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Sharing A Doll’s House with Islamic Neighbours Julie Holledge Flinders University 154 This article critiques three productions of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House created within Islamic cultures, or for Muslim audiences, between 1994 and 2006.1 It addresses a simple question: If the character of Nora is an icon of the first wave of the European women’s movement and embodies the demand by women for the subjective freedom enjoyed by men in Western modernity, can it be adapted and shaped by another set of cultural determinants to create a different but equally potent icon of female emancipation? This question has a particularly relevance for the production history of A Doll’s House within Islamic cultures, because it is in these cultures that a colonial feminist discourse has been manipulated by British and American rulers to justify imperial and colonial ambition. From the British in nineteenth-century Egypt, to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Western governments have “used the issue of women’s position in Islamic societies as the spearhead of the colonial attack on those societies” (Ahmed 243). The conflation of the menace of terrorism, the Taliban and the torture of women by Laura Bush, former First Lady, in her November 2001 radio address, is typical of a colonial feminist discourse that justifies military intervention: The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists…Only the terrorists and the Taliban forbid education to women. Only the terrorists and the Taliban threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish. The plight of women and children in Afghanistan is a matter of deliberate cruelty, carried out by those who seek to intimidate and control (qtd. in Russo 561). This citing of cruelty towards women and children became, as Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood have convincingly argued, a convenient smoke screen to avoid public debate about the role of American foreign policy in creating the conditions Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée crcl june 2011 juin rclc 0319–051x/11/38.2/154 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours that had brought the Taliban to power (347). Afghanistan and Laura Bush may appear to be a far cry from the concerns of cultural transmission and A Doll’s House, but they are closer than the reader might imagine. Since 9/11, A Doll’s House has played a role in the soft diplomacy employed by the West to engage with its Islamic other. Nora’s Sisters, the most generously funded cultural program to be run by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been operational since 2006. In it, Norwegian Embassies host seminars with visiting Norwegian and local speakers to discuss issues of gender and equality. In most cases, the seminar concludes with a performance of A Doll’s House produced by local artists with Norwegian money. Islamic cities that have hosted Nora’s Sisters seminars include Ramallah, Banda Aceh, and Cairo. A seminar was planned in Kabul but was cancelled because of security concerns. The Nora’s Sisters program raises questions about the efficacy of using a text so identified with Western feminism to begin a dialogue with an Islamic other, particularly when the text itself is implicated in an 155 orientalist discourse. It may seem outlandish to suggest that a play enclosed within the bourgeois domestic world of nineteenth-century Norway contains a European orientalist discourse, but there are traces of it deep within the fabric of the play. In Ibsen’s first draft of the tarantella scene, Nora distracts Torvald from Krogstad’s letter by singing Anitra’s song from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. This is a song of adoration, describing how Peer is revealed as the Prophet, spreading light as he rides on his white horse across the North African desert. As Nora sings, Torvald turns to Dr. Rank and says: “But we must have cigarettes with it; real Turkish ones”; and the men sit and smoke, echoing the figure of Peer listening to Anitra while reclining on cushions in his Arab Chieftain’s tent, drinking coffee and smoking a long pipe. When Mrs Linde enters, Helmer says: “A picture of family life. What do you say to it?”; Dr. Rank adds, “Turkish, but pretty is it not?”. Mrs Linde agrees to plays the piano, and Nora dances, draped in her multiple veil-like shawls. Torvald surveys her body, comments on “the fine curve of the neck”, and concludes, “A wife is a good thing” (Perelli 122). Peer imagines his sexual slave with “Veils etc. cast aside”(Peer 4:7 113): “Every inch and fibre of you/Must accept me as its master./You shall have no will but mine” (Peer 4:7 116). Ibsen’s orientalist diversion in Peer Gynt, and its echo within the first draft of A Doll’s House, is clearly parodying the sexual fantasies of harems and slave girls found in European literature from the late seventeenth century onwards.2 The scenes critique the unacceptable face of gendered power relations in the bourgeois households of Northern Europe. However, by using these fantasies as the litmus test for male supremacy, Ibsen feeds the binary of the colonial feminist discourse that contrasts the supposed emancipation of women in Europe, with their implied powerlessness in the Muslim world. The most offensive aspect of Ibsen’s rewriting of the orientalist fantasy within Peer Gynt is Anitra’s misrecognition of Peer as the Prophet, which illustrates the then European misperception that Islam was synonymous with decadence. All the references to Turkish cigarettes and Turkish families have disappeared crcl june 2011 juin rclc from the final version of A Doll’s House, but in Torvald’s erotic fantasy of ravishing the peasant girl from Southern Europe, there is an echo of Peer Gynt’s fantasy of a sex slave from North Africa. And as Franco Perelli has pointed out, the Neapolitan tarantella contains both Spanish and Arabian influences (120). The binary structure that Ibsen uses to organise gender within his play creates a negative polarity that attributes sexual manipulation to subaltern femininity, and erotic fantasies of sexual mastery to bourgeois masculinity. It also creates a positive polarity that ties the dramatic action to the liberal secular assumption that all human beings have an innate desire for liberty. If this binary is central to A Doll’s House, can the play be re-located in an Islamic cultural framework? To investigate this question, this article looks at three versions of A Doll’s House: a film version from the Islamic Republic of Iran, directed by Dariush Mehrjui and released in 1993; an Egyptian production that opened the National Theatre Festival in Cairo in 2006; and a 2004 Dutch theatre production, directed by Gerrit Timmers and performed in 156 Arabic in the Netherlands by actors from Marrakech. All these productions were created by male directors in contexts where censorship was applied, or invoked, over the representation of female sexuality; and in cultures with a past or present history of colonial feminist discourse. I have concentrated on the adaptations authored by the three directors, rather than on the performances of the three Noras by Niki Karimi, Eiman El Eman, and Saadia Ladib. A short background briefing will preface the discussion of each production. The various comparative threads that link the versions of the play will be considered in the conclusion. ‘Bad Hejabi’ Days in the Suburbs of Tehran It is ironic that Sara, the most critically acclaimed of all the film versions of A Doll’s House, was produced in Iran during Ayatolleh Khomeini’s rule-and that in it Nora is veiled. The Director/scriptwriter Dariush Mehrjui, a major figure of new Iranian cinema, renamed Nora as Sara, and relocated her in an old suburb of Tehran.3 Secular liberal feminism is firmly associated in Iran with Western imperialism because the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), a regime supported by British Intelligence and the CIA, introduced legislation improving the status of women as part of its modernisation program. Women were given the vote, but for elections that were boycotted for lack of genuine opposition parties.4 The Pahlavi dynasty was eventually overthrown by a coalition made up of bourgeois, nationalist, and Marxist-Leninist parties, as well as religious activists-and women were active participants throughout the mass movement (Shahidian 8). It took several years for the Islamic Republic to silence the secular elements of this coalition. In a society where it is illegal for a woman to show anything other than her face and hands in public, the representation of the female body on the stage or in film is problematic.5 Sara was released in 1993, when theatre as a public art form was J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours 157 Fig. 1 Sara. Directed by D. Mehjuri, producted by H. Seifi and D. Mehrjui. Farabi Cinema Foundation, Tehran. 1993. crcl june 2011 juin rclc banned and film was (and still is) controlled by pre- and post-production censorship. The early nineties were a time of political uncertainty, following the Ayatolleh Khomeini’s death in 1989. The morality police, or komiteh, had enormous powers and used them indiscriminately, particularly against women who were arrested for letting a strand of hair escape their headscarves, a crime known as ‘bad hejabi’, or for travelling alone, or being seen in public with a man who was not a relative, or wearing slippers in the street. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote of the komiteh during this period: “they harassed people because they felt like it, looked for pretexts to intimidate them, and, when they found none, made them up…before you knew it, you were three days into an interrogation, being accused of anything from adultery to treason” (99). As a human rights lawyer, Ebadi succeeded in improving the legal status of women and children by arguing over interpretations of the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet: “Islam, like any religion, is subject to interpretation. It can be interpreted to oppress women and it can be interpreted to liberate them…If I’m 158 forced to ferret through musty books of Islamic jurisprudence and rely on sources that stress the egalitarian ethics of Islam, then so be it” (122). Just as Ebadi worked through Islamic jurisprudence to create legislation to improve the position of women, so Mehrjui, worked through the framework of Islamic family law to create his adaptation of A Doll’s House. In Iran, marriage is regarded as a contract in which women can insert divorce clauses, subject to their husband’s approval (Karmi 75). Men may marry up to four times, take mistresses as temporary wives, and can divorce with comparative ease. Child custody rights favour the father. Under Article 1170, a mother is given custody of her daughter until the age of seven, and of her son until the age of two; if she remarries she loses all rights over her children (Mir-Hosseini 67). In Mehrjui’s film, Hessam (Helmer) tries to separate Sara from her daughter; she defies her husband and insists on taking her three year-old with her when she leaves her doll’s house. Divorce is a possibility for Hessam; he threatens never to return to his home after reading Goshtasb’s letter at the bank. Sara never suggests that she will divorce Hessam, only that she will return to her father’s home. During the early nineties, female characters in Iranian films were idealised to conform to notions of Islamic purity. Mehrjui’s Nora had to be morally correct. As the dramatic action of the film focuses on the blackmail plot, the intrigue at the bank and the double letters from Goshtasb (Krogstad), Sara’s forgery of her father’s signature is essential to the plot. But with the exception of this single act of folly, justified by her devotion to her sick husband, every other blemish is removed from her character. A suggestion that Sara might have committed adultery to secure the loan is dismissed as preposterous. Sara does not flirt with her husband, and Dr Rank has disappeared from the story. There is no hint in Hessam of Helmer’s sexual fantasies, and the tarantella rehearsal is substituted with a party celebrating his promotion at the bank. At this gathering, it is the men who dance and the women who watch; a close-up of Sara shows her gently swaying to the music as a tear falls from her eye. If there is any lingering doubt in the audience’s mind regarding Sara’s honesty, a scene is inserted J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours in the bazaar where she demonstrates her financial integrity. At the height of her torment, in the middle of the night as Hessam sleeps, Sara kneels in silent prayer. This might suggest that Sara has more in common with Chaucer’s Patient Griselda than Ibsen’s heroine, but there is another more subversive text in the visual and emotional layers of this film. Shirin Ebadi described public space in Iran in the early nineties as a “charged and potentially hostile realm” (180), and there is a sense in the film that outside the home women are subject to constant surveillance; when Sima (Mrs Linde) and Sara stand together ‘immodestly’ laughing in the street, a car accelerates towards them, splattering Sima with water from the gutter. But the response of the women to this anonymous aggression is more laughter, and it is this constant avoidance of the pitfalls of melodrama that stops the female characters of Sara and Sima dwindling into martyrdom. In all the confrontation scenes between the men and women there is something comical about the male posturing; the women dismiss these tantrums with impatience and irritation. Finally, there is an incredible energy and resilience in Niki Karimi’s performance as Sara, as she strides through 159 the streets of Tehran with hejab flying, attempting to solve the blackmail plot. Two devices frame the film: sickness and sight. Hessam lies in hospital in the prologue, but he is brought back to health through Sara’s actions; as the film ends, he is sick once again, but this time he must heal himself. Paralleling Hessam’s sickness is Sara’s faulty vision: she has partially lost her sight through her secret labours as a seamstress, but her symbolic blindness can only be cured through her realisation of Hessam’s true nature. This double structure of sickness and sight implies that both characters will have to change in order to move forward. Or as Sara says in her final line: “we have to change a lot before we know where we are going”. Moving forward together, these characters will resolve their differences within an Islamic framework. It can be argued that the solution to the problem within their relationship lies in one of the most disputed of the Qur’anic verses, the gaymuma, which is interpreted either as giving men authority over women, or the financial responsibility for their well-being (Karmi 74). Mehrjui’s film succeeds in eliding the inherent bias towards liberal secular feminism in Ibsen’s text; and undermines the play’s binary structure by removing explicit sexuality and reaffirming the value of religious belief. The film succeeds in challenging the systemic gender inequalities within the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the extent of this challenge is circumscribed by state censorship, not only of the narrative, but also of the visual representation of female characters. Snow Falling in Alexandria A Doll’s House was first performed in Cairo at the Khedivial Theatre in 1892; it starred Janet Achurch and was the original Novelty Theatre production from London.6 Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General in Egypt, is unlikely to have accepted his invitation to the opening night. In Britain, Ibsen was the darling of the suffragists, and crcl june 2011 juin rclc 160 Fig. 2 A Doll’s House. Directed by Gamal Yakout. First performed at the Cultural Palaces’ Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre, Alexandria, June, 2006. J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours Cromer supported the other side; he was to become the President of the Men’s League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in 1909. His hostility to women’s emancipation in Britain did not prevent him from advocating colonial feminism in Egypt, where he declared that the seclusion of women and the practice of veiling was “the fatal obstacle” to “mental and moral development” of Egyptians (Ahmed 153). Apparently, it was not the separate spheres of men and women that Cromer disliked, but the oriental veil that hid Egyptian women from Western eyes. The first Arabic performance of A Doll’s House was broadcast on official Egyptian radio sometime between 1957 and 1962, along with ten other plays by Ibsen. According to Nehad Selaiha, theatre critic from the Al Ahram Weekly, the play was not performed on stage because it seemed “pallid and tamely conservative to the women of the 1960s generation who underwent military training in schools” (July 2006). The play may have been considered pallid in the sixties, but in June 2006, a company of unknown actors from Alexandria presented A Doll’s House at the Cultural Palaces’ Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre and had a popular success. The production transferred to a larger venue, and was invited to Cairo to open the first National Theatre Festival. The Festival program included thirty-seven of the best professional, commercial, independent, and amateur theatre productions seen in Egypt in the previous two years. On the final night of the Festival, a panel of judges gave three awards to the Alexandria production: best newcomer director to Gamal Yakout; best newcomer actress to Eiman El Eman for her performance as Nora: and best design to Sobhi El Said. What made A Doll’s House so vivid in the Egypt of 2006? Was there a new identity space created for women by the Islamic revival visible in the Alexandrian adaptation of A Doll’s House? Or was it an aspect of women’s lives in the rural areas, where it is still possible to find high levels of illiteracy, infant mortality, honor killings and genital mutilation? Or was it the contradictions between the influence of women in the workforce, and the recent outbreak of sexual harassment on the street? Or perhaps more pertinent to the play, the resistance of Islamic family law to change, with polygamy and easy divorce for men, and restrictions on divorce and child custody for women? On the surface it would seem that none of these referents to the lives of Egyptian women had any bearing on Gamal Yakout’s interpretation. His production creates a romantic “Christmas card,” quasi-period, quasi-European world with twinkling lights and snow, bathed in vivid colours: the exterior a deep violet blue, and the interior warm pinks and oranges.7 The lattice wood design provides an illusion of a transparent fragile glasshouse. This set is a visual metaphor; it has nothing to do with realist conventions. “Transparency constitutes a major issue in this production”, Yakout argues, and it is only transparency that can “terminate the cycle of deceit and complicity besetting this household” (Selaiha July 2006). The blackmail plot is played at a cracking pace, the whole performance taking just over an hour. Emotions are close to the surface and reinforced by a sound track of 161 crcl june 2011 juin rclc everything from jingle bells to operatic choirs and melodramatic chords that heighten suspense. There is no space here for reflection of introspection, and the characters are boldly typed: the charming energetic wife, the melancholic women with a past, and the authoritarian and dominating husband. As the villain, Krogstad is the most complex of all the characters. Nora is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstance, and once again her relationship with Dr Rank and the sexual complexities of the silk stocking scene are excised from the text. Nora’s inner crisis is removed from the rehearsal of the tarantella and reinterpreted as a fantasy sequence in which she manages to unlock the letterbox and rip Krogstad’s letter to pieces. As she throws the pieces of paper into the air, laughing and dancing with joy, hundreds of letters fall around her like the snow outside the windows. In the final scene, her eyes are opened as she realises that her husband is, in the director’s words, a “morally dysfunctional person”.8 She is filled with a self-righteous anger that transforms her from the child of her husband/ 162 father, to the censorious mother of her husband/son. But when she makes her final exit into the snow, in her romantic pink dress and hat, she leaves the door ajar. Yakout feels that this action allows for Nora’s possible failure, Helmer’s possible change, or another unforeseen outcome. Nehad Selaiha suggests the ending is true to the spirit of Mediterranean culture “where women invariably forgive, or overlook, the silly foibles of men and never take quite seriously what they say” (Salaiha Aug. 2006). Yet this production is not about Mediterranean women in the twenty-first century, any more than it is about Norwegian women in the nineteenth. There is no re-working of an icon of women’s emancipation from the West to the Arab world, and it is clear form his program notes that Yakout’s interest is in Helmer’s social hypocrisy rather than Nora’s demand for subjective freedom: “Divine laws, manmade laws, social traditions, the human conscience, ethics, societal codes, etc.…We trust each other’s words as long as they do not go beyond words. When it comes down to actions, we realise how false the words were” (Yakout). Yakout was applauded by Abala el-Ruweiny, the critic from El Akhbar, for placing “the cause of the woman” outside his interpretation of A Doll’s House and concentrating on “denouncing falseness”. El Robi, the El Karama critic, went straight to the heart of the matter: “it is the conflict between Nora the human being, and Helmer the society…We suffer from a disease which has infected our social political and cultural life for many years, this is disease is the ‘schizophrenia’ or splitting: this disease is embodied in the clear contradiction between speech and action.” At the time of the performance, the clearest expression of this public schizophrenia was the government’s position over the question of Palestine. The then Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, was regarded by many in the Arab world as a puppet of the American government. In the year that A Doll’s House was performed, there were over eight hundred strikes and anti-government demonstrations linking Mubarak’s failure to support the Palestinian cause with a wide range of domestic issues. All the Arabic reviews of the Alexandria production of A Doll’s House treat the production as a J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours political allegory. The outer layer of the blackmail plot remains, but the inner layer of Nora’s psychological struggle for identity has been replaced with a critique of state power and religious hypocrisy that is visible to an audience trained to read between the lines by an ever present state censorship of the arts, media, and education. Fixing Furniture in Rotterdam Onafhankelijk Toneel (O.T., or ‘Independent Theatre’) is based in Rotterdam, the second biggest city in the Netherlands, a country with a population of nearly one million Muslims. The city invested the equivalent of 400 million US dollars in the mid-nineties to implement a multicultural arts agenda; and OT, led by Gerrit Timmers and Mirjam Koen, became a model for European multicultural theatre.9 A Doll’s House was just one of the O.T. productions performed in Arabic by Moroccan 163 actors during the ten years between 1995 and 2004. In the nineties, O.T. built a solid Dutch Arab audience through migrant networks, students, and local media, but as the century turned, they ran into problems. Gerrit Timmers had commissioned the Algerian-French writer, Assia Djebar, to write a libretto based on her novel Far from Medina. Djebar focused the opera Aisha and the Women of Medina on a famous incident involving the Prophet’s young wife, Aisha, who was falsely accused of adultery. Shortly before rehearsals for the opera were due to begin, an Islamic group in the Netherlands made a complaint to the Moroccan Government about the representation on stage of the family of the Prophet. Moroccan cast members contacted Timmers and asked him to remove the character of Aisha from the opera. It was an impossible request: “it would be like doing Hedda Gabler without Hedda Gabler on stage!” (Timmers).10 The production was cancelled and the press got hold of the story. Timmers explains: “I stated over and over again that we had not received a single threat. But of course, journalists only want to hear that there is an Islamic danger in the Netherlands” (Bouanani). O.T. called a meeting to discuss the cancellation; the theatre was packed with “people in traditional clothing, politicians, preachers, the white and Arab community”. There was a clash within the Moroccan community about theatre and representation but “it was all done with an open heart and no one felt threatened”. With hindsight, Timmers feels that the conference “was more valuable than the production”. Two years later, in April 2002, when O.T.’s production of A Doll’s House opened, fears of an Islamic danger in the Netherlands had skyrocketed. The production began its tour a couple of months after the first of two events that became known as the Dutch 9/11 (Kooijman 120). First, Pim Fortuyn, a sociology professor turned populist politician, was assassinated in Hilversum nine days before a general election. He had been standing on a strong anti-immigration platform, arguing that the Netherlands was formed out of Christianity, Humanism, and the Enlightenment, and that Islam was antipathetic to Dutch culture. He had cited inequality between the sexes, and crcl june 2011 juin rclc 164 Fig. 3 Nora. Directed by Gerrit Timmers. First performed by Onafhankelijk Toneel, Rotterdam, 17 Apr. 2002. J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours intolerance of homosexuality within Islamic cultures as the most obvious examples of cultural incompatibility. As a gay man, he had declared his intention of defending homosexuals from the Islamisation of the Netherlands.11 There was a collective sigh of relief in the Netherlands when it was revealed that Pim Fortyun’s murderer was an animal rights activist with no Islamic connections, but exactly 911 days later, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam by a radical Dutch Muslim.12 The two murders triggered a re-examination of the celebrated multicultural tolerance of the Netherlands. Sexuality became a central issue in this debate. To create a version of A Doll’s House for Dutch Moroccans in this political climate, and avoid the charge that the production was designed to teach Muslims about gender equality, was a complex theatrical task. Amidst heated debates about national identity, the failure of multiculturalism, and the need for migrant assimilation, Timmers and his Moroccan actors from the Atelier Tensift company in Marrakech transformed Ibsen’s play into a charming, light hearted, hour-long entertainment with performances bordering on the ‘edge of boulevard comedy’ 165 (Zonneveld). They set the play in the home of a Dutch Moroccan family living in Rotterdam: it has a North African aesthetic, with ornate furniture, candelabra, and red plush furnishing. This is a pop-up two-dimensional home with objects from the world of farce. On Nora’s first entrance, the front door falls off its hinges; when Saaida (Mrs Linde) appears, candelabra drop to the floor; Mohktar’s (Krogstad) disturbance causes the curtains to crash; and when Nora decides to leave her children the family photographs disintegrate. This mayhem reveals the fragility of Nora’s domestic world, and her constant labour to hold the family together. Time and time again, when the text moves towards unpalatable fears and anxieties, the breaking furniture releases the dramatic tension. In the final moments of the play, as Nora leaves her doll’s house, she throws her keys onto the ornament shelves; the whole edifice collapses and she exits to audience laughter. This physical farce may lighten the play, but it is juxtaposed with a serious critique of Moroccan patriarchy. Traditionally, the Moroccan family creates a strong divide between male and female social spheres. Until the recent family law was passed in Morocco, Moroccan women were denied the right to divorce or inherit (WLP). The first wave of Moroccan guest workers arrived in the Netherlands in the nineteen-sixties. The men travelled alone, leaving their families in Morocco until the Dutch authorities gave permission for the migration of dependents. Many of the women came from rural areas where educational opportunities were limited. When they arrived in the Netherlands, they tended not to enter the workforce, and the traditional separation between the sexes was recreated in the new environment. In the mid-nineties, a study conducted in the Netherlands showed that young men of Moroccan descent wanted to marry virgins, and they assumed that their wives would accept their authority in the home (Pels 82). While the O.T. production challenged these attitudes, it was careful to avoid creating negative stereotypes of the male characters. Medhi (Torvald) expresses his crcl june 2011 juin rclc opinions forcefully, and assumes his natural right to patriarchal authority, but he is devoted to his child wife. Even Mokhtar (Krogstad), at the height of his oppressive blackmail fantasy, eats an ice cream like an arrogant teenager. According to Timmers, there were still men in the audience who left during the performance; if they stayed, they tended to sigh, while the women laughed and applauded. On the surface this is a thoroughly secular production: Christmas is being celebrated as a public holiday, and there are no decorations in the house. Equally, there are no visual indications that this is a family of practicing Muslims. Although explicit references to religion have been avoided, this adaptation is still deeply influenced by traditional Islamic values, particularly with regard to sexuality. Nora’s honour is unblemished, and any possibility of immodesty, or immorality, has been cut. Only a fraction of the erotic play between Nora and Mehdi survives and most of the relationship between Nora and Dr Rank has gone. Instead of syphilis, Rank dies from an unnamed cancer. 166 The danger of imposing a Western paradigm of women’s emancipation on a Muslim community is particularly acute in this production. When Nora leaves home to find a flat and get a job in Rotterdam, it might appear that she is rejecting her own culture and claiming an identity space defined by her white Dutch sisters. This possible interpretation is subverted by Nora’s costuming during the final scene with Mehdi. In the Ibsen text, Nora leaves the stage to take off her tarantella costume and returns in her ordinary clothes to confront Torvald. In the Dutch Moroccan version, Nora stays in the traditional Berber costume for the entire third act. While the decision was pragmatic (the edited text left no time for her to leave the stage and change), the visual impact of Nora confronting her husband dressed as a Berber reaffirms the fact that women from non-Western cultures have their own proto-feminist traditions to draw on in the struggle for gender equality. A Tale in Three Cities Tehran, Alexandria, and Rotterdam are three cities with totally different social and cultural lives, but there are interesting commonalities in the versions of A Doll’s House produced by their artists. In every case the plot line of loans, forgery, blackmail, and accountability, remains close to Ibsen’s text. The economies of these cities range from a port in post-industrial Europe, to a port in a developing economy dependent on foreign investment, to the capital of an oil rich theocratic state, yet the dramatic action surrounding the transfer of money remains identical. It would appear that in each city, a wife borrowing to get medical treatment for her husband, naively committing a forgery to secure the loan, paying off the debt through some kind of casual employment, and being rejected by her husband for dishonesty, is a plausible narrative. J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours While the blackmail plot remains largely unchanged, all of the productions make drastic cuts to the sexual content of the play. In the original text, power circulates in the domestic environment through sex, just as power circulates in the outside world through money. The silk stocking scene, the character of Dr Rank, the tarantella, Torvald’s erotic fantasies, and the sexualised game playing between husband and wife are either totally removed or minimised in all these versions. Eliminating sexual display and flirtatious behaviour from the text removes the only form of agency available to the character of Nora prior to the final confrontation; but it also trounces the orientalist discourse embedded in the text that attributes a decadent sexuality to an Islamic other. The second major excision from these adaptations is the critique of patriarchal religion. This is achieved largely by cutting the dialogue in which Nora reveals to Torvald that she intends to re-examine her religious belief. Removing religious doubt from the play destabilises the binary that underpins the construction of male supremacy; the unequal power relations in the home are dependent on a religious 167 belief that encourages women to put their trust in god-like husbands. Once religious doubt has been removed from the text, the social background of patriarchal religion becomes hegemonic, and any implied secularism is lost from the new paradigm of gender relations foreshadowed in the final scene. If sexuality, religious doubt, and secularism are removed from the play, what is put in their place; and can we find icons of female emancipation emerging from this new content? Overt sexuality is replaced in these versions with innate modesty, particularly in the development of the characterisation of Nora. It is difficult not to interpret this modesty as the containment of female desire, symptomatic of cultures with a deep-seated belief that a man’s honour is embodied in the virtue of his wife. The possibility that female agency can be tied to the practice of piety is alien to secular feminist thinking, and yet it is precisely this possibility that is the subject of Saba Mahmood’s fascinating study, Politics of Piety, of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo. This grass roots movement engages in a religious practice designed to produce a subjective agency through the self-discipline of an ethical practice. This is not to suggest that Yakout’s Nora, or her Dutch Moroccan and Iranian sisters, represent identity spaces inhabited by participants of the Egyptian mosque movement, merely that the rejection of a husband on moral grounds does concur with the teachings of the moderate faction of the piety movement. Mahmood records a women dã‘iyãt, or teacher, in a local mosque arguing that: “Only when the nature of a husband’s conduct is such that it violates key Islamic injunctions and moral codes, making it impossible for a woman to realize the basic tenets of virtuous conduct in her own and her children’s lives, is she allowed to resort to divorce’ (187). Virtuous Noras may not question the basis of religious faith, nor infer a connection between patriarchy in the home and in the mosque, but they are still capable of challenging Islamic family law. Their departures from the doll’s houses seem to signal a re-negotiation, rather than a termination, of marriage contracts. Pre-nuptial crcl june 2011 juin rclc contracts fit within Islamic family law; thus renegotiation can fit within the same framework. In the Iranian film, Sara returns to her father’s house to consider the future, not to begin a new life; in Alexandria, the door is left open to allow for a number of possibilities. Gerrit Timmers’ account of the end of one of the O.T. performances gives a hint of the sentiments that might inform these contractual changes: It was a special performance for women, we had organised a crèche next door for the children. The word miracle has strange connotations in Arabic, so at the end of the play Mehdi says, “I’ll wait until she comes back”. One of the women called out, “Then you have to take better care of her”, and the actor replied, like a typical Moroccan man, “Then she has to take better care of me”. The audience started to sing a popular marriage song, “You have to take care of her, You have to take care of him”. It was very touching. It is arguable whether these Noras, with their re-negotiation of Islamic family law and moral agency, can be described as icons of women’s emancipation. For Yakout 168 the issue is irrelevant; for Mehrjui, in an Iran plagued by morality police, even a slight shift in gender boundaries was a major victory; and for Gerrit Timmers, subtle subversion is the most appropriate strategy for fighting the cultural wars in the Netherlands: “My aim is not to shock my audiences, but to seduce them.” Alexandria, Rotterdam and Tehran are all cities in which conflicts over gender relations have polarised Islamic and liberal secular politics, yet none of these versions of A Doll’s House has been appropriated to impose a Western secular feminist discourse. Instead, they demonstrate that it is possible for this play to transcend its cultural origins and become a flexible template for the creation of new performance texts. These versions have transformed Ibsen’s social drama into a realist film in Iran; a farce in Rotterdam; and a magical realist world in Alexandria. Rather than being constrained by a European classic, these three directors and their actors have manipulated the global respectability of A Doll’s House to create original performance texts that speak directly to their audiences, while still avoiding the eyes and ears of state and religious censors. Works Cited Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992. Bouanani, Maria Soaad. “Waanzee! When Religion Becomes Merciless: Interview with Gerrit Timmers.” ISIM Newsletter 13 Dec. 2005: 65. Buruma, Ian. Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam and the Limits of Tolerance. New York: Penguin, 2006. A Doll’s House. Theatre performance. Henrik Ibsen. Dir. Gamal Yakout. Cultural Palaces’ Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre, Alexandria. June, 2006. Ebadi, Shirin and Azadeh Moaveni. Iran Awakening. London: Rider Books, 2006. J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours El-Ruweiny, Abla. “Nora: From Ibsen’s Realism to Yakout’s Romaticism”. 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Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia, 2010. Kooijman, Jaap. Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2008. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. “Women, Marriage, and the Law in Post-Revolutionary Iran”. Women in the Middle East. Ed. H. Afshar. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1993. Nora. Theatre performance. Dir. Gerrit Timmers. Onafhankelijk Toneel, Rotterdam. 17 Apr. 2002. Oxfeldt, Elisabeth. Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800-1900. Copenhagen: Mueum Tusculanum Press, 2005. Pels, Trees. “Muslim Families from Morocco in the Netherlands: Gender Dynamic and Fathers’ Roles in a Context of Change”. Current Sociology 48.4 (Oct. 2000): 75-93. Perrelli, Franco. “Some more notes about Nora’s tarantella”. Acta Ibseniana, Ibsen and the Arts: Painting-Sculpture-Architecture. Ibsen Conference, Rome. 2001. 119-127. 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While I think Ibsen is using an orientalist fantasy to critique the power relations within the Helmer household, this image is still inflected with a particular Scandinavian flavour. The Danish bourgeosie created Turkish smoking rooms in their houses and received guests dressed in oriental costumes (Hansen: 1996) Elixabeth Oxfeldt has pointed out in her fascinating study Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 1800-1900 (Copenhagen: 2005), that orientalism has a very specific Nordic history with regard to the emergence of the national imaginary. 3. Mehrjui won the Golden Seashell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival for the direction of Sara; Niki Karimi won Best Actress for her performance in the title role. The same year, Sara won the Audience Award at the Nantes Three Continents Festival. It is one of four films with strong central female characters made by Mehrjui between 1992 and 1997. J ulie H olledge | Sharing A D oll’s House with Islamic N eighbours 4. The second Pahlavi Shah maintained his power-base for 25 years with the aid of Savak, the political police force. The Shah persecuted anyone who attempted to oppose him. Five thousand people died and 50,000 were forced into exile. Savak had 60,000 people working as informers and was known for its brutality. Over (US) $2,000 million was exported annually from Iran during 1973-8; half of this amount belonged to the Pahlavi extended family (Hiro 95). 5. The struggle over the politics of clothing, and particularly the clothing of women, has always been particularly strong in Iran. For an extended discussion on the costuming of Sara, see Holledge and Tompkins (37-43). 6. The London production was returning to Britain via Batavia, Ceylon, India, and Egypt after a twoyear colonial tour of Australia and New Zealand. The Batavia performance of the play is the first recorded in an Islamic culture, and the Cairo season is the second. 7. The children’s costumes are contemporary party clothes, but Nora and Helmer are dressed in outfits usually associated with weddings: a full length dress with lace decorations, and tail coat with open necked white shirt, exaggerated collar and romantic full sleeves. The maid is in the uniform of a nineteenth-century servant in white cap and apron, and Mrs Linde wears a straw hat. This combination of period elements, together with the fairy tale setting, distances the production from any sense of verisimilitude to Norway in the nineteenth century. 8. All the quotations from Gamal Yakout in this article are taken from an unpublished personal statement regarding his artistic intentions written for the purposes of this article. I have to thank Mona Khedr, the Egyptian research assistant on this project, not only for her assistance in obtaining this document but also for the translating of the Arabic reviews of the production. She also provided feedback on the various drafts of this article. For an excellent discussion of Muslim identity in contemporary Egyptian theatre, see Kehr (2009). 9. Kees Weeda, the bureaucrat responsible for the Rotterdam multicultural arts policy, encouraged artists to draw on a broad range of cultural references: “Thirty percent of our population is inspired by non-Western civilization…producers of theater (sic) must read not only the ancient Greeks but also the ancient Arabs. Then you’re producing art for everyone in this city, and encouraging integration of people from different cultures. That’s our policy goal” (Dorsey). 10. I would like to thank Eugene Van Erven for helping me to arrange this interview. 11. Fortuyn’s justification for his party’s anti-immigration platform is a perfect illustration of Talal Asad’s assertion that: “For both liberals and the extreme right the representation of ‘Europe’ takes the form of a narrative, one of whose effects is to exclude Islam” (165). 12. Attached to van Gogh’s body was a death threat addressed to the Somali activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the scriptwriter on van Gogh’s latest film, Submission. The film, which had been shown two months before on Dutch public television, was structured in the form of a Muslim woman’s prayer intercut with images of badly beaten and raped women. On their naked flesh, signs of male violence were visible alongside quotations about the rightful place of women in Islam (Buruma 176). 171