Would you care about the life a cockroach? Anyone who had ever lived in a flat had probably seen the creatures and the usual reaction is to kill the thing as fast as possible (and make sure you kill all of its kin). And yet, this play makes you care about a cockroach.

The complete play is first published in 1966; its two parts (slightly different...) were initially published as two separate plays in the previous 2 years under the same name: a one act one (the first act) and a two-acts one (the second and third). Not knowing that before I read it, I kept looking for the characters of the first act to show up again - except for the main protagonist, noone else crosses between the to main parts.

The story opens in an apartments' bathroom where the king and queen of cockroaches discuss their main enemy. No - it is not the humans - the cockroaches had seen the poisons and the shoes used to kill them but they are so much bigger that they believe them to be natural phenomenons. The enemy are the ants -- who wait for one of our heroes to fall on its back and thus get immobilized and attack - carrying the cockroach home for food. But the two royals and the rest of the population cannot decide who needs to do what work - as usual and if you forget for a second that you are reading about cockroaches, you can decide that you are listening to a modern country's government... The act closes with a tragedy - the king falls into the bathtub and cannot get out.

And once the curtain falls on that act, we won't see the rest of cockroaches again -- although we will see the ants.

The second act opens in the bedroom of the apartment where Samia and Adil are waking up for work -- and the regular morning disagreement on who is to take a bath first starts almost immediately. But with the king in the bathtub, trying to escape, Adil decides that he wants to find out when the creature will give up... and the play goes into its absurdist phase. The doctor is summoned (and convinced that this is a good way for someone to spend a day), at various times various characters decide that they identify with the cockroach (or that someone else in the room does). Until the bathtub is filled by the cook and our main character dies of course (or are Samia and Adil the main characters). A dead cockroach on the floor is food for ants so they come... and then the cook wipes them out.

You can read this as a comedic piece but it is also deeply philosophical - would you help someone you do not like or will you enjoy looking at them trying over and over? When a failure is inevitable, do you help or do you just watch?

I was not sure I was sold on the premise of the play when I started reading it but at the end it actually works - especially when you change the cast and put the same story on a global scale.

Tawfik al-Hakim is one of the big play-writers of Egypt but it does not seem like a lot of his plays had been translated. I plan to track down the ones that had been though. ( )