Stage is set for Saudi Arabia school theatre revival

On the west side of Riyadh, the largest entertainment complex in Saudi Arabia opened in 2021. Construction of the lavish theme-park inspired The Boulevard, which is said to be modelled on New York’s Times Square, was completed in just four months.

We’re here to see a play written by two Saudi women, Ilham Ali and Fouz Al Abdullah, who also star alongside popular Egyptian female comic actor Shaima Saif.

The theatre is full and the majority of the audience are women, of all ages. Young, non-hijabi women in jeans sit next to their friends in traditional clothes, their hair intermittently covered and uncovered.

The play, a story of a woman killed by an abusive husband who meets other women like her after death, is presented as a comedy, but also as a story of solidarity among women in an afterlife populated by dim-witted, zombie-like men.

Titled An Hour of Hope, it’s one of the highlights of the 2022 Riyadh Season, a festival of entertainment established by the Saudi government in 2019.

Scoping the School Theatre Initiative

We’re in Saudi Arabia to prepare for a major research and development project commissioned by the country’s Ministry of Culture.

The School Theatre Initiative aims to train one teacher in every government school in the kingdom in drama and theatrical production.

At a superficial level, our project is purely educational, enriching the experience of Saudi children and young people, and developing the knowledge and skills of the country’s teachers.

But this project is economic and political, too, helping to grow a pipeline of talent into the performing arts industries that are important to the kingdom’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, while also providing entertainment and cultural activities to a young and energetic population, two-thirds of which is under 30, and eager for change.

In recent years, the pace of change in Saudi Arabia has been rapid. In April 2016, the Crown Prince announced Vision 2030, a national agenda for economic and social reforms.

This strategic plan came in response to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute that predicted dire implications for the Saudi economy due to the oil price slump that year.

A key focus of the report was the need to shift into a “productivity-led economic transformation” by diversifying the country’s oil-based economy.

Three themes run through Vision 2030 – “a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and an ambitious nation”. Education is a key conduit to creating a vibrant society, and will be the means to stimulate the growth of cultural and entertainment institutions and economies, as well as solidifying a sense of Saudi national identity.

The links between the introduction of theatre training for teachers and social reform are clear to many.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya News, Mohammed Al-Sohaimy, a Saudi playwright and columnist, said Saudi theatre went through a systematic eradication by Islamic radicals for more than 40 years.

For him, news of reactivating school theatre, and theatre and drama venues in the kingdom, sends a message of launching a new era of liberal arts focusing on theatre and performing arts that will develop students’ personal skills and talents so they can contribute fully to society.

Huda Al-Rehily concluded in her recent master’s thesis that:

“... school theatre effectively contributes to building the future skills and dispositions desired by Vision 2030, namely responsibility, leadership, productivity and a lively culture.”

So the importance of having theatre in Saudi schools goes beyond even the most expansive notion of curricular/extracurricular activities, and is directly linked to societal transformation.

What is the Monash Faculty of Education doing?

For a university such as Monash that seeks to make a global impact by stimulating and supporting positive change, this project is well-aligned to the values of the University’s own strategic plan, Impact 2030.

The kind of society the kingdom wishes to become is almost unimaginable in its difference to its recent past, and the development of theatre and the performing arts – especially in educational contexts – will have a critically important role in helping people imagine that new kind of society, just as Ilham Ali and Fouz Al Abdullah’s play showed us.

Monash supports that change, and will work closely with the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Performing Arts Commission to help train up to 28,000 teachers – across all of the government schools – in drama and theatrical production, in ways that are respectful and sustaining of the indigenous traditions of performance such as oral storytelling, satirical shadow puppetry, and religious ritual.

The team will research this major, country-wide intervention using Change Laboratories, the Finnish methodology that draws on a theory of change known as third-generation activity theory, developed by Yrjö Engeström and Annalisa Sannino, a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education.

While Monash’s theatre practitioner partners (the UK-based Peepolykus Theatre Company) lead the training, the Monash research team will be generating data on the ground in-country, across a national sample of schools, and bringing that data together with the theory in the hands of the Saudi teachers.

A drama of hope

In several ways, introducing drama and theatrical production into Saudi Arabian schools is high-risk. We can’t think of another country in the world that has decided its government-funded schools need more theatre, and cultural activities more generally, and that is prepared to fund a national professional development program for teachers to achieve those aims.

Overall, therefore, the Saudi Arabian School Theatre Initiative promises to be a “drama of hope”, with some deep learning required by everyone involved, including Monash and Peepolykus, the teachers and principals, and the relevant Saudi ministries.

As the playwright Arthur Miller said of theatre itself, it’s a serious business.