This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus legend by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq Al-Hakim’s King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir’s The Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim’s The Comedy of Oedipus and Walid Ikhlasi’s Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim’s preface to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general interdiction by the editor.

An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western theatre community, and we hope that this collection will contribute to that awareness, not only because of the importance of the dramatists represented, but because of the fascination of seeing a variety of Arabic perspectives on one of the central dramas of the European canon.  These varied Arabic explorations of Oedipus range in tonality from dark fatalism to rollicking farce and in time from ancient Greek and Egyptian Thebes to a contemporary computer laboratory, where a super-computer replaces the Delphic oracle as the source of the fatal prophecy.