Myth, Form, and Theatrical Space: Psychological Poetic Drama as Cultural Analysis and Social Change in Modern Arabic Poetry

Abstract

This article reads Saʿdī Yūsuf’s When in the Heights as a case of psychological poetic drama in which Mesopotamian myth functions as a cultural technology for negotiating social change. Rather than treating legend as ornament, the play converts epic structures (Sidūrī/Utnapištim, the herb/serpent, Enūma Eliš) into theatrical spaces for inner action that recalibrate civic ethics—care, measure, and mortal sufficiency—in late-twentieth-century Iraq. Methodologically, the study combines comparative poetics with reception and performance analysis to show how formal choices—chorus, mise-en-scène, and semi-circular “events”—transform mythic memory into present-tense cultural critique and a usable social affect. Close comparison with Akkadian episodes clarifies where Yūsuf preserves mythic scaffolding and where he alters it to stage a modern psychology of anxiety, denial, bargaining, and measured assent. The final return to Sidūrī’s tavern operates as ethical compensation: a civic acceptance in which form “thinks” by binding image, cadence, and value. In answering 1970s critical calls for elevated language, translocal theme, and renewed heritage, the play also models how Arab poets adapted world practices of poetic theatre to articulate inner conflict under historical pressure, offering a comparative category—psychological poetic drama—for cultural analysis and social change.