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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Interview Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters At the edge of being
By Nehad Selaiha
At 27, with seven provocative productions already on his CV -- The Blind, The Monastery of Birds Mountain, Briaska II, Pinter's Old Times, Miller's The Crucible, Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, and, finally, Bond's Lear, currently on at Al-Hanager -- Mohamed Abul-Sa'ud is perhaps the most exciting, adventurous, and passionately dedicated director of his generation. With no formal training in theatre (he read philosophy at university), he is blissfully free of the timidity of professionals and their clichés. He will never play it safe, and will try anything; and naturally, this can be disastrous sometimes. But even his failures are moving, impressive and curiously refreshing -- like failed expeditions to the peaks of the Alps or the poles.
Abul-Sa'ud's production of Lear on the Hanager stage photo: Khaled El-Fiqi
If a production of his misfires, you can be sure it will do so with a glorious bang. The Crucible was one such grand failure. The conceived structure was simply too colossal and he did not have enough professional cement to hold it together; it collapsed with a magnificent crash, leaving behind a treasure of priceless replicas. Ultimately, it was much more exciting and rewarding than the more compact, successful Old Times. Though a voracious reader in general and insatiable consumer of plays (he sometimes buys books in languages he does not speak in the hope that somehow he will be able to make sense of them), the shaping influences on Abul-Sa'ud's art are painting, music and European cinema. He is enamoured of mediaeval and church music, especially Gregorian chants, and many of his stage images are inspired by the paintings of Rodin, Hieronymus Bosch, Giotto, Rembrandt and Pieter Bruegel. More often than not, the starting point for a production is a group of images and sounds that attach themselves to a particular subject or some nebulous idea or a strong feeling. Then the hunting for a text that can mediate them begins, and if after going through dozens of plays he finds none that suits him, Abul-Sa'ud will sit down and write his own script, often combining many sources in the form of a collage.
Processing the tentative script into an integral audio-visual conception follows, and at this stage Ihab Abdel-Latif's collaboration is indispensable. The two work closely together for weeks, sometimes months, talking, sketching, arguing, listening to dozens of tapes and poring over art books. They do it mostly in cafés, and when they were preparing Briaska II they found their way to my cosy and modestly-priced little café in Mohandessin and for three months were a permanent fixture there. Dropping in one morning for a quick coffee, I found Abul-Sa'ud slumped on a tale across an art book and heaps of scribbled papers and sketches. The waiter told me he had spent the whole night there and that Ihab had left him at four in the morning. It was then that I learnt that Abul-Sa'ud had left the family home because his father, a well-to-do textile merchant, objected to his pursuing a career in theatre and wanted him to join the family business. For a make-shift home he took over a deserted flower stall (formerly a gate-keeper's hut) in the derelict garden of the shut-down house of an old aunt in Nasr City. As resourceful in life as in the theatre, the frequent allusions to Abul-Sa'ud's hut, shack, and hideout, which I had taken for a joke, were after all true.
Rehearsal time is the happiest for Abul-Sa'ud and he would stretch it as long as the actors would tolerate, and even beyond their tolerance. Some leave after months of rehearsals in despair of the show ever coming out, and he is often accused of unprofessionalism on that score. "If it were up to me," he told me once, "I would be rehearsing forever. The rehearsals are the work," he added. "Once they are over, I am not interested. Opening nights don't excite me".
Another thing that maddens the actors who work with him is what the professional ones call his lack of method and what one amateur actress eloquently expressed as "he never tells you what he wants; he only objects and asks you to try once more, and it goes on and on." Other directors, like the famous Robert Ciulli (who was honoured by CIFET last year), not to mention Peter Brook, would call this allowing the actor to be creative.
Recently, during the Oman Festival, Ciulli told a group of actors and directors that most professional actors want to be treated as morons and robots. "Personally, I never direct actors," he said. "I design the movement, yes, and the spatial placing on stage, but I never tell them, or show them how to act a part. It would be me acting then, not them, and it would be boring and repetitive.
"I act as their audience," he continued, "I tell them what is good and they should keep and what they should chuck out. For me direction is a process of choice, exclusion, refinement and orchestration. And, of course, giving the actor the best possible frame," he concluded.
I guess Abul-Sa'ud is following very much in the footsteps of Ciulli without knowing it. Although he watched his stunning production Pinocchio-Faust which visited Cairo last year and camped at the hotel where the company (Theatre an der Ruhr) stayed all the time they were there, making friends with the actors (luckily he speaks German), I do not think he had the chance to talk to Ciulli about artistic matters.
I went to the opening of Lear in great excitement and trepidation. Excitement, because I am always fascinated by the images Abul-Sa'ud and Ihab Abdel-Latif come up with and they have never failed to surprise me. Trepidation because this Lear is not a pleasant play (Bond's plays rarely are); it gives us all the horrors and atrocities of Shakespeare's Lear (multiplied tenfold) with none of its poetry and dignified suffering.
The image of human history as a senseless, sinister, and brutal game of mutual homicide, even if true, is projected here with almost sadistic, vindictive relish in the scenes of carnage; and in the presence of Bond's high-pitched, crude moralising (which conjures up images of hysterical preachers, frantically waving hell-fire) it occasionally pitches into the vulgarly obscene. With all the macabre stories of genocide, massacres, and mass graves, as well as the harrowing images issuing from the Balkans and delivered to our doors post haste every morning with the papers, or jumping at us off the TV screen at the touch of a button, I wondered if I could take more.
As an artist, and a young man, Abul-Sa'ud has every right, of course, to hold up the mirror to humanity and show how ugly and irredeemably damned it has become. To my question why Bond's Lear, he answered: "with all the violence around me, it is the only play I can do now; and I want to do it because it is ugly, grotesque, and cruel." Well, he did; and magnificently, I am glad to say. And though he compressed all three acts in two hours without intervals, I survived it, thanks to the sustaining force of art.
It was Abul-Sa'ud's biggest challenge since The Crucible; but hand in hand with Ihab Abdel-Latif, they managed to avoid all the pitfalls of the former production and come up with a taut, quick-paced, well-integrated, and competently acted performance. The sensitive lighting, the bold and simple stage-design -- all metal and wood -- the blend of shiny and muted colours, the intricate and highly evocative soundtrack and the well-thought out movement configurations all combined to create a palpable, eerie, dreamlike atmosphere which enveloped the play, lending unity to its highly episodic structure, and softening the brutality of the action without making it less shocking. This kind of stage poetry is crucial to a play like Lear, and contrary to my expectations, the final effect was cathartic more than anything else. Eminently well worth seeing, even if you have a weak stomach. And on the way out remember to congratulate Hoda Wasfi for her courage. She deserves it.
