Sympathy symphony

By Tarek Atia

Alas, elegance won out, as it did with most of the audience. That's why during the first intermission a woman with bare shoulders was complaining that her fancy shoes were being ruined by all the dust and sand. Apparently, some people wanted the perfect setting for Aida, as well as red carpets every step of the way. Sorry, sweeties, you can't have everything.

What you could have, however, were spectacles galore, both on stage and off.

At one point in the second act, during the stretch of ceremonial music all too familiar to everyone (even if they had no idea it was from Aida), there were almost as many performers on stage as there were people in the audience -- which is a lot, considering the 3,000-plus nearly-full house. There were so many entrances and exits onto and off the stage that people seemed to be coming out of nowhere.

In fact they were all coming from backstage, which must have been the biggest in the world, at least the size of four football fields. It was like being in a storeroom of the Egyptian museum. There were statues, boats, funerary chairs, colourfully painted columns and people dressed in Pharaonic garb everywhere. And just like the audience, the cast and crew were all speaking different languages.

In the grandstand itself, a UN-style symphony was also floating in the air. I'm talking here about the conversations carried out among the audience and not the Italian being sung on stage, which, of course, I couldn't understand a word of.

"Is that a real person standing between those two murals?" a woman asked her husband in Arabic.

"You mean the one raising the ball?" he said, referring to the sun disc being carried by an extra at centre stage.

"Is he really going to stand there holding that thing all this time?" the woman said.

"Actually, I think it's a girl," her husband answered, this time in English.

Meanwhile, someone else was delicately explaining the French term cherchez la femme, to his companions. "Behind every disastrous political event in history there is always a woman involved," he said with much confidence, as if speaking from personal experience.

And although that is one of the things Aida is all about -- an Ethiopian slave torn between her Egyptian amour and her country's well-being -- class struggle and upward mobility also top the list of the opera's themes.

And there we were, divided into sections, A, B, C and D, staring at the Pyramids, a backdrop which might very well be the ultimate symbol of upper class decadence.

Everything we saw that night was about getting ahead. Even during the slow pre-performance climb up the Giza plateau, some cars just couldn't bear to stay in line and kept trying to pass to the right and left. Near the end of the night, before Aida and Radames made their way to the pyramidal tomb where they would finally be together, albeit in death, the busybodies who imagined they were going to beat the inevitable traffic jam by exiting the parking lot early got up to leave before the final scene even began.

During intermissions, in section A closest to the stage, business moguls were chomping on cigars and checking on things at the office. Glamour queens were complimenting each other on their new, mostly shorter, hairstyles. Way back in section D, the junior would-be moguls were also sparking up their somewhat smaller cigars.

Meanwhile, in the parking lot, drivers who had chauffeured their bosses to the performance sat in the dark waiting for it to end. During the second intermission, some people decided to leave early prompting many of the drivers to wonder out loud if their wait would soon be over. When informed that there was still at least two hours to go, epithets I'd rather not mention here, but distinctly related to the poor Ethiopian slave's mother, filled the air.

One driver, standing next to a large dark sedan, wondered naively if anyone was going to bring him dinner. "Well, it's a special night, right, once in a lifetime?" he asked, seemingly resigned to his fate. "We'll survive."

For those in the audience, it was a matter of surviving for a few hours without their favourite new toy. Although the event was sponsored by a mobile phone company, people were asked to turn their phones off during the performance, or else leave them in the car.

Which, thankfully, after only a little bit of arguing, they did.

Related:

Meeting a myth

Aida returns to the Pyramids

Bye-bye Budapest, hello Aida