Shams by Rumi: When the Writer Becomes the Story
Aksam Alyousef
Some people leave our lives and never really go away. They remain in the rooms we enter, the words we cannot quite say, and the versions of ourselves we become after knowing them. Moemen Gaafar’s Shams by Rumi begins with the charge of such an encounter and follows its afterlife with tenderness, wit, and remarkable theatrical clarity.
At first, the story seems familiar. Galal, an Egyptian playwright, meets Shams, a young Iranian woman. Curiosity becomes attraction; attraction becomes the fragile, exhilarating intimacy of two people discovering how much they can risk with one another. They tease, wander, dance, argue, and imagine a future. Yet another meeting moves beneath this contemporary romance: that of Galal al-Din Rumi and Shams of Tabriz. Gaafar does not flatten that history into reenactment. Instead, he lets its emotional and spiritual force surface within the present.
This is not a simple modernization of Rumi. Galal explains his writing method as taking something that happened, changing one element, and then following the consequences. Gaafar builds the play by the same principle. Historical Shams, a man, becomes a contemporary Iranian woman; Rumi becomes an Egyptian writer; spiritual companionship is filtered through the rhythms of romantic comedy. What survives the transformation is not biography but the destabilizing power of an encounter that changes the shape of a life.
Brijesh Nagarathinam understands this beautifully. His Galal has none of the strained grandeur that can burden a character with Rumi’s shadow. He is spontaneous, funny, slightly foolish, and quietly open-hearted. Nagarathinam’s comic timing is superb, but his finer achievement is emotional proportion. Tenderness arrives without being underlined; when the story darkens, grief is allowed to settle rather than performed at us.
Fatemeh Jelveh-Garan gives Shams an equally persuasive interior life. Her attraction to Galal unfolds through glances, pauses, teasing, and the shifting distance between their bodies. The chemistry feels discovered rather than announced. Their Sufi-dance sequence is among the evening’s loveliest scenes. At first, they mimic the whirling projected behind them, treating it as a game. Then the movement escapes imitation and breaks into something joyous, sensual, and nearly delirious. The scene reveals the play’s deepest instinct: the past is not displayed behind glass but allowed to pass through contemporary bodies and acquire a new pulse.
Gaafar draws a surprising amount of theatrical life from very little. Harjot Bassi and Skye Grinde’s design uses three projection panels, a small table, and two chairs to move fluidly among places without encumbering the stage. Maps, images, and graphics establish the world, while the actors rearrange furniture in full view. A running joke has Galal finding ever more inventive ways to avoid helping with the set changes. It is a small but telling choice: the labour of making theatre becomes part of the play’s comedy.
The economy of the staging gives Khaled Elbastawisy room to shine. Moving among minor characters, including coffee servers and a policeman, he creates each one through crisp shifts of posture, voice, movement, and costume. The transformations are never merely efficient; they become a pleasure in themselves, lending the production buoyancy without disturbing its emotional balance.
Language complicates the romance in subtler ways. Arabic, English, and Farsi coexist with an ease that makes meaning exceed literal translation. Galal first worries that English cannot contain what he writes in Arabic. Later, he describes an intimacy in which he and Shams seemed to find another language altogether, neither English, Arabic, nor Farsi, yet somehow shared. For a writer concerned with which language can hold his art, this is an unsettling and liberating discovery: feeling has outgrown the words available to contain it.
The production’s most eloquent moment arrives almost without language. Before she leaves, Shams lays a shawl over the sleeping Galal. Her departure is not made grand; it is made tangible. The shawl becomes a trace of presence, a quiet reminder that an encounter can remain real even after the person has gone. Sheikh Imam’s أنا توب عن حبك؟, “Do I Repent of Loving You?”, deepens the scene’s ache without pushing it into sentimentality.
Here, the play’s engagement with Rumi becomes fully convincing. The question is no longer whether Galal and Shams will remain together. It is what their meeting has made possible in him. Earlier, Galal treats experience as material a writer can reshape into a story. By the end, that process has reversed. Housam urges him to write again because he is different now, because he may write “from a different place. The phrase gathers the play’s concerns with quiet precision: the artist who believed he could shape life into art discovers that life has first reshaped him.
Shams by Rumi succeeds because it trusts its people more than its ideas. Nagarathinam and Jelveh-Garan give the production tenderness and emotional delicacy; Elbastawisy supplies irrepressible comic energy; Gaafar knows when to let music, movement, poetry, and silence speak where dialogue cannot. What might have been an intellectual exercise in adapting Rumi becomes immediate, generous, and deeply human.
Among the many stories competing for attention at the Fringe, this is one worth making time for. It is accessible without becoming slight, poetic without becoming obscure, and moving without begging to be admired. For anyone drawn to intimate, language-rich theatre, Shams by Rumi offers something rarer than a clever adaptation: it makes an ancient story feel not merely new, but necessary. ★★★★★
