THEATRE REVIEW:
ONE THOUSAND
AND ONE NIGHTS
13 JUN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3 out of 5

TORONTO - It is the most expensive commission in the brief and certainly colourful history of Luminato, the upstart arts festival that is currently trying to capture our city and the world in an artful net. But in the wake of the world première of Dash Arts Production’s ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS at the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Opera Centre Saturday, one can’t help but think that organizers should have at least scored substantial discounts to the more than $1 million they purportedly poured into the production simply for buying in bulk.

A compendium of folk tales from across the breadth of the Arab world, compiled and adapted by Hana al-Shaykh, then dramatized and directed by Tim Supple, this is nothing if not an ambitious undertaking, even with the number of tales distilled to 20 individual but oddly interconnected stories, split into two instalments that add up to more than a six-hour running time.
These are not, it might also be noted, anything a childhood exposure to the tales of Shahrazad might lead one to expect, for all that they share the same starting point: a suspicious king whose mistrust of women drives him to take a new virgin to his bed every night only to kill her in the morning. Then, of course, he encounters Shahrazad, a brave spinner of tales who survives, not on sexual prowess, but rather on her skills as a spinner of tales of the cliff-hanger variety, which she delivers on a nightly basis to forestall her own execution.

Brought to life by a committed cast of 24, drawn from across the Arabic-speaking world, these are raunchy vignettes, filled with sex and intrigue, spread over a sprawling and largely empty thrust stage designed by Oum Keltoum Belkassi and lit by Sabri El Atrous. Performed in a mixture of Arabic, French and (usually highly accented) English, it features simultaneous translation that, on occasion, proves rather dodgy.

In addition to the high commitment of the cast, there are some lovely costumes, courtesy of Zolaykha Sherzad, and some pretty explicit albeit highly stylized sexual content, wrapped in a discomfiting look at archaic attitudes towards sex and women that sadly only the most ill-informed might label as exclusive to the Arab world.

But in the end, it all seems to add up to significantly less than the sum of all its parts, for while Supple imposes a highly theatrical style on things, what he produces never really rises too much beyond the level of illuminated storytelling. It’s the kind of show that would be highly entertaining if one stumbled across it in the square of an ancient city and stopped to enjoy it for an hour or two, but in taming it for the conventional stage, Supple fails to impose any sort of new or thrilling context for what is essentially, simply old-fashioned tale-spinning. In a world accustomed to the soaps, this is mere gossip — finally, more a triumph of endurance than of art.