Staging women’s implicit dissidence in Yusuf Al-Ani’s The Silk Thread

This article presents an overview of the intellectual atmosphere that shaped the Iraqi theatre during the Iraq–Iran war (1980–88). It focuses on Yusuf al-Ani’s 1986 play Khayt al-Breesam (‘The silk thread’) to show how Iraqi theatre-makers struggled under the totalitarianism of the former Ba’athist regime to present, although indirectly and oftentimes through the theatrical representation of female characters, their anti-war views. This article examines the play as an example of (1): deliberate disassociation from the dominant war narrative of the period and (2): Iraqi dramatists’ tacit representation of dissident Iraqi women.