The Arab's Mouth

Judith Rudakoff is an associate professor of theatre arts at York
University and the co-editor of Dangerous Traditions: A Passe Muraille
Anthology.

MacDonald’s great strengths as a writer come in large part from her
fluency in many disparate fields and her remarkable ability to fuse them
together in a coherent, pithy, and entertaining fashion. The Arab’s
Mouth is no exception. Classic gothic plot twists taking on levels of
meaning as Freudian analysis, Egyptian mythology, and Scottish lore
intermingle to chronicle a coming-of-age/taking-power tale of Pearl
MacIsaac, an academic naif who shares some characteristics with
MacDonald’s other female protagonists in Goodnight Desdemona, Good
Morning Juliet, and the collectively written Smoke Damage. The Arab’s
Mouth moves through seemingly mutually exclusive yet apparently parallel
worlds, somehow weaving them into a web where the points of
intersection, overlap, and interplay are points of great beauty.
Linguistically and metaphorically, MacDonald is a maestro of the art of
synchronistic synergy: from a jackal-headed Egyptian god to the sound of
bagpipes, from haggis to hieroglyphs, Pearl and her brother Victor
traipse through a labyrinthine journey toward self-discovery and
recovery of the past. Familial ties and heredity play with traditional
values and religious assumptions as the voices of the past vie for
control over the present and, ultimately, influence the future. This is
a profound play that is as challenging to read as it is to stage.