occasionally depend on the power of the tales they weave: when the story is sufficiently enchanting, would-be executioners soften into mercy.

Is the power of storytelling something we've lost in the west? Supple thinks for some time. "I hope the social art of telling a story, and the ability to listen to stories, is transforming, not dying," he says. "You find that in times of political struggle, it becomes more important again ? like in Palestine, in Beirut, in South Africa ? because it's so easy and free and light-footed. Whenever people have something urgent to say, they'll turn to that. I just think the Nights is bigger than history, really. Like Shakespeare, or any great folk work, history ebbs and flows within it."

Hermione Hoby

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