In a poem I had once written, I’d bemoaned the fact that our lives, our wireless, quantified-in-bit-rates, coffee-spoon measured lives, have lost all music; that heroism, enchantment, magic and myth have faded like the ghostly breath of a lost dream that we do not even have the poetry to sing a requiem for. Yet, “Arabian Night”* (Die Arabishche Nacht, by Roland Schimmelpfennig) dares to find poetry, a magnificent song, from the very heart of this Stygian darkness that we call twenty-first century existence, and throwing caution to the winds, succeeds magnificently.

The true worth of theatre is not in the answers it provides, but in the questions it asks—in the magnifying mirror that it holds up in front of our eyes, enlarging every blemish, every bit of blotchy skin, every scar of the soul, every hidden valley of beauty and sorrow, longing and terror. The truest theatre is not the one that portrays ourselves as we are, but the one that colours our little lives with the Tyrian purple of the imagination, and turns us into reeds that the great gods play upon. Going by that yardstick, “Arabian Night” secures its place firmly as a sublime incantation of human fantasy, a complex fugal landscape of dream and nightmare that leaves us trapped and suffocated, yet touched with a limpid beauty. If it leaves us sorrowful, it also leaves us wise; if we are shaken by its brutality, we are also moved by its poignant, tender eroticism.

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