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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 May 1999 Issue No. 428
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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 Special Focus Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The dance of death
By Nehad Selaiha
"A few rough marble tiles at the top of a hill, nicknamed by the people 'hangman's noose', is all that remains of Herod's sumptuous banqueting hall where Salome once danced her fateful dance," Salmawy says in his foreword to the published text of Salome 2, rechristened Salome's Last Dance for the current National Theatre production. Oscar Wilde's dramatic portrayal in 1893 of the woman held by the Gospels to be the cause of Herod Antipas's beheading of John the Baptist has inspired Salmawy's earlier Salome which starred Raghda in a memorable open-air production at Al-Munesterly Palace, directed by Fahmi El-Kholi. There were no sets, only a broad sweep of steps descending from the Nilometer to the shore where some of the audience sat, while others watched the performance from the deck of a ship on the Nile. The director's imaginative use of the garden and the roof tops surrounding the Nilometer, together with Raghda's savage beauty, framed by the Nile and the night sky, her fiery, passionate acting and erotic abandon, made the play into a wild, enchanting pageant.
Soheir El-Murshidi
in SalomeThe production had a long successful run in Cairo, then travelled to Syria and Jordan in 1989, but the ghost of Salome continued to haunt Salmawy long after it stopped. "What happened to her after the fatal dance, how she felt and what her end was like, remained teasing questions," he says. An excursion to the ancient site of Herod's palace 50 kilometres outside Amman clinched the matter. At that desolate spot, where the surrounding desert bore no sign of life past or present, and the Dead Sea lay on the horizon Salome 2 was born; but this time the imaginative resources were definitely Shakespearean.
Consciously or otherwise, Salmawy seems to have modelled his second Salome on Shakespeare's Cleopatra. Like the Egyptian queen, she is middle-aged, but "age cannot wither her"; both combine in equal measure dignity and vulgarity, sensuality and heroism, and both end up defeated, bereft of their lovers through their own actions, and jubilantly embracing death in the spirit of a bride preparing for her wedding. The similarity extends to Salome's female attendants, Nardeen and Miray, whose bawdy humour in the first scene and sad task of adorning their queen for death at the end clearly evoke Charmian and Iras.
Modelling his second Salome on Cleopatra, Salmawy created a complex, intriguing character whose ambivalent status as queen and fishwife, pagan goddess and whore, murderess and victim would attract and challenge any actress. Nevertheless, I was genuinely surprised when I heard that Soheir El-Murshidi had accepted it. For the best part of her stage career she had formed with her late husband, director Karam Mutaweh, a politically committed artistic couple and her repertoire had largely consisted of patriotic parts which symbolically projected her as Egypt or the moving spirit of the nation. For months after playing Tawfiq El-Hakim's Isis (directed by Mutaweh for the National in the '80s) she appeared at many social occasions dressed in the costume of the part and seemed obsessed with the character. I remember asking her once in Tunis, the year she was honoured by the Ministry of Culture there, whether she didn't get tired sometimes of those parts which did not do full justice to her range as an actress and whether she would not like for a change to take on Medea, Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth or Blanche du Bois. "But would the audience accept me in such parts?" she wondered; after a moment's reflection she added, "I am not sure I can feel at home in them, and I want the audience to love me."
Well, she seems to have changed her mind, and good for her. Rather than a national heroine, she competently plays here a woman in love who, driven by guilt, remorse, immortal longings, and a mad defiance of death, embarks on a suicidal course and leads her nation to destruction. Although she believes in the curse she has brought on the land when she was inveigled by her mother to ask for the head of the Baptist (consistently referred to as Al-Nassiri, "the Nazarene", in the play to underline his symbolic role as Nasser -- a national rather than religious saviour), and though she watches passively as her kingdom rots and crumbles under her feet and is overrun by rebels (all Nazarenes/Nasserites), she does not surrender to her fate without a good fight. Unfortunately, however, Salmawy denies her Cleopatra's graceful exit; instead, he allows an angry mob to stone her to death -- a messy and most undignified way to die.
The challenge El-Murshidi faces nightly is familiar to any actor who has tried on Macbeth -- namely, to work against the political grain of the play and its dominant message which ultimately damns the character to try to raise it to a broader existential plane of universal human significance, and to project as sympathetically tragic figures whose monstrous deeds make them as black as hell. El-Murshidi had my full sympathy as she heroically grappled with one particularly repellent sacrificial ritual in which she kills one of her young worshippers in cold blood to use his body as a vessel for the spirit of her lover which she means to conjure up. This was followed by reincarnation rites complete with smoke machine and three witches who seemed to have been hastily summoned from Macbeth to display their antics at the National. Considering that the costumes in this production are a disaster and make the actors look like farcical figures taking part in a cheap masquerade (I am promised they will be changed), and despite the clumsy and embarrassing directorial management of some scenes (particularly Salome's bath scene which, in the interests of chastity, perhaps, was barely visible and all one could see of El-Murshidi was a bobbing head in the distance with a ridiculous crown of red roses on top or a modestly clad leg suddenly sticking up), El-Murshidi coped admirably. She negotiated with skill the many transitions of mood and the tricky lyrical passages and amorous monologues; but she was really at her best in the realistic scenes when she had real people to talk to rather than ghosts or witches.
The real surprise of the evening, however, was popular comedian Abdel-Moneim Madbouli who made me suddenly realise how close the character of Herod as written by Salmawy was to Lear after his mind gives way. Looking pathetically frail and old in a shabby dressing-gown, and doddering around the stage, dropping pearls of wisdom, he was every inch the Shakespearean decrepit, dethroned king driven to insanity by ill use, and gaining wisdom as he loses his reason. Creating comedy in classical Arabic is never easy and few comedians attempt it; but here Madbouli handles it with masterful ease, revealing a new range of comic invention and displaying his usual wonderful sense of stage effect and sure command of tone and gesture. As Herod, Madbouli's performance surpasses anything he has done before and consolidates his reputation as one of the greatest comedians Egypt has known.
Other pleasures were Rageh Dawoud's score, Maya Selim's choreography of Salome's first and last dances, Sekina Mohamed Ali's simple, uncluttered set, and Asim El-Badawi's lighting. But the choice of venue was not in the interest of the play. It needs a larger, untraditional and more versatile space. In the circumstances, director Hanaa Abdel-Fattah had to use the sides of the balcony and the auditorium aisle and entrance which entailed a lot of painful neck-craning and twisting and turning in one's seat. Hardly conducive to comfortable viewing or concentration.
