This picture is the first khedivial theatre building in Cairo, the Comédie or Théâtre Français. It operated between January 1869 and the early 1880s. Sometimes it is misleadingly named as the “Ezbekieh theatre” although it was, properly speaking, outside of the garden. The “Garden Theatre of Ezbekieh” was inside the garden and a different venue. The building of the Comédie was the location of the first public, modern Arabic theatre performance in an official government building in 1872. It was demolished in 1887.
Le Monde Illustré, 6 February 1869, 86.
The architect of the building was Julius Franz (1831–1915), the khedive’s private German architect. It was built in the place of a palace belonging once to Ahmed Tahir Pasha. It had special boxes for the harem. The Comédie was the first khedivial entertainment building, ordered as part of the preparations for the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal. In spring 1869 it was the only theatre building in Cairo hence the Arabic press called it maḥall al-malʿab al-musammā bi-l-tiyātrū (“the building of the playhouse which is called theater,” Wādī al-Nīl, 23 April 1869, 12.). Soon it was overshadowed by the meanwhile built famous opera of Cairo.
Detail from Grand Bey map, 1872.
Unlike the opera house, this little theatre is often forgotten in the chronicles of Egyptian history. It really embodies a Mediterranean circulation of culture, and, of course, the competition between Italian and French musical theatre styles in the second half of the nineteenth century. Khedive Ismail decided to build this theatre while he stayed in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, in the late summer of 1868. He invited a French theatre company, originally organized for shows in Beyoğlu, over to Cairo. Next, the theatre became part of the khedivial “entertainment empire” within the city in the 1870s. Between 1878 and 1882 there were plans to make this theatre the first venue for exclusively Arabic plays. ‘Abd Allah Nadim (d. 1896) and Yusuf Khayyat (death date not known), an Egyptian and a Syrian interested in Arabic theatre, petitioned the government of ‘Urabi Pasha in the spring of 1882 for their exclusive use. After the British occupation the building fell into disuse. The occupying British army kept its horses in the building in 1882-1884. Ruined, it was demolished, and a Post Office was built in its place which functions until today. (A.M.)
Source: Adam Mestyan, Arab Patriotism – The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt, Chapters 3 and 4 and sources quoted there.
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