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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 February - 3 March 1999 Issue No. 418
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters That time of year
By Nehad SelaihaI was not in the brightest frame of mind when I made my way to the Book Fair last week to take part in two symposia, one on the future of the Egyptian theatre and the other on the position of women in the contemporary world viewed from a feminist angle. The trip across town at the height of the rush hour -- 2 pm -- in a rickety, grunting taxi amidst all the noise and fumes seemed a cruel conspiracy against my already very jagged nerves. For weeks I had been battling against a tidal wave of depression and spiritual fatigue brought on by a series of internal landslides. My daughter moving out to set up home elsewhere proved a traumatic experience. I had not realised how our lives had become intermeshed and how much I depended on her as a friend and companion. For years we have gadded around town in her little car, ferreting out exciting out-of-the-way shows or sitting through dreary and dull ones that rambled on for over four hours. Her witty remarks helped me through many a miserable performance, and afterwards, in our little café, a lively exchange of views and impressions would ensue -- a profound dialogue between sensibilities and generations. Theatre is a collective experience both in the making and the consumption, and I have always found that sharing a performance with a kindred mind makes one's reception sharper, more sensitive and perceptive. Perhaps fairer as well.
Khalid El-Sawi and Sumayya El-AlfiThe second landslide followed soon after. On the last day of Ramadan, Ali El-Ra'i, who revolutionised theatre criticism in the sixties, shifting the focus from the literary text to the performance and performers, and who reshaped the artistic and dramatic sensibility of generations of critics and artists, died. Oddly, the following day, I heard that the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski -- another man whose theories have had a seminal influence on Egyptian theatre since the late eighties, and who also foregrounded the performer in his work -- had decided, as if by assignation, to join El-Ra'i on his voyage to explore what one French writer called le grand peut-être. It felt like the end of an era. In one sense, the history of the Egyptian theatre from the sixties onwards can be read as a dialectical movement between the ideas of these two men. In his Improvisational Comedy and other books, El-Ra'i put forward the concept of a popular theatre which gives the actors room to exercise their creativity and powers of invention, and enables them to engage the masses in an active, participatory experience closely linked with their daily reality. The translation into Arabic of Grotowski's book, Towards a Poor Theatre, swung the pendulum in the opposite direction, in favour of an exclusive kind of theatrical experience, based on long and arduous spiritual and physical training on the part of the actors, and involving a small audience prepared to take psychological risks and "cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations", as Grotowski puts it: a theatre where the actor "is a high priest who creates the dramatic liturgy and at the same time guides the audience into the experience". Towards a Poor Theatre was an inspiration to many young theatrical artists in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and triggered a spate of experiments and workshops. Even when it was not fully understood or was only superficially applied, it helped draw attention to the importance of the actor's body, its expressive power and plastic potential for shaping space. For young groups faced with a theatrical tradition that was word-oriented, and in a culture which still regards the body with great suspicion, even fear, it was exhilarating to investigate the physical as well as the vocal aspects of performance. And with their meagre financial resources, how could they resist the idea that theatre could exist without make-up, costume, sets, lighting, a stage even, or sound effects? That very few artists in Egypt can give the time and dedication Grotowski's "poor theatre" requires remains the biggest obstacle which its advocates still face here. There are also countless cultural and psychological taboos to be overcome, especially in the case of female performers.
I had hardly recovered from my sorrow over El-Ra'i's death, when I heard of the deaths first of Fathi Ghanem, then, close on his heels, of Lutfi El-Kholi. Ghanem's dramatic novel, The Man Who Lost His Shadow, where the same story is narrated from different points of view, had convinced me in the sixties of the relativity of truth and the partial fictionality of all accounts of it. For me and my generation, it was a revelation, and one which left an indelible impression on the imagination. El-Kholi, though mainly a political thinker and writer, had played an active part in the theatre of the sixties. I remember bumping into him often at El-Hakim Theatre, in Emadeddin Street, at the time we were putting on a student show of Shakespeare's plays. In those days, theatre was regarded as an effective political forum and taken very seriously. El-Kholi wrote three plays: Kings Cafe Qahwat Al-Muluk (Kings Café), Al-Qadiyyah (The Lawsuit) and Al-Aranib (The Rabbits). All were comedies, in the tradition of socialist realism, projecting ordinary scenes and characters from daily life in an exaggerated, sometimes farcical manner, and using them as a vehicle for the writer's progressive socialist ideas. The Rabbits, in which a husband and wife exchange roles and sexual identities, was his most adventurous and hilarious and is, perhaps, the earliest feminist play in the Egyptian theatre.
I remembered El-Kholi and his Rabbits during the symposium on the position of women at the Book Fair. It turned out that, despite all the profound insights put across by the panel of speakers and all the serious issues they raised, what preoccupied the majority of the audience was the veil. For them, the right of women to work was secondary. And when one of the speakers, the Jordanian poetess Zulaykha Abu Risha, dared question a popular Islamic leader's interpretation of a verse of the Quran, she was almost physically attacked and the meeting broke up in a near riot. I flew out, feeling that my world lay around me in ruins, like Shakespeare's "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." The sweet birds have been departing one after the other, and those who remain are becoming a sad minority.
That night, I braved the cold and took a cab to Al-Salam Theatre. There, a bunch of wonderful actors were playing Wannus's swan song, Al-Ayyam Al-Makhmourah (Drunken Days) orchestrated by director Murad Munir. The vivid theatricality, poetic power, and dauntless audacity of the text seem all the more stunning in view of the fact that Wannus wrote it in the final stage of his battle with cancer, practically on his death bed. Like The Rites of Signs and Transformations written 3 years earlier (1994), it is a staunchly feminist play, which ruthlessly exposes the repression of women in the Arab world and their mental and physical abuse in patriarchal societies. The heroine, Sanaa, is married off, or rather bartered, by her family at the age of 15 to a rich merchant who nightly rapes her in a gruesome ritual. At 37, with four grown sons and daughters, she falls passionately in love with a Christian widower and, after an agonising conflict, elopes with him. Her decision is not prompted by love alone, but also by an overpowering desire to act of her own free will at least once in her life, as she tells her youngest daughter. The different attitudes and reactions of her family to the scandal and the individual fates of its members build up an image of a sick society deeply riddled with moral, political and ideological contradictions. In such a society healthy, robust passions cannot survive: Sanaa's love story ends in tragedy when her eldest son shoots himself in frustration after failing to bring himself to shoot her "and wipe away the shame she has brought on the family", while her lover, Habib, wanting to "devour" her completely, even to the point of possessing her past and her memories, builds a wall around their house, turning it into "another prison" like the one she had left.
The play's structure is as intriguing as its subject. The story is told through a narrator -- Sanaa's grandson -- who, in a series of interviews with the surviving members of the family, tries to ferret out its details and piece them together. The interviews, which were conducted in the past, are enacted before us in the present, and the memories they yield are often likewise enacted. Other scenes, particularly those representing Sanaa's relationship with her lover, are described by the narrator and a chorus of clowns who use their imaginations to fill in the gaps in the narrative. The distance created by this technique between the story and the audience allows a space for reflection (which is what Wannus, deeply influenced by Brecht, always wanted in his theatre), and saves the play from the twin pitfalls of sensationalism and melodrama.
In Murad Munir's production (first presented at Al-Hanager last year, then transferred to Al-Salam with new sets and minor cast changes), both the lyricism and theatricality of the text are brought out. A large dose of music, drawn mostly from old songs and popular tunes, played live on the lute and piano by the narrator, Wael Sami, has been added. This contributed to the smooth transition from scene to scene, setting the emotional tone and efficiently filling up the time required by the many set changes. I would have preferred a less cluttered stage, fewer painted drops and props, a more studied choice of costumes, and a less exuberant choreography. But there was plenty of good and sensitive acting in really demanding parts, and not just from the leading actors -- Sumayya El-Alfi, Khalid El-Sawi and Attiya Oweis -- but also from a promising crop of young performers, some of whom are making their stage debut in this production. There was also the text -- shocking and liberating, and practically uncut: a credit to our censor, and the best antidote to depression around.
