Changing theatrical direction

By Tawfiq Al-Hakim

Those were the companies concerned with serious theatre. Of those that went for comedy, there was the company of 'Aziz 'Id, which specialised in frank vaudeville, in translations closely following the text of Georges Feydeau. After a while appeared the troupe of Amin 'Ata Allah, then that of al-Rihani, associated with the character of Kishkish Bey, which he took over from Amin 'Ata Allah. And there was the troupe of 'Ali al-Kassar, Egypt's unique Berberine.

One night I was at the Opera House watching a play by the 'Ukasha troupe, and found there a classmate of mine in the School of Law. I knew he was not interested in plays or novels, so I asked him what had brought him there. He told me that his brother was the author of the play we were watching. I was surprised and delighted, and asked him to introduce me to his brother. So I came to know one who then became my friend and co-author of a musical play, The Seal of Solomon. He was Mustafa Effendi Mumtaz, an employee in the administration responsible for tribal chiefs and village headmen in the Ministry of the Interior.

Mustafa Mumtaz had entered government service with a baccalaureate, and had not gone on to higher education as his brother, my classmate in law, had done. Yet I found him better grounded in both Arabic and English, more widely read, a better conversationalist. He also had a great deal of talent, of feeling for art, and of true love for the theatre. In him I found a congenial friend, whereas I did not trouble much with his brother who, although a classmate, was almost a stranger to me in mentality and tastes.

I used to visit Mustafa at home from time to time. He was married and had children. We spent a great deal of time in the sitting room chatting about art and plays. He would listen to me hold forth on the French plays I read, and I to him on the English plays which he used to get by mail from London, published in a cheap series. We would then review what we found here or there that seemed to us suitable for translation, or that tempted us to Egyptianise.

Before I got to know Mustafa Mumtaz, I had myself Egyptianised a play which I entitled The Groom -- based, perhaps, on a play called Arthur's Surprise -- and I had offered it to 'Ukasha troupe. At that time Tal'at Harb -- who was considered the Sa'd Zaghlul of the national economy, the founder of the first Egyptian bank -- was thinking of the creation of an Egyptian, Eastern theatre.

To this end, he had the Azbakiyya Garden Theatre built in Arab style, and he made it a condition that only Egyptian plays in Arabic be presented there -- not translations following the literal European text and produced in Western dress, as was done by the companies of George Abyad, 'Aziz 'Id, or Yusuf Wahbi, who was looming on the horizon with a new company in the Ramsis Theatre. If the use of a foreign theme was unavoidable, it was to be Egyptianised or Arabised -- 'adapted' was the term in use then. This meant that if the subject of the foreign play was appropriate to present-day life, it was Egyptianised, whereas what had to be set in bygone days was to be cast into the early Arab or Mamluk eras. It is in this that the Azbakiyya theatre specialised, never departing from it. Classical Arabic was used if the theme was historical or serious, colloquial Arabic if it was contemporary or humorous.

Whatever may be thought of Tal'at Harb's choice of the 'Ukasha company to occupy the new Azbakiyya Theatre and to fulfill this mission, thanks to financial backing by Banque Misr and the encouragement of Tal'at Harb it succeeded in producing operettas and operas and other performances that required lavish expenditure.

Mustafa Mumtaz and I eventually chose an interesting theme that I had picked up in a French novel, the title of which may have been The Maid of Narbonne or something of the kind -- I do not now remember. Out of that we were able to fashion a musical play for the 'Ukasha company. We had the action take place in an Eastern city at some ancient time. We went over a number of cities, but could not find one that suited the atmosphere of the play, for we wanted an Eastern city, but not a major one that would leave no scope for the audience's imagination. In the end, we got hold of a map and kept scanning it until we came across a small city in Persia called Merv, and we shouted together, "This is our city!" We called the play The Seal of Solomon.

We apportioned the writing of the lyrics between us, and then took the play to the 'Ukasha company. It was received by its director, its star singer, the one who always played the hero whether we liked it or not, its pampered actor, he whose command or prohibition was law within the company, the youngest of the 'Ukashas and -- by the admission and consensus of the whole of Cairo -- the most insufferable of them all: Zaki Bey 'Ukasha, the same who owned a huge, shining diamond ring and made a point of displaying it always on his finger, in order to dazzle the ladies secluded in boxes draped with screens like mosquito nets. He insisted on wearing this ring even when he took the part of a beggar in The Two Orphan Girls, brandishing it so that it shone on his finger even as he intoned, nay chanted, nay sang, 'Alms for the love of Allah, O my Masters!"

He was a past master not at these arts alone, but also at the art of procrastination with authors of no account like ourselves and poor composers like Kamil al-Khula'i. We would go to him week after week, and he would say, "I have not read your play yet," "I was busy," "I was hoarse," or "My mood was all wrong!" and yet the truth was that he had read the play on the first evening, had determined what his part in it was to be, and had passed it on to the composer.

If by some chance we learned that the play was in the composer's hand, which meant it was at the final stage before production, we would waste no time in facing him with what we knew and demanding either our fee or the return of the script. His ploy then was, "Come back tomorrow." We would call on him the next day and he would say, "Be patient another couple of days." After the couple of days, it was "There is to be an inventory. You'll have to wait a little." And in the last resort, "Go to Hashim Effendi, the chief accountant of the company." We would go to find him only to be told, "He is on a journey," whereas in fact he was hiding in another room. We would keep dogging Hashim Effendi and he would slip away like mercury.

When at last we cornered him where no escape was possible and all the tricks of evasion based on appearance and disappearance were exhausted, the gallant and invincible Zaki 'Ukasha would move to another stage, another battlefield: haggling about the price. He would not give an author more than thirty pounds for a play -- fifty on rare occasions. But in the books he would enter two hundred pounds as the payment to the author or the composer, the difference of course landing in his generous pocket. Toward the end of his life, it was known that he had amassed a huge fortune, yet extracting even the thirty pounds was no easy matter -- there would have to be, on the way, endless discussions and negotiations. I could see not a flicker of hope in the horizon of an early success in our negotiations -- even Sa'd Zaghlul's negotiations did not compare! -- leading to an actual disbursement of cash by Zaki 'Ukasha, so I gave way to despair, left that matter in the hands of my friend and partner Mustafa, and turned my attention instead to following up the music that Kamil al-Khula'i had been commissioned to compose.

(...)

That was one phase of writing for the theatre in Egypt. As for actual creative writing, it did not begin seriously for me until after I had been to Europe and drunk at the true springs of culture and of the actual formation of my intellectual make-up.

The wonder is that in Paris I did not continue along the line I had followed in Egypt, the line of humour, vaudeville, operetta -- the popular theatre in general. These were represented in France in what were called the theatres of the Boulevard, comparable with our own 'Imad al-Din Street, with its places of entertainment, its plays, its writers commanding success before huge audiences. What happened was that I lost interest in this easy kind of art. I was not tempted by the ready and certain success it offered. I followed a new direction, with a different caravan of playwrights, authors, and producers who were effecting an innovative revolution against the other, successful way. It was the caravan of Ibsen, Pirandello, Bernard Shaw, Maeterlinck, playwrights and authors who encountered extreme difficulties in holding a large public at the time, because they had turned their backs on the usual ways of earning applause in order to blaze new trails. If they triumphed later, it was thanks to groups of cultured people who neither weakened nor despaired in commending their art.

Extracted From The Prison of Life: An Autobiographical Essay, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, trans. Pierre Cachia, Cairo: AUC Press, 1992.