A taste of Italian vintage

By Nehad Selaiha

When Dr Hoda Wasfi, the present director of the National, decided to revive the project, it was already too late for Ayyoub to do the part. The time had passed. A competent actress, more suited to the character age-wise (Filumena is 47 in the play), and preferably with star quality, was needed. Curiously, the choice fell on Dalal Abdel-Aziz who is still in her thirties, looks young and voluptuous, and whose stage credits consist solely of vaudevilles and spectacular musical comedies which showcase her dancing skills and sex appeal. It was a risk for the theatre and a challenge for Abdel-Aziz, and many had grave doubts about her ability to cope. Her performance, however, despite occasional slips into sentimentality and a spot or two of excessive emotionalism, has proved that with a little more experience, confidence, better control and more subtle manipulation and tuning of voice and gesture, she can develop into a fine serious actress with a powerful presence and a wide emotional range. With the help of make-up which made her look much older, and plain, homely costumes, she projected a convincing and deeply sympathetic image of the ignorant, common, and emotionally battered former prostitute who first steals money from her lover of 25 years to support her three illegitimate sons, then tricks him into marrying her in a death bed ceremony to obtain for them social respectability and financial security. Luckily for Abdel-Aziz, she had a sensitive, meticulous and taxing Italian director, Mariano Regilio, to guide her, and a strong cast which includes some of the finest acting talents in the National, and is led by the magnificent Yehia El-Fakharani (as the wealthy, vain and selfish Don Domenico Soriano) to support her.

The unconventional and earthy morality of the play which condones unlawful sex, theft and deception, and rates the social and financial interests of the sons above truth and honesty is unusual in the Egyptian theatre and would be shocking and quite unacceptable in an Egyptian drama. What helps the predominantly middle class and conservative patrons of the National to swallow it every night -- apart from Filumena's emphatic declaration of repentance and her extensive and detailed description of the rigours of poverty that drove her to prostitution in her early youth, her passionate longing for a decent, respectable life, and her vehement denouncement of abortion -- is the palpable "foreignness" of the play. Though presented in colloquial Arabic (Mustafa Saad prepared the colloquial version) and retitled Gawaza Taliani (An Italian Marriage), no attempt was made to adapt it, Egyptianise it, or interfere in any way with the original text. The setting remains the hall-cum-dining room in Soriano's house in Naples (a beautiful neat white and grey set designed by Mahmoud Hanafi who also designed the costumes with careful attention to colour, detail and texture), the characters keep their Italian names and Catholic faith, the references are all Italian, and so is the music (with some delicious Neapolitan songs played before and after the performance, and during the interval), and even the by now old-fashioned and unfamiliar (at least to Egyptians) division of the play into three acts (instead of the usual two "parts") is also kept. This disconcerted some members of the audience, and on the two occasions I watched the play I heard one or two people exclaim in bewilderment when the curtain came down after the first act: "Whoever heard of a part that lasts only 35 minutes!"

It was a real and refreshing treat to watch for once a foreign play untampered with; this has become quite rare in the Egyptian mainstream theatre, and Hoda Wasfi was very wise to entrust the first Egyptian production of Filumena Marturano to Mariano Regilio who has long and wide experience of the Neapolitan dialect theatre and especially the work of Eduardo De Filippo. The fact that I am not particularly fond of Filumena, find its central "honest whore" figure boring, its traditional dramatic structure unexciting, its exalted, uncritical view of motherhood, marriage and the family smug and parochial, its harping on respectability and money stuffy and a bit too bourgeois, and would have preferred a more provocative play from the Italian repertoire, a Pirandello for instance, does not make me value the production any less. It is a serious and brave attempt on Wasfi's part to revive the long-forgotten tradition of respect for dramatic texts, foreign and local, which we had in the sixties and the interest in world drama, and to stem the tide of adaptations which has flooded the Egyptian stage.

Having seen many perfectly respectable and good texts wantonly meddled with and messed up (the most recent was Tawfiq Al-Hakim's Shams Al-Nahar [Morning Sun]), I shudder to think what would have happened to Filumena Marturano in the hands of an Egyptian director. It would have, in all probability, been transplanted to Egypt, Filumena and Soriano, now Muslims with Egyptian names, would not be living in sin but secretly married, or at least having the Islamically accepted form of common law marriage called 'urfi, the sons would, therefore, be legitimate and all fathered by Soriano without his knowledge, the virgin whom Filumena encounters would become a sheikh, and, more importantly, Filumena's past life which she describes in the second act would be dramatised and visually projected on stage in a series of melodramatic and gaudy scenes, with plenty of singing, dancing, ribaldry, sexual innuendos and risqué jokes. Instead of a prostitute in a brothel, Filumena would probably become a belly dancer in a sleazy nightclub, thinly clad, but fiercely guarding her honour, that is her virginity, until Soriano marries her in secret. The poverty of her family which drives her to the nightclub would be effectively displayed with the help of music and lyrics (from the pen of a hack song writer), and the lives of the three hidden sons would be extremely gone into and amply revealed. By the time the adaptor has done all this, or even half of it, he will have stretched the one and a half hour play into a four hour show. Some people, particularly the clientele of the commercial theatre, will doubtless enjoy such a version. Personally I am grateful to Wasfi, Regilio, and his disciplined cast and crew that they spared me such horrors.