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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 April 1999 Issue No. 424
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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 Danse macabre
By Nehad SelaihaTheatrical events are few and far between in Alexandria. In winter, it is forced into theatrical hibernation, and in summer, it is doomed to parasitical dependence on guest Cairene troupes to entertain its visitors. The city which has given the Egyptian theatre Salama Hijazi, Sayed Darwish and Fatma Rushdi, and was a thriving theatrical centre at the turn of the century, with at least six private companies working round the year, has been shamefully neglected for decades and, at present, does not have a single resident professional theatre company.
When Sami Khashaba took over as head of the State Theatre Organisation four years ago he announced that giving Alexandria its own national theatre was at the top of his agenda. So far, however, the company has not materialised and its prospective home, the Sayed Darwish theatre, remains in need of extensive restoration. Work has already begun, but at the rate it is going, so everyone tells me, it may take up to 10 years before the building is ready. Another thing that galls Alexandrians is the appointment of a Cairene director as head of the proposed company in blatant disregard of many competent, experienced, and highly qualified local artists.
One such artist is playwright and director Mahmoud Abu Doma who, against great odds, has managed to keep his independent, largely self-financing and non-profit-making Alternative Theatre Group going for the past 10 years. Their first production, Doma's Castaways, a haunting poetic parable about the rise of capitalism and consumerism based on the Biblical story of the Fall and set on an idyllic island suggesting the Garden of Eden, was performed in the garden of the Alexandria Atelier in the winter of 1989 with real trees and, on two nights, a real drizzle. Next was The Dance of the Scorpions -- a brilliant and highly theatrical adaptation of Hamlet which narrows it down to a single plane -- the political, and projects it (with the help of masks, puppets, elaborate costumes and life-size paper dolls) as a gruesome bal masque. It was first performed in 1990 at the open air theatre of the Opera House during the First Free Theatre Festival, then, in a slightly modified version in which Ophelia's ghost plays the role of chorus, at El-Shatbi Arts Centre.
In subsequent years, though he continued writing, producing two more plays, The Well and Miriam, Doma turned his attention as director and group manager to foreign texts. It does not take a lot of guessing to figure out the reason. New plays by relatively unknown authors are invariably regarded with great suspicion by those who possess the money and the venues. With a famous foreign play it is easier to get some kind of subsidy and a performance space from the local authorities. And if all else fails, one can always appeal to the cultural centre of the play's country of origin. It was with help from the American Cultural Centre that Doma and his group were able to mount a production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at El-Shatbi Arts Centre in 1990; and Doma's beautiful translation of Athol Fugard's A Place with the Pigs was readily sponsored by the Cultural Palaces' Organisation and presented at the same venue in 1992.
A grant from the Goethe Institute allowed him to spend some time in Germany, attending performances and visiting important theatre centres. There, his passion for Brecht, which permeates all his writing and has from the beginning defined his approach to theatre as both dramaturge and director, gained new force. Not surprisingly, the Alternative Theatre Group's subsequent productions were all of plays by writers deeply influenced by Brecht. With help from the Goethe Institute in Alexandria they presented in succession: Friedrich Durrenmatt's adaptation of Strindbergs "The Dance of Death" retitled "Play Strindberg" in the lobby of the Goethe Institute in 1994; Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade at El-Shatbi Arts Centre in 1996; and, last week, Max Frisch's Biedermann und die Brandstifter (translated as The Fire Raisers by the British, The Firebugs by the Americans, and The Incendiaries by a German scholar). For this latest production (co-subsidised by Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland in Cairo), Doma refitted part of the elegant, wood-panelled lobby of the Goethe Institute to look like a café theatre, with little round tables and plates of delicious patisserie. The performance space was the area in front of the delicate wrought iron gate which leads into the library, with occasional use of the first landing of the old-fashioned wooden staircase on the left. A number of plastic petrol containers, a few folding chairs, a make-shift table together with some plates and cutlery made up all the props, leaving the space free for the six energetic actors who played all the parts as well as the chorus.
Following Durrenmatt's example in Play Strindberg, Doma extensively adapted Frisch's text to bring it nearer home and give it topical relevance. As the characters are given Egyptian names, the town victimised by arsonists becomes Cairo, Alexandria, or any other Egyptian town. Instead of Frisch's chorus of firemen in helmets who stay clearly out of the action, confining themselves to comments, observation, warning and lamentation, we have a second-rate company of actors bent on foisting their art on us, and alternately enacting the parts and stepping out of them to comment on the action.
Other changes include Biedermann's job (Doma makes him a judge who condemns an innocent man to death instead of a ruthless merchant who sacks his assistant and drives him to suicide); the characters of his wife, Babette, his servant Anna, and the doctor of philosophy (who becomes his own friend rather than the friend of the arsonists, Schmitz and Eisenring). But by far the most important change is the aggressively didactic tone which replaces Frisch's subtle wit and irony and rises in a crescendo to a feverish climax at the end with the actors literally screaming at us fiery quotations from revolutionary poems by Amal Donqol, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Naguib Sorour and the writings of Karl Marx among others.
Instead of a morality without a moral with an afterpiece, as Frisch subtitles his play (in an obvious dig at Brecht), Doma, in his Brechtian zeal, ignores the funny afterpiece (which takes place in hell, identifies the two arsonists as the Devil and Beelzebub, and the doctor of philosophy as a long-tailed monkey in charge of the records) and provides a strong, clear moral which transforms the play into an agit-prop piece. But despite its grating loudness, the tiresomely consistent violent emotionalism which marked Awatif Ibrahim's performance as chorus-leader and Babette, the excessively exaggerated physical expression and vocal delivery of the other actors, the embarrassingly forced attempts to draw laughter by crude farcical means, and the general lack of subtlety (something which was never missing in Doma's earlier productions), Doma's version of The Fire Raisers, rechristened Daylight Ghosts, manages to communicate an urgent sense of danger, and comes across as a chilling warning against indifference in the face of fundamentalism, fanaticism and the inevitable, disastrous results of gross and flagrant social inequality.
