 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 March 1999 Issue No. 419 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 4 - 10 March 1999 Issue No. 419
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters That time of year
By Nehad SelaihaPlay reading, for entertainment or educational purposes, is a familiar practice in high schools and universities. In some small theatres, it is used to test new scripts on an audience to gauge their potential, before going through with a full production. It is peculiar, however, to find a writer of contemporary realistic drama deliberately opting for this mode of theatrical representation. In his Love Letters -- directed by Tori Haring-Smith and presented at the Wallace with four alternating casts playing two nights each, including both AUC teaching staff and professional Egyptian actors -- American playwright A.R. Gurney has created a curious play which elevates the absence of movement and scene-changes to a condition for its existence. Like an epistolary novel -- a form that flourished in Britain, France and Germany from the 1740s till around 1800 -- it consists solely of the letters, notes, and postcards exchanged by two characters between childhood and middle life.
Letters, of course, have frequently featured in drama as clues or devices, often playing crucial roles in the development of the action or providing dramatic turning points. Macbeth's letter to Lady Macbeth which sparks off the thought of murdering Duncan is a notable example. In many plays the concealment, discovery or going astray of a letter can damn or save a character. But a drama where the characters never come face to face -- except off-stage, in meetings we hear about but never get to see -- where the dramatic context of the communicative act is non-existent, is quite an oddity. It can even seem like a contradiction in terms. In this sense, one may legitimately wonder if Gurney's Love Letters is not really a short epistolary novel masquerading as a play.
That said, there is obviously a strong kinship between the epistolary novel and the drama. In both, the story reaches us as it develops through the characters involved in it, without the mediation of a narrator, and this immediacy lends itself to intense expression of feeling and subjective analysis. Moreover, the epistolary form implies a communicative situation involving an addressor and an addressee and, therefore, creates the illusion of an ongoing dialogue in the present. But this communication remains an illusion. It rarely becomes a dramatic event in and of itself. In Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Clarissa Harlowe, what matters is the narrative communicated through the letters, not the act and mode of communication. The fact that the story unfolds through letters does not affect its shape, course or meaning. Indeed, one can easily imagine recasting both novels in a different form without substantial loss to the story except, perhaps, in terms of immediacy, urgency and intimacy.
In Gurney's Love Letters, the situation is radically different. Here, the letters do not simply tell us a story that can exist independently of them, but are themselves part of the subject matter of the story and one of the major forces that shape the two characters' lives and the course of their relationship. In this sense, Gurney's letters are performative, rather than narrative. They constitute a real dramatic dialogue, where words become action.
Within a few minutes of the beginning, the play draws attention to its epistolary form, making it a subject for discussion and a bone of contention between the two characters who are, in turn, defined by their attitude to it. Melissa who hates writing letters and prefers drawing as a means of communication and self-expression is gradually revealed as a person who relates to the world physically, spontaneously, concretely. She resents and resists what Jameson has called "the prison-house of language", which isolates people from each other and the world. In one of her rare long letters (she mostly writes brief notes), she explains to Andy why they failed to make love when they met. Neither she nor he recognised the person they knew from the letters: "Two people were absent from that hotel room," she tells him.
For Andy, however, writing is an existential need. Unlike Melissa, he relates to the world conceptually and can only experience life through the mediation of language. Writing is his way of piecing together, defining and projecting himself (or rather, his multiple selves) -- of finding order in the flux of experience and making sense of the randomness of life. As the play progresses, however, the letters seem to push the two lovers apart rather than draw them together.
Andy's and Melissa's attitudes to language represent two ways of responding to the world, two distinct systems of values. Gurney does not take sides; he plays them off against each other, projecting each with profound sympathy and understanding as part of humanity's struggle to make the best of life and attain happiness. In the process, he raises questions about the randomness of life and the role of language as a social institution in the construction of subjectivity and the production of meaning. The constant clashing and efforts at reconciliation between the two characters constitute the dramatic conflict in the play; and the dramatic action they generate consists not in the sketchy narrative of their lives provided through the letters, but in their movement towards and away from each other -- a movement which partly produces and controls the narratives. It is this, together with the lively style of the letters, their conversational mode, the absence of consequential narration, the telegraphic way of providing information, the telling gaps of silence which interrupt the flow of correspondence and form an integral part of its overall rhythm, which may persuade us that Love Letters is a drama despite its curious form.
Speculative questions about genre, however, become irrelevant in the presence of performance. Performance cuts across the genres of fiction, poetry and drama, and so even if one remains doubtful about the provenance of Love Letters one can still enjoy it as theatre -- and I most certainly did at the Wallace. I saw it with two casts, one all-Egyptian (Khaled El-Sawi and Mona Zaki), and one American-Egyptian (Tori Haring-Smith and Ezzat Abou-Oaf). Both were enjoyable and it was exciting to watch different actors on two consecutive nights doing the same part, compare their interpretations and the subtle shades of meaning each brought to the character. In the Haring-Smith/Abou-Oaf performance, the cultural difference, marked by the accents, created an unexpected and delicious irony. Abou-Oaf's palpably Egyptian accent made his Andy, who in the play is supposed to represent the typical upright US citizen who embodies the American ethos and feels quite at home in his culture, come across as a foreigner trying desperately to pass himself off as an American. The accent seemed like an ironical comment on his way of life, his repeatedly voiced sense of duty "to family, country and self, in that order", and the system of values he champions. Compared to his Andy, Haring-Smith's Melissa became less of an alienated soul, with stronger roots in the culture and more authenticity and strength of character. It was a fortuitous contribution which stressed the superficiality of the apparent order, integrity and coherence of Andy's life and sense of identity.
