From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
In the final scene of Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882 (2024), British forces in fuchsia uniforms march through the gates of Cairo and occupy the city. Their movements are slow, non-naturalistic, flowing and constant. This is a stage on which no individual body is ever still: throughout Shawky’s filmed opera there is physical unrest, the performers swaying back and forth or executing repetitive gestures.
The British forces sing as they march, telling the story of a son asking his mother for a blessing ahead of a great battle. Drama 1882 is a mannered staging of the ‘Urabi revolt – a popular uprising in Egypt, against a weak and corrupt regime, which was leveraged into a violent power grab by the British. Unlike the rest of the opera, this final chorus is not based on 19th-century sources, but on the millennia-old Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata. The chorus tells how on the eve of battle the warlike and impetuous Duryodhana visits his mother Gandhari to ask for her blessing. She instead warns him: ‘Victory always follows the steps of righteousness.’
For more than 15 years, Shawky has undertaken the retelling of history using methods calculated to undermine any suggestion of glory or authority. His three-part film Al Araba Al Madfuna (2012–16) was performed by a cast of children, and Cabaret Crusades (2010–15) by marionettes. Cabaret Crusades III: The Secrets of Karbala (2015) is performed by Murano glass puppets with monstrous, characterful faces. Set largely in the Muslim world of the 12th century, it ends with the Sack of Constantinople in 1204.
The period covered by The Secrets of Karbala coincides with the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades, but these are only contextual elements in a chaotic welter of geopolitical ambition, deception, treachery, betrayal, bribery, horse-trading, greed, rhetoric, bad faith, broken promises and manipulation. No sooner does a character commit to acting without deception or ill-will than they break an alliance. Belief in divine right, holy visions and messages from God leads to inglorious deaths. Any suggestion that a leader is omnipotent or untouchable guarantees that they will be beheaded and fed to the dogs within three scenes.
The puppets’ set is constructed on three concentric rings that move in contrary directions – as with the rocking and shifting human performers of Drama 1882, Shawky offers a vision of a world in perpetual motion, where stability, far from being the norm, is only ever a short respite within a default state of turbulence. The narrative confusion of these ceaseless power struggles is compounded by presenting The Secrets of Karbala in a gallery. Visitors come and go, and few will catch more than a fraction of the epic’s two-hour running time. As with the turning wheels of the puppets’ set, the film exists as an infinite loop of which each visitor witnesses only a portion.
Here, Shawky makes a grander point about the telling of history. A storyteller shapes their tale through constraints, choosing where to begin and where to end, discarding distracting detail to focus on the central players. Yet every episode in history takes places within a web of connections and has repercussions that ripple forward in time. As gallery visitors we can drop in on this story, stay for a while and then drop out, but we can never actually escape it. This history, compromised as it is, is also embedded in our moment.
Filmed in performance at an outdoor theatre in Alexandria, Drama 1882 covers a period of mere months rather than centuries, yet the pervading atmosphere of duplicity, self-interest and ambition is familiar from Shawky’s earlier film. In a pivotal scene – the Constantinople Conference of 1882 – a group of European diplomats meet with Lord Dufferin, the British ambassador, who Shawky places squatting barefoot on a tilted negotiating table that balances on insect-like legs. The conference is a perfect exercise in doublespeak and duplicity, with the diplomats collectively vowing not to pursue occupation of Egypt or engage in individual intervention. Except, Dufferin notes in a closing caveat, in case of force majeure – a state of crisis, which the British then precipitate.
Drama 1882 was commissioned for the 2024 Venice Biennale and became a hot ticket, with hours-long queues trailing from the entrance of the Egyptian Pavilion. It entices at the level of craft alone – sung in Arabic, the opera is scripted, scored, designed and directed by Shawky. On its picture-book sets a live donkey and goose share the stage with characters in approximations of historic dress as it might have been described by an excitable child – towering stovepipe hats, dangling tailcoats with diagonal pinstripes, military medals the size of pincushions. As with Cabaret Crusades, the title of Drama 1882 makes it clear that this is an entertainment – in Edinburgh, watched from cafe tables. Within an information ecosystem in which sources must scream their integrity and authority to distinguish themselves from pullulating artificial intelligence, propaganda and misinformation, Shawky’s films instead point to their own artifice.
In the Mahabharata, Duryodhana enters 18 days of battle during which he and his 99 brothers are killed. Raging with grief, his mother curses the god Krishna himself. As in the shifting atmosphere of ambition and duplicity that pervades Shawky’s journey through centuries of conflict, belief in the victory of righteousness turns out to have been a most dangerous delusion.
‘Wael Shawky’ is at Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 28 September; ‘Wael Shawky: Drama 1882’ is at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until 26 October.
From the September 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
