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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 March 1999 Issue No. 421
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Rising from the ashes
By Nehad SelaihaI had nearly forgotten there was an actor called Mohamed Khayri. The once highly promising handsome young man, who made his debut in cinema as the male lead opposite Magda in the '70s in Life Is But A Moment, was not destined to make it as a star. He stumbled through a few major and supporting roles in films, then seemed to pale out of sight. He continued to act, and one occasionally came across his voice in radio plays or serials, or caught fleeting glimpses of him on stage in tawdry commercial plays or on television in small, lacklustre parts in trashy soap operas. But few registered his presence, or continued to remember him once his image went off the small screen or he withdrew off stage. He seemed to have become that most unfortunate of things: an eminently forgettable figure.
When I heard he was playing the leading part in a revival of Mikhail Roman's earliest play, Al-Dukhan (Smoke), it took me some time to put a face to the name. When I did, I groaned in a mixture of dismay and disbelief. Hamdi, the central character in the play, is an extremely complex and often baffling character who needs a really tough actor to cope with his wide range of diverse, often contradictory emotions, his constant vacillation and sudden, extreme changes of mood. Combining aspects of the typical romantic and existentialist heroes, Hamdi is at once an anarchist, a nihilist, a dreamer, an escapist, a social rebel, a poet, an egoist, a warm, affectionate man, a selfish brute, a weakling who blames his failure on fate, society and others, and a man of integrity and determination who takes full responsibility for his tragedy and recognises his suffering as part of the human condition. Nauseated by the dullness and triviality of his existence, and the ugliness, vulgarity and injustice of reality, and haunted and tormented by a vague, strong (almost incestuous) attraction to his elder sister, Gamalat, who he at once adores and deeply resents, this almost pathologically sensitive character takes refuge in rugs. Hashish and opium become his solace, and his way of slipping literally out of life.
The play traces graphically his gradual deterioration and relentless descent into the darkest pit of despair -- to the lowest depths of physical degeneration, social degradation, and moral disintegration. When he hits rock bottom, the shock proves a turning point. He begins his arduous ascent towards the light alone, rejecting the help of his family and refusing medical assistance. Taking his destiny into his hands at last, he sets out alone on a perilous journey "through hell" -- as he says -- to achieve his salvation. The play ends at the beginning of the journey and we are denied the comfort of knowing how it ended.
This character was too deep for Khayri, I thought, and felt almost certain he would drown in it. When the play was first performed in 1962 at the National, Salah El-Sa'dani, a brilliant actor even then, played the part, giving a highly acclaimed performance. But, even so, the production, directed by Kamal Yasin, failed to please the leading critic at the time, Lewis Awad, who referred to the play disparagingly in an article in Al Ahram as "that thing called Al-Dukhan" Another source of worry was Khayri's age. In his late '50s, wasn't he a little too old for the part? He may be still handsome, but Hamdi is not supposed to be more than 35 in the play, or 40 at the outside limit.
I grew even more skeptical about the production when I heard it was that vexing thing: an adaptation. More worrying still was the choice of venue. I could not see how Roman's three-act realistic drama, with its two detailed, realistic sets could be squeezed, together with an audience, into the cramped space of the Abdel-Rehim El-Zurqani Hall at the National. What did the adaptation do to make this possible? And how will Khayri, who is tall and well-built, manage his part in that tiny space?
I went to see the play mainly to satisfy my curiosity on those points and did not expect to have an enjoyable, let alone a memorable experience. As it turned out, those who went to scoff stayed to applaud. Within 10 minutes of the beginning, I became wholly engrossed in Khayri's performance. Standing in a soft pool of bluish light, he seemed like a man emerging from the shadows of the valley of death, and staring around in utter bewilderment and growing panic at a world at once hostile and enigmatic. The tiny, semi-circular performance space, fenced in with panels representing an old, dilapidated wall, with a forbidding stone gate in the middle, intensified the sense of constriction, becoming a concrete stage metaphor for isolation, alienation, and imprisonment. Gazing at us with those tortured eyes -- the eyes of a haunted man, a wounded animal, a man tormented beyond human endurance by shame, guilt and self-loathing -- he communicated to us vividly, almost physically, his terror, making us wonder what horrors lay behind that mysterious door. At this moment, it did not matter what age he was or how he looked; he was ageless and could be a baby just out of the womb, or an old man gazing into his gaping grave. The actor had bared his soul to us, or grown so physically transparent that he could see through his body and look directly into his soul.
The intense immediacy and urgency of Khayri's performance was truly stunning. He had obviously made a thorough study of the nature and causes of addiction, its phases, physical and mental effects, and the psychology of the addict. It is possible also that he resorted to intimate observation of addicts. But he did not stop at giving us just an accurate and meticulously detailed portrait of a man enslaved by drugs, but went on to transform this image, through a masterful management and control of voice and body language, into a powerful theatrical metaphor for the human condition, and a metaphoric embodiment of the tragic sense of life. Actors often speak of "a once in a lifetime performance", and for Khayri, this is it. Facing a really physically and mentally taxing part, perhaps for the first time, his latent acting talent rose to the challenge and burst forth with unbounded energy and devotion.
But this could not have happened had Smoke been given the way Roman wrote it. For once I find an adaptation that does not alter or spoil the original text, but, rather, improves it substantially. guided by Roman's extensive experimentation with dramatic form in his subsequent plays, and his frequent recourse to expressionism and other non-realistic modes, Nagwa Abdel-Rahman shrewdly realised that rather than help the drama along, the realistic mode and framework chosen by Roman (perhaps because it was fashionable at the time or to dress his shocking theme in familiar robes) hampered its progress, obstructed its psychological flow, obfuscated its central themes, landed it into many contradictions, and cluttered it with many unnecessary and tedious details. With a firm, unfaltering hand, she dismantled the outer realistic frame, removed the paraphernalia and trappings of realism, promptly excised the characters and scenes which she regarded as mere deadwood obstructing the course of the drama.
In her hands, Smoke, became a taut, intense psychological drama, with clear metaphysical reverberations, and a tragic, cathartic impact. The settings of the drama and its stage becomes Hamdi's mind. To achieve this, Nagwa Abdel-Rahman changed the original, chronological order of the scenes, replacing it with a steam-of-consciousness state of flux, shaped by subtle resemblances, echoes, repetition, contrast and association. The characters and events materialised as Hamdi remembered them, flowing in and out as if borne on waves. The world of the play became an internal space inhabited by memories and shadows which merged, separated and overlapped -- a world that embodies in its spatio-temporal fluidity the tragic element of life and the ineluctable existential loneliness of wo/man.
With such a beautifully distilled, stirring script, and Khayri's magnificent performance, the director, Asim Raafat, would have been well-advised to adopt the principle of austerity and do without the offensively banal songs which pitifully intruded on the show, vexing both the actors and audience, the strange contortionist movements and inexplicable postures he foisted on the actors, and many of the props which were distracting and completely redundant. However, no amount of directorial impurities could have spoilt my enjoyment of such a superb brand of "Smoke".
