Sharjah 24: The Arab Theatre Institute announced the conditions and forms for participation in the competitions for writing play scripts, directed to children and adults.
The Arab Theatre Institute has allocated the year 2025 for play scripts competition directed at children from the age of 3 to 18 years, while it has allocated the year 2026 for play scripts competition directed at adults over the age of eighteen.
In its announcement of the 17th Children’s Texts Competition, the Arab Theatre Institute specified a guideline for writers to work on creating texts according to its jurisprudence, which is (Our children are new heroes in our folk tales), a trend of integrating contemporary characters from children into popular tales known in Arab culture in order to correct, update and revive these stories, ridding them of some negative images and meanings, bridging the gap between them, and preparing them for the future.
The dates for receiving texts were set from the beginning of March until the beginning of August 2025, with the authority announcing the final results for the winners during the first half of November 2025.
In its announcement of the 17th Adult’s Texts Competition, the Commission has developed the organising system (Man in a Posthuman World), in an effort to produce texts that anticipate the danger of a posthuman world, la Posthumanism. If the Czech writer Karel Čapek, in his play “Rossum's Universal Robots”, which he wrote in 1921, envisioned the imagination that science later turned into a tangible reality through experience, and he was the first to coin the word “robot” which means “labourer” in Czech. He was anticipating, and we are now living what he anticipated, and even more than what he anticipated, with the acceleration of the expansion and development of artificial intelligence in the joints of our lives, so what should we, as theatre writers, anticipate? What can we write to protect people and the spirit of humanity while ensuring development and growth?
The announcement specified the dates for receiving texts in this competition from the beginning of March to the beginning of July of the year 2026. The Arab Theatre Institute will announce the final results in mid-November 2026.
The Secretary-General of the Arab Theatre Institute, Ismail Abdullah, said that the Arab Theatre Institute always seeks to develop the mechanisms for implementing its programmes, and the two writing competitions are considered among the most important of these programmes. Writing is also a major creative process that establishes starting points and visions, on which the performances are based.
Ismail Abdullah added that the Arab Theatre Institute decided to give writers sufficient time to complete texts in accordance with the announced regulations, and to take the necessary time for contemplation and revisions. This will lead to greater control in accepting competing texts, and thus the Arab Theatre Institute will avoid the writer resorting to ready-made texts, doing some conversion and modification to suit the competition.
Ismail Abdullah addes that in the 17th edition of the Children’s Texts Competition, the Arab Theatre Institute seeks the writers’ contribution to reproducing the folk tale through new heroes, who are children who live in a high-tech age.
He concluded that through texts directed to adults, to contribute to shaping the world and the fate of humanity, in light of the control of artificial intelligence, and the mechanisation of life and its electronic programming. These texts will contribute to raising a person’s awareness of all these developments that they will inevitably experience, as they will either be their master or be their victim.
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