1--In a recent NOT I staging I read about in THE BECKETT CIRCLE which you once edited, the Auditor is made a Twareq look-alike. Twareqs are bedouin Arabs living in the Algerian Sahara (Desert). The recent V[olkes] W[agen] model is subtitled Twareg, ie desert rover, as the Arabic word, tawreq means rovers or roamers. The name Twareq (twareq is plural of tareq) is from Tareq ben Ziad, the Arab captain who crossed the sea from Tangier to Spain en route what later came to be named after him, Gibraltar which is a spoiled English version of the original Arabic: Jabal Tareq which translates as: Mount of Tareq. Present-day Saddam's Deputy Tareq Aziz, imprisoned in Baghdad since Saddam's fall on 9th April, 2003, is named after that Arab Captain Tareq ben Ziad, and Deputy Aziz named his first-born son, Ziad so that the son's name is Ziad Tareq who is currently in Jordan, pleading--through Pope Benedict XVI, among many another world VIP--for his father's release




2--In the television staging of QUAD which I saw in England as part of the 1981 BBC-2 TV Beckett Plays Festival, the four hooded figures were Moroccan look-alikes. They were reminiscent of the hooded man who gets stabbed in the market-place in Alfred Hitchcock's THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, the 1956 Hollywood film whose action at the beginning is set in Morocco where James Stewart and Doris Day are touring