The publication and performance of his play,
Ahl al-Kahf (The People of the Cave, 1933), was a significant event in Egyptian drama. The story of 'the people of the cave' is found in the eighteenth surah of the
Qur'an as well as in other sources. It concerns the tale of the seven sleepers of Ephesus who, in order to escape the Roman persecution of Christians, take refuge in a cave. They sleep for three hundred years, and wake up in a completely different era - without realizing it, of course. In its use of overarching themes - rebirth into a new world and a predilection for returning to the past - al-Hakim's play obviously touches upon some of the broad cultural topics that were of major concern to intellectuals at the time, and, because of the play's obvious seriousness of purpose, most critics have chosen to emphasise such features. Within a year, al-Hakim produced another major and highly revered work,
Shahrazad (Scheherazade, 1934). While the title character is, of course, the famous narrator of the
One Thousand and One Nights collection, the scenario for this play is set after all the tales have been told. Now cured of his vicious anger against the female sex by the story-telling virtuosity of the woman who is now his wife, King Shahriyar abandons his previous ways and embarks on a journey in quest of knowledge, only to discover himself caught in a dilemma whose focus is Shahrazad herself; through a linkage to the ancient goddess,
Isis, Shahrazad emerges as the ultimate mystery, the source of life and knowledge. Even though the play is now considered one of his finest works, Taha Hussein, a prominent Arab writer and one of the leading intellectuals of the then Egypt criticized some of its aspects, mainly that it was not suitable for a theatrical performance. Later, the two writers wrote together a novel called
The Enchanted Castle (Al-Qasr al-Mashur, 1936) in which both authors revisited some of the themes from al-Hakim's play. When the National Theatre Troupe was formed in Egypt in 1935, the first production that it mounted was
The People of the Cave. The performances were not a success; for one thing, audiences seemed unimpressed by a performance in which the action on stage was so limited in comparison with the more popular types of
drama. It was such problems in the realm of both production and reception that seem to have led al-Hakim to use some of his play-prefaces in order to develop the notion of his plays as 'théâtre des idées', works for reading rather than performance. However, in spite of such critical controversies, he continued to write plays with philosophical themes culled from a variety of cultural sources: Pygmalion (1942), an interesting blend of the legends of Pygmalion and Narcissus. Some of al-Hakim's frustrations with the performance aspect were diverted by an invitation in 1945 to write a series of short plays for publication in newspaper article form. These works were gathered together into two collections,
Masrah al-Mugtama (Theatre of Society, 1950) and
al-Masrah al-Munawwa (Theatre Miscellany, 1956). The most memorable of these plays is
Ughniyyat al-Mawt (Death Song), the play formed the basis of an Egyptian short film under the same name starring
Faten Hamama, a one-act play that with masterly economy depicts the fraught atmosphere in
Upper Egypt as a family awaits the return of the eldest son, a student in Cairo, for him to carry out a murder in response to the expectations of a blood feud. Another plays include
Sahira (Witch), which formed a popular Egyptian short film
by the same name, starring
Salah Zulfikar and
Faten Hamama. Al-Hakim's response to the social transformations brought about by the
1952 revolution, which he later criticized, was the play, ''Al Aydi Al Na'imah'' (Soft Hands, 1954). The 'soft hands' of the title refer to those of a prince of the former royal family who finds himself without a meaningful role in the new society, a position in which he is joined by a young academic who has just finished writing a doctoral thesis on the uses of the Arabic preposition hatta. The play explores in an amusing, yet rather obviously didactic fashion, the ways in which these two apparently useless individuals set about identifying roles for themselves in the new socialist context. While this play may be somewhat lacking in subtlety, it clearly illustrates in the context of al-Hakim's development as a playwright the way in which he had developed his technique in order to broach topics of contemporary interest, not least through a closer linkage between the pacing of dialogue and actions on stage. His play formed the basis of a popular Egyptian film
by the same name, starring
Salah Zulfikar and
Ahmed Mazhar. In 1960, al-Hakim was to provide further illustration of this development in technique with another play set in an earlier period of Egyptian history, ''Al Sultan Al-Ha'ir'' (The Perplexed Sultan). The play explores in a most effective manner the issue of the legitimation of power. A
Mamluk sultan at the height of his power is suddenly faced with the fact that he has never been manumitted and that he is thus ineligible to be ruler. By 1960 when this play was published, some of the initial euphoria and hope engendered by the
Nasserist regime itself, given expression in Al Aydi Al Na'imah, had begun to fade. The
Egyptian people found themselves confronting some unsavoury realities: the use of the secret police to squelch the public expression of opinion, for example, and the personality cult surrounding the figure of
Gamal Abdel Nasser. In such a historical context, al-Hakim's play can be seen as a somewhat courageous statement of the need for even the mightiest to adhere to the laws of the land and specifically a plea to the ruling
military regime to eschew the use of violence and instead seek legitimacy through application of the law.
Rosasa Fel Qalb (A Bullet in the Heart) was released in Cairo theatres
by the same name, starring
Salah Zulfikar. The events revolve around Naguib, who has a dire financial situation, who falls in love with the girl Fifi at first sight and does not know who she is, so he tells his friend, Dr. Sami, the story and she's originally his friend's fiancé. This play is one of the three plays of Al-Hakim, in which the conclusion was open and unconvincing in that way. A two volume English translation of collected plays is in the
UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. ==Style and themes==