Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights

Featured Image:

A scene from The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, directed by Silviu Purcărete, Photo by Alexandru Condurache

What does it mean for a Romanian director to stage a Yemeni story drawn from an Arabic canonical text? Silviu Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert (based on One Thousand and One Nights), produced by the “Radu Stanca” National Theatre in Sibiu, is structured around a triple displacement: a story from Yemen, mediated through the vast and unstable textual corpus of One Thousand and One Nights, is reimagined on a Romanian stage for a contemporary European audience. Premiered in Sibiu on 5 December 2025, with set design by Dragoș Buhagiar and original music by Vasile Șirli, the production presents itself not as a straightforward dramatization of the 1001 Nights, but as the theatrical recovery of an almost forgotten story from within this narrative labyrinth. It should also be noted that Vasile Șirli’s music, recently awarded the UNITER Prize for Best Original Music for Theatre in 2026, does far more than accompany Purcărete’s universe: it gives it breath, memory, and ritual tension. In this sense, sound becomes one of the forces that connects the story’s multicultural imaginary with the distinctive scenic spectacularity of his Sibiu productions.

This layered act of cultural transfer raises a problem that cannot be adequately addressed through the binary of fidelity and betrayal, nor through a simple accusation of exoticism. One Thousand and One Nights is not a neutral source text: in European cultural history, it has been repeatedly translated, rearranged, eroticized, infantilized, and monumentalized as “Oriental” literature. Any contemporary adaptation of the Nights therefore enters a field already overdetermined by Oriental frameworks of reception. Yet Purcărete’s position is not identical to that of a metropolitan Western director staging the East from the symbolic center of the empire. Romanian theatre occupies a more ambiguous location: historically European, but culturally and geopolitically marked by semi-peripherality, belatedness, and its own negotiations with Western models of cultural authority.

I do not intend to review Purcărete’s production in the usual sense. Such a review would probably end, as many encounters with his recent work do, by acknowledging the value and force of yet another major staging. My interest lies elsewhere: in the way this adaptation handles the Orientalist imaginary it inevitably inherits. The production uses its images, pleasures, and theatrical conventions, but also shifts them, exposes their artificiality, and leaves them slightly unsettled. Seen from the semi-peripheral position of Romanian theatre, Abul Hossein’s story becomes not simply an exotic object to be displayed, but a space of mediation, memory, and performative re-narration.

Across Silviu Purcărete’s Sibiu productions, from Faust to Metamorphoses, The Scarlet Princess, Jonah and now The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert, multiculturalism is less a declared theme than a theatrical method: myths, legends, literary canons, and popular narratives from different cultural traditions are absorbed into a shared scenic language of image, music, rhythm, and corporeal excess. As Faust and Metamorphoses, Abul Hossein transforms a canonical or semi-canonical textual source into a spectacular stage organism, in which narrative matters less as a plot than as a generator of visions, processions, grotesque bodies, choral energies and ritualized theatrical experience.

At the same time, the connection with The Scarlet Princess is especially relevant, since both productions return to an exotic world not in order to reconstruct an “authentic” Orient, but to explore how stories migrate, mutate, and become theatrical matter in a European context.

Seen together, these productions also show how Sibiu, through the institutional ecosystem and the visibility of Sibiu International Theatre Festival, has become a privileged space for Purcărete’s large-scale intercultural theatre, a place where local repertory, global sources, and festival spectatorship meet in a distinctive form of theatrical cosmopolitanism.

Brief Theoretical Framework and Genealogy of the Text

The postcolonial approach used in this article begins with Edward Said’s understanding of Orientalism not as a simple collection of stereotypes about the East, but as a system of representation through which the “Orient” is produced as an object of knowledge, fantasy, and control. In this sense, the Orient is less a geographical reality than a cultural construction shaped by unequal relations of power. European representations of the East have often depended on a fundamental asymmetry: the West looks, describes, classifies, and stages, while the East is looked at, described, classified, and staged. This asymmetry is especially important in relation to One Thousand and One Nights, a text whose European reception has long been mediated by fascination, translation, eroticization, and exotic display.

However, to read every European adaptation of the Nights as a simple repetition of Orientalism would flatten the complexity of theatrical production. Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, mimicry, and the “third space” offer a more flexible vocabulary for approaching adaptation as a process of negotiation. A theatrical adaptation does not merely transfer a source text from one culture into another; it also displaces it, reorganizes it, and exposes the tensions between inherited images and new contexts of performance. The “third space” is useful here because it names a zone in which meanings are neither fully original nor fully borrowed, neither entirely dominant nor entirely resistant. It allows to see Purcărete’s production not simply as an appropriation of an Oriental text, but as an ambivalent encounter between several cultural positions.

This ambivalence becomes even more visible when the object of analysis is theatre rather than literature alone. Performance adds bodies, voices, costumes, music, rhythm, spatial relations and immediate presence of the authors. Postcolonial theatre studies have shown that the stage can both reproduce cultural hierarchies and disturb them, sometimes at the same time. A text may carry Orientalist associations, but performance can exaggerate, parody, fragment, or estrange those associations. In other words, theatre does not merely illustrate ideology; it materializes it, makes it visible, and sometimes makes it unstable.

This is particularly relevant in the case of a Romanian director staging One Thousand and One Nights. Romania does not occupy the same historical position as the Western powers most associated with Orientalist representation. At the same time, it cannot be placed outside Europe or outside European cultural hierarchies. Its position is liminal: neither a classic colonizer nor a classically colonized country, but part of a semi-peripheral Eastern Europe that has often defined itself in relation to Western cultural authority. This matters because Purcărete’s adaptation does not speak from the secure center of imperial privilege. It emerges from a culture that has itself been subjected to forms of marginalization, belatedness, and self-exoticization within Europe. The production’s engagement with the Orient must therefore be read through this double displacement: it stages and already Orientalized text, but from a cultural position that is itself not fully central.

Within this framework, The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert can be approached as a negotiation rather than a verdict. The question is not whether the production is simply Orientalist, but how it handles the inherited theatrical and cultural codes attached to the Orient: whether it repeats them, distances them, transforms them, or leaves them productively unresolved.

The story of Abul Hussein is a story of displacement. A respected Yemeni man, overcome by shame after an embarrassing bodily accident during his wedding celebrations, abandons his social identity and flees into the desert. His flight is not heroic, but comic and desperate: he attempts to escape not danger, but memory. Years later, when he returns in disguise, he discovers that the humiliating event has survived as a point of communal reference. His shame has become part of public time. The tale is brief, ironic, and structurally simple, yet it contains several themes central to One Thousand and One Nights: the instability of identity, the power of storytelling to preserve what individuals wish to erase, and the transformation of private experience into collective narrative.

Yet this story does not reach the modern European stage through a transparent line of transmission. One Thousand and One Nights has a famously troubled editorial history in the West. Antoine Galland’s eighteen-century French translation played a decisive role in introducing the Nights to European readers, but it also helped establish the work as an object of Orientalist fascination. Later versions, including those by Edward William Lane and Richard Burton, further shapes the text according to different European expectations: moral, ethnographic, erotic, scholarly, or exoticizing. As a result, the Nights entered European consciousness not simply as Arabic literature, but as literature already filtered through translation, selection, censorship, commentary, and fantasy.

At the same time, it would be misleading to oppose these European distortions to a single, stable, “authentic” original, The Nights is itself a compilation, a layered and mobile corpus made of stories that circulated across Arabic, Persian, Indian, and later European contexts. Its identity is palimpsestic rather than fixed. This matters for any theatrical adaptation. When Purcărete stages Abul Hussein, he is not adapting a pure source but entering a long chain of retellings. The question, then, is not only what story is being adapted, but what histories of translation, exoticization, and cultural mediation the story brings with it.

Orientalism on the European Stage

The European stage has often approached One Thousand and One Nights less as a complex narrative corpus than as a reservoir of images. Its stories have frequently been translated into theatrical languages of spectacle: veils, lamps, palaces, deserts, sensual dances, shimmering fabrics, stylizes violence, and music meant to evoke a generalizes East. In this tradition, the Nights becomes less a text to be interpreted than a visual atmosphere to be consumed, orientalist theatre, in this sens, is not defined only by what it represents, but by how it organizes looking: the Orient appears as an aesthetic surface, available to the spectator’s gaze.

This theatrical orientalism relies on recognizable codes. Costumes tend to signal difference immediately; music often functions as cultural shorthand; lighting produces mystery, heat or sensuality; movement vocabularies suggest ritual, seduction, or archaic collective energy. These elements do not necessarily belong to any specific Arab, Persian, Indian or Yemeni tradition. Rather, they form a composite stage language through which Europe has repeatedly imagined the East as timeless, excessive, irrational, and visually seductive. The problem is therefore not simply inaccuracy, but asymmetry: one culture becomes the active producer of images, while another is transformed into a decorative object.

This is the representational field in which Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert enters. The production cannot entirely avoid the inherited codes attached to One Thousand and One Nights: the desert, the sultan, the world of storytelling, and the musical-visual richness of the performance all carry Orientalist resonances. Yet Purcărete’s approach also appears to complicate the logic of exotic display. Rather than presenting the Orient as a stable object of fascination, the production foregrounds theatricality itself: narration, rhythm, collective performance, and the unstable passage from one image to another, the result is not a pure escape from Orientalism, but a partial displacement of it. The audience is invited to look at an imagined East and to observe how much it is made, performed, and continuously rearranged on stage.

Close Reading: Purcărete’s Oriental World

In the production directed by Silviu Purcărete at the Radu Stanca National Theatre, the stage manifests as a choral, dynamic, and vibrant universe, within which a cast of over thirty actors utilizes music and movement to embody storytellers, spirits, and complicit witnesses.

The visual world of the show creates a dialogue with the iconography traditionally attached to One Thousand and One Nights. The mention of a sultan, a Yemeni protagonist, and a flight into the desert activates a long European archive of Orientalist images: sand, heat, veils, turbans, lamps, shadows, sensual interiors and ceremonial excess. The question is not whether such images are present, but how the production handles their theatrical charge. Purcărete’s theatre has often worked through accumulation, grotesque amplification, and visual excess. In this sense, the production does not necessarily reject spectacle; rather, it appears to make spectacle unstable. The stage image invites the spectator to admire an exotic Orient as a coherent world, and it foregrounds its own constructedness. Instead of reflecting an actual place or culture, the "Orient" is often treated like a stage set. It is patched together from exotic fragments—costumes, gestures, colors, and rituals—rather than real human experiences. This distinction is important. Orientalist theatre usually depends on the illusion that the spectator is seeing “the East”. Purcărete’s visual language, by contrast, tends to remind the audience that what is being seen is already staged fiction.

The production therefore occupies an ambivalent position. On the one hand, it cannot fully escape the pleasures of the exotic display. The source material itself has reached the European stage through centuries of visual and literary Orientalization, and any theatrical adaptation of the One Thousand and One Nights risks activating those codes. On the other hand, Purcărete’s scenographic imagination does not seem interested in reconstructing a culturally specific Yemen or an “authentic” Arab world. The visual register is more abstract, carnivalesque, and dreamlike than documentary. This abstraction may be read as a strategy of displacement: the production cites Orientalist imagery without fully stabilizing it. The spectator recognizes signs of the Orient, but these signs are absorbed into a broader theatrical universe that is excessive, artificial, and self-conscious. 

This does not make the production innocent. Abstraction can also erase cultural specificity. When the Orient becomes a floating theatrical atmosphere, it may cease to be a lived historical or cultural space and become once again a European fantasy. Yet the very instability of the visual field complicates a simple accusation of exoticism. Purcărete reproduces the Oriental image, and he theatricalizes it, exaggerates it, and places it inside a visual system where all identities appear fragile, fluid and performative.

A second level of negotiations concerns the performers’ bodies. Orientalist performance has historically asked actors to perform difference through codified movement: languid gestures, ritualizes poses, decorative dances, or choreographies meant to suggest sensuality, primitiveness, or. Mystical otherness. In such cases, the body becomes a surface on which cultural fantasy is written. The performers are made to embody an imagined East for the pleasure of the European gaze.

Purcărete’s production seems to complicate this mechanism by placing the actors within a collective and highly theatrical physical vocabulary. The bodies on stage are not simply to create an Oriental world. They become narrators, witnesses, musicians, figures in a moving tableau, and elements of a larger scenic machine. This choral organization shifts attention away from individual ethnic representation and towards the process of the storytelling itself. The actors on stage produce the conditions through which the world of One Thousand and One Nights appears. This is where the director’s own theatrical language becomes important and crucial. His productions often rely on grotesque corporeality, stylized group movement, sudden changes of rhythm, and the transformation of the actor’s body into a visual musical instrument. Such physicality does not belong specifically to an imagined “East”, it is closer to a broader Eastern European stage tradition in which the actor’s body is treated as expressive matter: disciplined, exaggerated, sometimes comic, sometimes ritualized, but rarely naturalistic. In this context, the performers are not asked to “look Oriental”. They are asked to participate in a theatrical composition that turns bodies into signs, sounds, rhythms, and images.

Still, the ambivalence remains. Even when the choreography does nor explicitly imitate Arabic or Islamic cultural forms, the context of the Nights may lead the audience to read stylization itself as Oriental. A procession, a chant, a collective gesture, or a musical rhythm may be perceived as “Eastern” because the director’s frame encourages such a reading. This is precisely the problem of the gaze. Orientalism does not reside only in the object represented; it also resides in the habits of perception brought by the spectator. Purcărete’s production may displace Orientalist embodiment, but it cannot fully control how bodies are read once they appear inside the world of the Nights. The most productive reading, therefore, is that the show redirects the body away from ethnic imitation and toward performative transformation. The actors’ bodies do not secure cultural authenticity, but instead they reveal the stage as a space where identity is manufactured, repeated, exaggerated and dissolved.

The title gives unusual importance to the desert: Abul Hossein’s story is about flight into an empty space. In Oriental visual culture, the desert is one of the most persistent images of the East. It is often staged as an exotic landscape: vast, timeless, silent, dangerous, and spiritually charged. It can suggest freedom, barbarism, purification, or oblivion. Because of this inherited symbolism, the staging of the desert is politically loaded. To present it merely as a picturesque Oriental background would be to repeat one of the oldest clichés of European representation.

So Purcărete asks for a different reading: the desert may be understood as a space of disappearance, suspension, and identity loss. Abul Hussein flees into the desert because he is unable to inhabit the social world after this shame has become visible. The desert is therefore the opposite of community. It is the space in which he hopes to escape memory, names, witnesses, and narrative itself. This is crucial for the postcolonial reading of the adaptation. If the desert is staged as exotic scenery, then the production reinforces a familiar European fantasy of the Orient as empty, archaic, and available for projection. But if the desert is staged as an existential void, the meaning changes. It becomes a theatrical figure for displacement itself: the desire to vanish from social identity, to escape the gaze of the others, and to interrupt the circulation of stories. In this sense, the desert is more than “Eastern”, it is psychological, social, and theatrical.

The irony of Abul Hossein’s flight is that the desert fails to erase him. He tries to disappear, but the story preserves him. He abandons his home, but his shame remains behind and enters communal memory. The desert, then, is not a place for liberation. There is no space beyond narrative, because the very act of fleeing becomes part of the tale, the reading moves the production away from the exotic desert of Orientalist spectacle and toward a more universal meditation on memory, shame, and the impossibility of controlling one’s own story.

At the same time, we should be careful with the term “universal”. Universalization can be another form of erasure. If the desert becomes only an abstract existential void, the specific cultural and narrative origins of the tale may disappear. Purcărete’s negotiation lies precisely in this tension. The desert is both a sign inherited from the Orientalist imagination and a theatrical space that exceeds that inheritance. It is recognizable as part of the world of the Nights, and it also functions as a non-place where identity, geography, and narrative stability break down.

The final level of negotiation concerns language and cultural specificity. The story of Abul Hossein contains names, social codes, religious references, and cultural markers that locate it within an Arabic-Islamic narrative world. Yet any Romanian stage adaptation must translate, select, and transform these markers. Translation is never neutral here, it decides what remains foreign, what becomes familiar, what explained, what is erased and what is converted into theatrical effect. The handling of religious and / or cultural markers is equally significant. Prayers, invocations, social rituals, marriage customs and formulas of address can either preserve the specificity of the source world or become decorative signs of otherness. A production may choose to retain them to mark the difference of the tale; it may also minimize them in order to make the story more accessible to a Romanian and European audience. Both choices have consequences. Retention may risk exoticizing difference if cultural markers are presented as spectacle. Erasure may risk neutralizing the text by turning it into a generalized fable about shame. Nevertheless, Purcărete decided to work between these alternatives: he transforms the story into a performative event in which names, places, and narrative formulas function as entrances into theatricality. The Arabic-Islamic specificity of the source is not entirely preserved, but neither is it completely removed. It survives as a set of traces in the title, in the narrative premise, in the figure of the sultan, in the world of storytelling, and in the atmosphere of ritualized narration.

The production’s most important gesture may be its refusal to resolve the tension between exotic image and theatrical abstraction. The visual design, the performers’ bodies, the desert, and the translated text all move between recognition and estrangement. Orientalist codes remain present, but they are not allowed to settle into a stable fantasy of the East and they are displaced into a space where the audience is invited to see spectacle as a construction. Purcărete’s negotiation is an ambivalent staging of an already ambivalent text. One Thousand and One Nights comes to the Romanian stage carrying the weight of European Orientalism, but also the instability of a corpus that has always travelled across languages, cultures, and forms. The story of Abul Hossein performs this inheritance and so, the production opens a third space in which the Orient is neither authentically recovered nor passively consumed, but is displaced, rearranged, and made theatrically uncertain.

The Semi-Peripheral Gaze: Romania as a Third Space

Purcărete’s position as a Romanian director is not incidental to the postcolonial reading of The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert. Romania occupies a historically layered cultural space, shaped by Byzantine, Ottoman, Balkan, Central European, and Western influences. It is geographically and symbolically a place at the edge of several cultural maps, often imagined from the West as not entirely European, not entirely modern, or not fully central. In this sense, Romania has also been subjected to forms of external representation, simplification, and self-exoticization. This does not mean that Romanian theatre is automatically immune to Orientalist habits of seeing. Purcărete works within European theatre, and his visual language is legible within international festival circuits and Western aesthetic expectations. The semi-peripheral position can produce sensitivity to cultural displacement, but it can also generate a desire for recognition by reproducing dominant European forms. This double bind is precisely what makes the production interesting.

Romania’s location may therefore generate an unstable gaze, that has been formed between margins: European, but not central; historically exposed to Ottoman influences but also shaped by Western models; capable of recognizing otherness, yet still capable of staging it.

Purcărete’s adaptation does not belong fully to the Western Orientalist framework, but neither does it claim access to an untouched Arabic origin. It operates in between. The production becomes a site of negotiation where inherited images of the Orient are repeated, displaced, and made theatrical, while Romania’s own semi-peripheral cultural position complicates the authority of the gaze.

This reading does not resolve all the deliberate contradictions of Purcărete’s adaptation. To describe the production as hybrid or as occupying a “third place” should nor become a way of excusing every representational problem. Hybridity can be a useful concept, but it can also soften the political force of postcolonial critique by shifting attention away from material inequalities: who has the institutional power to stage, translate, circulate, and profit from the image of another culture? The question of audience is equally important. Abul Hossein is produced within a Romanian national theatre and is likely to circulate mainly before Romanian and European spectators, including festival audiences already accustomed to Purcărete’s visual language. This reception context shapes the politics of the adaptation. The performance may destabilize Orientalist codes, but it also offers them to an audience trained to enjoy theatrical exoticism.

Silviu Purcărete’s The Incomparable Story of Abul Hossein the Yemeni and His Flight into the Desert is a useful case study for thinking about the complexity of postcolonial cultural exchange in contemporary European theatre. The production works inside an inherited field of images, stories, and expectations, displacing them through theatrical excess, abstraction, collective performance, and the semi-peripheral position from which it speaks. Its importance lies precisely in this ambiguity. The Romanian stage is not outside the European structures of representation, but neither does it coincide neatly with the imperial centers usually associated with Orientalist discourse. This makes Silviu Purcărete’s adaptation a valuable example of how East European theatre engages with non-Western source material from a position that existing postcolonial frameworks do not always fully address. Such productions require a vocabulary attentive not only to domination and appropriation, but also to meditation, belatedness, self-exoticization, and cultural in-betweenness.

The broader question remains open. In a world in which One Thousand and One Nights circulates simultaneously as world literature, heritage object, children’s fantasy, erotic archive, and Hollywood franchise, what does it mean to stage one of its minor stories in a mid-sized Romanian city with a great theatrical heritage, and a great festival, such as Sibiu International Theatre Festival? Perhaps the answer lies not in recovering an authentic Orient, but in making visible the unstable routes through which stories travel, survive, and change hands.