Nuredin Boba

A dramatisation of Stratis Tsirkas’ novelette on the occasion of 100 years since his birth.

The dramatisation of the Limassol Theatre Development Company offers a new interpretation of Stratis Tsirkas’ novelette, presented by three actors, and adapted for stage and directed by Adonis Floridis.

Nuredin Boba, a popular hero who heads a rebellion of the fellahs, is the protagonist of this story, which on one hand, refers to the 1919 uprising in Egypt that was suppressed by the British, and on the other hand, fits perfectly into the events that unfolded at the time of its writing: the success of Gamal Abdal Nasser’s national revolution and the nationalisation of the suez canal in 1956. Tsirkas himself has made the “circumstances” around the creation of his work quite clear: “The novelette was written in ten days, shortly after the nationalisation of the Suez, amidst euphoria and dreadful expectation of a counterattack by the Powers that protected the interest of the European shareholders in the canal”.

A year later, cavafy’s poetry would become a testing ground for the model of historical and cultural criticism, which Tsirkas had gradually developed in the previous decades. The pattern would, of course, be completed with the “Drifting cities” Trilogy, in which native Arab people and families appear either as protagonists or as supporting ‘actors’, events of the Arab and Egyptian history come to live, and local cultural practices are being documented...

The performance tells the story of a boatman forced by circumstances to turn into a killer, burglar and pirate, who goes on to become an insurgent and leader of the 1919 rebellion of the egyptian people against British colonial rule...