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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 March 1999 Issue No. 422
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Profile Features Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters By Nehad Selaiha 
A political masquerade
One does not normally think of Molière in connection with politics, let alone contemporary politics or the Arab-Israeli conflict. To the ordinary Egyptian theatre-goer his name spells mirth, high spirits, the humorous portrayal of human foibles and the satirical castigation of hypocrisy, avarice, egotism and other moral vices. The more knowledgeable will tell you of his debt to French farce and the Italian Commedia dell arte and of his remarkable, far-reaching and long-enduring influence on English Restoration Comedy and, more importantly, the Arabic theatre.
When I heard that a new production of Molière's L'Avare had opened at the newly refurbished Miami theatre downtown (it runs there until the end of March) my mind turned to 1848, the year that marked the beginning of a new Arab theatre tradition based on the Western model. In February of that year, the Lebanese poet and writer Maron Naqqash (1817-55), who the year before had visited Italy where he attended many theatrical and operatic performances, wrote the first Arabic play in the European sense, directed it himself drawing on his experience in Italy, and presented it in the form of an operetta on a Western-style stage constructed in the garden of his house. The play was inspired by Molière's L'Avare, and the author openly acknowledged his debt by calling it Al-Bakheel (The Miser). The text is preserved, together with two more plays by Naqqash, in The Cedar of Lebanon (Arzat Lubnan), published in Beirut in 1869 by his brother Nicola, and reprinted in Egypt in 1969 by the National Centre of Theatre, Music, and Folklore.
Encouraged by the success of Al-Bakheel and his second play, Abu Al-Hassan Al-Mughaffal Abu (Al-Hassan the Dupe), in which he dramatised a story from the Arabian Nights involving the Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid, Naqqash built a theatre next to his home and, with his brother Nicola, who also wrote plays, established a repertory company. The style of staging the plays, like the scripts, was deeply influenced by the European theatre. In The Lebanon: A History and a Diary, (London, 1860), British traveller David Urquhart, who attended a performance of one of Naqqash's plays in January 1850, draws attention to the company's efforts to reproduce, down to the smallest and sometimes unessential details, European performance conditions. "The theatre," he notes, "was the front of the house itself, which was exactly what we seek to imitate by our scenes. There was in the centre a door, on each side of it two windows, and two above; the wings were the advanced part of the court with side doors. The stage was a raised platform in front. The audience was in the court, protected by sails spread over." They had seen in Europe footlights and prompter's box, and fancied it an essential point of theatricals to stick them on where they were not required. In like manner they introduced chairs for the Caliph and his Vizir, and cheval glasses for the ladies who, he observes, were prominent by their absence: "there were no women on the stage... none in the court, and not even at the windows which opened on the stage."
Naqqash's plays survived the death of their author in Tartus in 1855, the failure of his company, the eventual closing down of his theatre and the departure of his brother Nicola, with his son Selim and the troupe, to Egypt. In Egypt Selim continued to present his uncle's plays (there is a record of a performance by his company of one on 11 February, 1877), and within a few years, they became quite popular with other companies. Between 26 March 1887 and 9 December 1919, Abu Al-Hassan was in the repertoire of eight companies; Al-Bakheel was presented by Al-Qabbani troupe in 1898, the company of Sheikh Salama Hijazi in 1909, the Arab Acting Company in 1909 and by the Ukasha troupe in 1922 and 1923. By 1930, however, the popularity of Al-Bakheel had waned, and it was finally knocked off the boards when popular comedian Ali Al-Kassar, who wanted to play Harpagon, ignored it in favour of L'Avare, which he adapted for his own purposes. It was not until 1950 that Molière's original was presented without meddling or interference in a faithful translation by Mohamed Masoud. Not surprisingly the director was Zaki Tulaymat, a strict disciplinarian and great admirer of the classics. Two more productions followed in the National's '58-'59 and '59-'60 seasons, the latter using a new translation by Sabri Fahmi.
It took Molière's L'Avare nearly 40 years to make its way back to the stage. The current production at Miami (the new home of the Comedy state-theatre company) ignores the translator's name, and presents an abridged version of the play reset in a mental ward and projected as a zany musical comedy performed by lunatics. For this purpose new scenes have been added at the beginning and end; music, songs and dances provided to round off certain scenes while the sets, stage furniture and properties are, as in Molière's day, minimal. The costumes had a purely indicative function; the acting style, barring Harpagon, was deliberately exaggerated and affected and generally bordered on open parody; and Molière, looking emaciated in a ridiculous wig, was dragged in occasionally to comment on the mad proceedings. He looked like a caricature of the Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss's The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
It seemed to me that director Khalid Galal and his dramaturge and lyricist, Mustafa Selim, had decided to wrench L'Avare out of its consecrated niche among the classics and take it back to its crude, vulgar origins, expose the affinities of its characters with the stock figures of farce, and laugh good-naturedly at its stereotyped situations, its lack of development and structural logic, its many loose ends and discrepancies and its mechanically contrived happy ending. Rather than L'Avare, they treated us to a tongue-in-cheek burlesque of it. As such, it held its own against traditional productions of the play and even managed a degree of coherence. While everything on stage, including the conduct of the actors, heightened the effect of hilarious abandon, Khalid Galal's masterful and carefully controlled performance as Harpagon acted as a stabilising force and held the show together.
Taken on its own terms as a high-spirited, light-hearted burlesque, the show works admirably and is great fun, but only up to a point. In the penultimate scene (the final in Molière's text), Galal and his dramaturge suddenly decide to go political: Harpagon, looking more and more like Shylock, becomes identified with Israel, while his son, Cléante, represents the Arabs, and their bargaining and negotiations over Marianne and the cash box are presented, with the help of a microphone bearing Hebrew letters, as a travesty of the Arab-Israeli peace talks. I do not know if Khalid Galal realises that his treatment of this scene signifies logically that the Arabs are the offspring of the Israelis. To further punish this new Israeli Harpagon a last scene is added: it shows Harpagon alone in the dark, embracing his retrieved cash box and talking to it passionately as though it were a lover. It vividly recalled the opening scene in Ben Jonson's Volpone, where the eponymous hero, the avaricious Venetian, worships at the shrine of his coffers with a pious, quasi-religious hymn. By the time Harpagon drops dead, for no apparent reason unless, perhaps, his heart gave way under an excess of ecstasy, he has become a patchwork of different characters from different plays, a contrived figure who undercuts the intended political message and makes it ridiculous.
