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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 March 1999 Issue No. 420
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Special Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Fiction in action
By Nehad Selaiha
In 1958, Amina El-Sawi's dramatisation of Naguib Mahfouz's novel Midaq Alley set off a heated critical controversy about the artistic legitimacy of transferring novels to the stage. For some, the production was reductive, and falsified the novel out of all recognition. Others retorted that, of course, it was different; it had to be, in view of the change of genre and medium. Only a fool or an ignoramus would expect to find Mahfouz's novel in its totality on the stage. Making plays out of novels entails careful selection, extensive omission, rearrangement of events, curtailment and a telescoping of the spatio-temporal context. Then there is interpretation, as well: the adaptor or dramaturge gives only one of many possible readings of the novel, his or her own, and this reading should be judged independently of the novel, in terms of its depth, coherence and formal dramatic integrity.
Rather, some maintained that what was wrong with El-Sawi's adaptation was that it stuck too closely to the novel and ended up falling between two stools -- the narrative and the dramatic. El-Sawi may have been daunted by Mahfouz's literary stature, perhaps, or by the novel's enthusiastic critical reception. She was then only 38 and was making her debut as a writer, after years of work in the censorship department of the Ministry of the Interior, censoring films and publications. She did not want to take risks; she strove to be as truthful as possible to the text, cramming as much of the narrative as she could manage into the conventional time limits of a sixties' stage performance (roughly three and a half to four hours).
Directed by Kamal Yasin for the Free Theatre Company, which boasted some of the best young talents of the time (including Saad Ardash, Fouad El-Muhandis and Abdel-Moneim Madbouli), the play was a huge success. Yet, in the view of a number of critics, it rambled and lacked focus, dramatic tension and complexity. Judging by the one play El-Sawi later wrote single-handed (Marriage, Wholesale, 1959) and an earlier collective piece (The Struggle of Port Said, 1956), she had little gift for creative writing and a limited artistic imagination. But Midaq Alley established her credentials as an adapter of fiction, and there was no stopping her after that, whatever the critics thought or said. She went on to adapt three more of Mahfouz's novels for the stage: Bayn Al-Qasrein (Palace Walk, 1960), Qasr Al-Shouq (Palace of Desire, 1961), and Al-Liss wa'l-Kilab (The Thief and the Dogs, 1962), as well as Yehia Haqqi's Qandil Umm Hashim (The Holy Lantern) in 1961, Youssef El-Siba'i's Ard Al-Nifaq (Land of Hypocrisy) in 1962, and Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi's Al-Ard (The Land) the same year.
By then, adapting novels for the stage had become an established and respectable practice in the Egyptian theatre. Writers were encouraged, even commissioned to dramatise fiction -- not that they needed much persuasion, for El-Sawi's success was sufficiently alluring. From the point of view of the Ministry of Information and Culture, headed by Abdel-Qadir Hatem, adaptation was seen as a safe and speedy way of meeting the burgeoning demand for new plays created by the many newly-founded TV theatre companies. Each of these needed a minimum of one new play a month, in order to provide the medium with an incessant flow of well-visualised, diverse and ideologically-sound drama. Thus it was that some of the best and most popular novels of the sixties, or even of earlier periods, made their way to the stage. Examples include Tawfiq El-Hakim's Awdat Al-Rouh (The Return of the Spirit), Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi's Al-Shawari' Al-Khalfiya (Back Streets), Ihsan Abdel-Qoddous's Fi Baytina Rajul (A Stranger in Our House), Mohamed Abdel-Halim Abdalla's Min Ajl Waladi (For the Sake of My Son), Fathi Ghanem's Al-Ragul allathi Faqada Dhillahu (The Man who Lost his Shadow) and Mohamed El-Tab'i's 'Indama Nohib (When We Fall in Love).
Foreign novels were largely ignored, the only exceptions being Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and Crime and Punishment. Foreign plays were also left alone. The long tradition of adapting Western plays (particularly French melodramas, comedies, farces and vaudevilles) which had nourished and sustained the Egyptian theatre for over half a century gave way to the new trend. The change was beneficial all round: the theatre companies did not have to scramble any more for scripts; the dramatists were saved from turning into hack writers under pressure from the companies; the novelists reached a wider audience, becoming more famous and richer in the process; the dramaturges and adaptors stopped being plagiarists and plunderers of foreign drama and became skilled craftsmen who took pride in their work while making a good living; and foreign drama (Shakespeare, Molière, Sophocles, Lorca, Chekhov, Miller, Brecht, Sartre, Beckett, Ionesco) could tread the boards unbattered.
This trend, however, did not survive the decade. In the seventies -- as in the first half of the century -- the only narratives that yielded plays for the stage were the popular epics (siras), certain folk tales and historical chronicles. With the rise of the private commercial theatres, there was a reversion to the old tradition of purloining foreign plays and "Egyptianising" them. Novels continued to be adapted, but for television, as soap operas, as were some of the most famous plays of the sixties, such as No'man Ashour's El-Dughry Family and Burg El-Madabegh (Tannery Tower).
In the eighties, I could only find five productions based on literary narratives. Samir El-Asfouri's adaptation of Chekhov's Ward N6, rechristened Zinzanat El-Maganin (The Mad Cell) and presented at Al-Tali'a Theatre in 1980, was a huge success with the critics and the public. In terms of theme, style and atmosphere it was very much in tune with the mood of the times, and its mixture of black humor, barbed political satire, grotesque brutality, farcical absurdity and sensitive portrayal of human suffering made it one of the most memorable productions of that decade. A new adaptation of Mahfouz's Midaq Alley by Bahgat Qamar, produced by the private Al-Fananin Al-Mutaheddin (Private Artists) company, followed in 1984; and three years later another private theatre company produced an adaptation, also by Bahgat Qamar, of Amin Youssef Ghorab's popular novel Shabab Imra'a (A Woman in Her Prime) which had been made into a very successful movie in the fifties, directed by Salah Abu Seif and starring Tahiya Karyoka in her best role in cinema. (Thirty-five years later, another famous Oriental dancer, Fifi Abdu, attracted by Karyoka's success, attempted the part on stage, in a commercial production directed by Hani Mutawaa, but fell dismally short of achieving anything like Karyoka's fine and riveting performance.) In the same year, 1987, director Ahmed Ismail dramatised and produced Fouad Hadda's version of the popular tale of El-Shatir Hassan (Hassan the Clever) which he had written in person in the 1960s in collaboration with Abdel-Latif Metwalli, giving it a different ideological slant, and recharging it with socialist, progressive ideas. The production was simple but highly imaginative, and though the cast consisted mostly of amateurs, and had a small budget, like all mass culture productions, it enjoyed a long, successful run at Wikalet Al-Ghouri. In contrast, Abdel-Ghaffar Ouda's production of a stage version of Mahfouz's novel Bidaya wa Nihaya (A Beginning and an End), also successfully transferred to the screen by Abu Seif in the early 1960s, was a complete failure. Despite a star-studded cast, including Yusra, Hussein Fahmi, Mahmoud Yassin, Amina Rizq, and Farid Shawqi, among others, and the wide publicity it received as a fund-raising project to help repay the national debts of Egypt, it barely survived 10 days at the floating theatre in Giza. For a number of years afterwards, Ouda's flash in the pan seemed to have scared fiction off the boards.
It was not until 1994 that fiction found its way back to the stage, guided this time by Sameh Mahran. Unlike El-Sawi, who was a faithful realist, Mahran is thoroughly experimental. His plays and dramatisations display definite feminist sympathies, a predilection for deconstruction, a rebellious rejection of patriarchy, a deep-seated relativism and a postmodernist sensibility. Predictably, he takes a very different attitude to the dramatisation of novels from his predecessor, regarding it as a genuinely creative exercise which does not aim to reproduce the 'text/novel' in a different genre (an absurd proposition, he thinks), but instead engages the text, defined as a field of energy capable of generating many plural readings, in a 'constructive/deconstructive' dialogue which produces another field of energy -- a script. Influenced by modern theory (Semiotics, Deconstruction, Feminism and Reader-Reception theory), Mahran refutes the autonomous authority of the text. However, on the issue of "authorship", he is ambivalent. As a dramatist working with literary texts by known authors, some of them still alive, he is in sympathy with Stanley Fish's idea that the text is a product of the reader, and his claim that "Strictly speaking, getting 'back-to-the-text' is not a move one can perform." Once the text is produced, he likes to take credit for it as its "Author". In other words, in the process of reading the novels to produce his dramatic script, he tends to go along with Roland Barthes's pronouncement of "the death of the author"; but once the process ends, and the text is there, he resents being waved aside and pronounced, as an author, dead.
What feeds this ambivalent attitude and perhaps generates it in the first place, is that dramaturges, as well as literary translators, are never given the credit, respect, or indeed the financial rewards, they deserve. They are generally slighted, made light of, ignored, or forgotten. The dramatic script carries the title of the novel from which it was adapted and the name of its (the novel's) author. If the script is good and the production successful, the novelist and director get the credit. If it flops, the adaptor becomes the scapegoat.
Between 1994 and 1997, Mahran (who had already written two original plays before turning his hand to dramatisation) produced four experimental scripts based on five equally experimental novels: Tifl Al-Rimal (The Child of Sand) in 1994, based on Taher Ben Jalloun's novel of the same title, as well as another novel of his called Nuit Sacrée (Holy Night -- referring to laylat al-qadr, the night during the last week of Ramadan when the gates of heaven are said to open and all prayers are answered); Al-Touq wa'l-Iswira (The Collar and the Bracelet) in 1996 adapted from Yehia El-Tahir Abdalla's novel of the same title; Ayyam Al-Insan Al-Sab' (The Seven Days of Man) in 1997, based on a novel by the late Abdel-Hakim Qasim, and Khafyet Qamar (Lunar Eclipse), in 1998, adapted from Mohamed Nagui's novel.
When The Collar and the Bracelet won Egypt the best director award at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 1996, it encouraged another promising young playwright, Said Haggag, to try his hand at adapting Bahaa Taher's intriguing novel, Khalti Saffiya wa'l-Deir (Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery). The script was directed by Nasser Abdel-Moneim, who had already directed three of Mahran's adaptations, including the award-winner. Presented at Al-Hanager on the fringe of CIFET 1998, it then transferred to the National Theatre, where it ran for a month. Unlike Mahran, however, and very much like Amina El-Sawi, Haggag tried to play it safe and ended in disaster. Sticking to the surface of the narrative and its skeletal plot, and ignoring the layers of meaning and deliberate ambiguities generated by the structure, the language, and the author's handling of space and time, he produced a limp, melodramatic script, the latter half of which consists of the ravings of a mad woman. Haggag, however, is still young and has time to learn from his mistakes.
Other young theatre artists -- usually directors who compose their own scripts in collaboration with the actors and artistic crew -- have resorted to fiction for material and inspiration, but they seem to favour the short story. In 1991, Tariq Said produced a pungently satirical and exuberant script out of a number of short stories by Youssef Idris, linking the hilarious, witty, strip cartoon-like episodes together through the most famous character in Idris's plays, Farfoor. Demi-Rebels was presented during the second Free Theatre Festival in 1991, where it was voted best production.
Foreign short stories attracted another artist, Sarah Enani, who fell in love with Jane Rhys's short fiction. Working in close collaboration with Caroleen Khalil, she created an image-based impressionistic script from Rhys's Vienna, incorporating certain details and motifs from another two stories in the same collection. The play, directed by Sarah and starring Caroleen, was performed at Al-Hanager in March 1996, with a simple elegant set, real crystal glasses, back projections using the paintings of Klimt, musical motifs from Chopin and the songs of Edith Piaf, and a fresh supply of irises for every performance. It came across as a flow of cinematic images, as fleeting and short-lived as the happiness of the two main characters, and transmitted a poignant sense of the fragility of beauty which rose to a climax when the sheet of glass covering the back screen suddenly cracked and crashed down in a heap as if of its own accord. The final image was of an empty stage strewn with broken glass and a video projection showing close-ups of iris petals falling into the water and floating on the waves.
Two years later, another Sarah -- Sarah Nur El-Sherif -- brought a production based on a selection of letters from Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi's long epistolary narrative, The Letters of Haraji al-Qutt to his Wife Fatna, to the same venue. The work traces the rise to consciousness of a peasant who leaves his village to work at the construction site of the Aswan Dam, and of his wife who has to learn to cope alone and manage as head of the family. Sarah Nur El-Sherif, who prepared and directed the script, used a dual set, splitting the stage into two locations without any visible barrier. The husband and wife spoke their letters to each other across imaginary distances. The contrast between the physical proximity of the couple on stage and their assumed separation had an ironic effect, making the audience reflect on the meaning of communication in relation to space and time.
The same year, 1998, Rasha Khairi's daring and lively dramatisation of Youssef Idris's famous short story Beit min Lahm (House of Flesh) was directed by a gifted actress called Riham (her surname I have sadly forgotten), and presented at the AUC Howard Theatre. It was a robust production, refreshingly outspoken, unsettling, and painfully honest. Idris's story, which centres on the hunger of the flesh (the most iniquitous kind of hunger, as the narrator says) and the desperate, even perverted, action it can force the starved to take, features four women -- a widow and her three daughters -- driven by the hopelessness of their wretched lives and the rigours of extreme physical deprivation and sexual frustration to violate the incest taboo and share one man. The sharing is not planned -- when the mother remarries, it just happens, as a natural, inevitable consequence of the physical situation. All the women know of it, and the widow's second husband, who is blind, first suspects it, then is sure of it. Yet it is never mentioned or discussed. The "unspeakable" is carefully hidden behind a diligently guarded wall of silence. And, indeed, silence dominates the story verbally, thematically, and structurally. The word "silence" occurs 35 times in the short narrative which consists of three sequences and moves from the silence imposed by mourning the father, combined with the silence of breathless, hopeful expectation at the beginning, to the guilty conspiracy of silence at the end. The central sequence, in which this silence is briefly broken to express hope, is cruelly ironical.
There are ways, of course, of projecting such a story on stage with little or no recourse to language, and some viewers missed the silence that envelops Idris's narrative in Khairi's adaptation. But her way is as legitimate as any. She allows the women to vividly express their rebelliousness and frustration in word and action, violent fights and petty squabbles, and builds a convincing, detailed and graphic image of the dismal and arduous daily life of a poor family of working women. The raw realism of the image brought it very close to life, while the loud vulgarity of the verbal exchanges betrayed the violent despair underneath, and made the silence that gradually creeps over the characters, one by one, all the more chilling.
Like most of her generation of young adaptors, Khairi is not awed by literary texts or the reputation of their authors. She took the liberty of adding many details to flesh out Idris's shadowy females, individualising them and bringing them to life on stage; and the result was quite rewarding. The AUC production gave Khairi's script uncensored and uncut, and I can still remember the sultry atmosphere and mounting sense of claustrophobia I experienced as I watched those tensed up female bodies, bespeaking great mental agony and emotional strain, jerking around in the intentionally cramped performance space created by the director, knocking against each other and the few sticks of furniture. Every detail of the set -- the low, stained grey walls, suggesting a smelly basement flat, stuffy and humid; the threadbare faded rug; the oppressively tiny window in the back wall behind a humble box-sofa with a thin, discoloured mattress; the few pathetic cooking utensils, the grey washing tub; the cheap tabliyya (low table) of unvarnished wood; the old, scratched clothes chest; the women's shabby, frayed dresses and head scarves, made of the cheapest fabrics -- everything bore the taint of squalid poverty and hopelessness. Except for one thing: a tall four-poster bed, dressed in clean white sheets and looking invitingly soft and comfortable. That bed, which stood in sharp contrast with its degraded surroundings, became in the course of the performance the focal point of the set and of the dramatic action. Gradually, it grew into a multiple, complex and paradoxical sign, signifying at once the escape route from the dreariness of reality, the promise of fulfillment, the longing for warmth and security, the site of bitter conflict, of what is both craved and forbidden -- the lawful bridal bed the daughters dream of, and a hotbed of sin. As the meanings multiplied, the bed seemed to imaginatively expand and occupy the whole performance space -- a space that had to be shared by the wretched souls confined in it. Reduced to its two basic actions, Khairi's adaptation, as performed at the Howard, seemed like a grim joke: it begins with the daughters taking turns at sharing the only bed with the mother to get one kind of nourishment, and ends with them taking turns again at sharing it, but this time, with her husband, for another kind of nourishment.
Another production of Khairi's adaptation, directed by Asim Nagati, was presented by the Youth Theatre in February this year at the House of Zeinab Khatoun. For this production, however, Khairi had to submit her script to censorship. (Any public performance running for more than three days has to be approved by the censor.) Alterations were inevitable: the incest theme had to be watered down and the end, changed. In the Zeinab Khatoun production only one of the three daughters commits the heinous act, and only once, while the blind husband (predictably, perhaps, since he is a sheikh who earns his living reciting the Quran) is absolved of the guilt of colluding in the conspiracy of silence and kept innocent of the knowledge to the end. In the earlier script, he knows very well what is happening, but does not confront the women, using his blindness as a hypocritical excuse to absolve himself and shift the guilt squarely onto their shoulders, since they can see, as he tells the audience, and he cannot. Any woman who wears his wedding ring he will treat as his lawful wedded wife, regardless of her shape or the feel of her skin, he tells us.
In the censored script, on the other hand, the sheikh remonstrates with his wife for taking off her wedding ring when she slept with him earlier that day. He is at a loss as to why she insisted on remaining silent, and walks out in a huff. The mother is shattered by the discovery that one of her daughters had taken her place in his bed, and rightly suspects the middle one, who has the most vitality and is the most rebellious. When, in the following scene, her eldest daughter asks her to lend her the ring to wear for a day, she refuses (in the story and earlier script she complies), and a violent quarrel ensues. The final scene shows the husband on the large balcony overlooking the courtyard of Zeinab Khatoun where the performance takes place, singing a maudlin song, accompanied by a small oriental band sitting in one corner of the yard, while the four women huddle together on the four-poster bed (carried over from the earlier production) and draw the blanket over their heads.
At Zeinab Khatoun, the flesh and its desires were tamed, the family, judging by the costumes, raised slightly up the socio-economic ladder, the tension and oppressive atmosphere substantially eased, and the physical and mental strain considerably relieved. Instead of a cramped, claustrophobic space underground, we have the spacious, airy courtyard of the house and its charming architecture. Sitting there, it was difficult to imagine that the life of the characters inhabiting this place could be dull or dreary. There was no hint of squalor, no trace of vulgarity or ugliness anywhere; only pure old-world charm stirring a vague nostalgic feeling. The daughters (played by Intisar, Amani Youssef and Hind Hosni) and their mother (Manal Zaki) were beautiful, elegant and in the bloom of youth; one could hardly imagine them failing to get husbands, unless all men were to go blind like the sheikh their mother marries. The sheikh, on the other hand, was nothing but a grotesque caricature, and it would require quite a leap of the imagination to think of him as a male object of desire. This defused the incest bomb: forbidden sex with this travesty of a man would constitute its own punishment. Mostafa Selim's lyrics and Hisham Taha's tunes created a lyrical mood which softened the atmosphere and shifted the accent from sexual to social, economic and general human deprivation. And Hisham Gomaa's design, which kept the props to a minimum, leaving the space free, contributed to the lyrical romantic mood. When the actresses slid the bed on its wheels around the space in the soft lighting, it seemed like a graceful dance; and when they moved their individual clothes chests around, they looked like excited children delving into their secret treasure-boxes. It was a smooth, inoffensive, charming performance, with no claws or fangs.
