- 1985/88 pages
The Tree Climber:
a play in two acts
Hardcover: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-89410-204-2
Paperback: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-89410-205-9
In The Tree Climber, a detective, a lizard, a time-traveling dervish, and a magic tree all help to turn the quiet life of a married couple upside down.
"Tawfiq al-Hakim’s plays deal with themes of universal rather than local application: the role of the artist in society, the predicament of man in the face of forces he neither controls nor understands, the use and abuse of power.... In [The Tree Climber] the retired Bahadair Effendi and his wife, each immured in a self-created world, are universal characters. Only the dervish is a product of the East and represents the hidden forces (within ourselves?), the realization ... that the irrational and the ‘absurd’ are an inevitable part of existence. Like the dervish, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s final comment on life is an amused chuckle rather than a fist raised in angry defiance against the heavens."—from the translator’s note by Denys Johnson-Davies
"Tawfiq al-Hakim’s plays deal with themes of universal rather than local application: the role of the artist in society, the predicament of man in the face of forces he neither controls nor understands, the use and abuse of power.... In [The Tree Climber] the retired Bahadair Effendi and his wife, each immured in a self-created world, are universal characters. Only the dervish is a product of the East and represents the hidden forces (within ourselves?), the realization ... that the irrational and the ‘absurd’ are an inevitable part of existence. Like the dervish, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s final comment on life is an amused chuckle rather than a fist raised in angry defiance against the heavens."—from the translator’s note by Denys Johnson-Davies
