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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 July - 4 August 1999 Issue No. 440
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Phantom of an opera
Nehad SelaihaOn 1 September last year, I received an invitation to a special performance (for critics and the censor's office) of the first production of the Theatre For All Festival (TFAF). TFAF is not, strictly speaking, a festival at all. When I first heard about it, I linked it in my mind with other Television-sponsored and commissioned revivals of some plays from the Egyptian theatre repertoire, such as Saadeddin Wahbah's Sikket Al-Salama (Road to Safety) and Sa'dalla Wannus's '80s smash-hit Al-Malek Huwa Al-Malek (The King is the King) -- both of which were performed and recorded for television in '98, well before TFAF. I imagined that the festival which was hyped in the press, somewhat grandiloquently, as the magical cure for the ailing Egyptian theatre, a show-case for its forgotten treasures, and an effective way to rehabilitate it and establish a sense of continuity with the past, would include other TV-sponsored productions besides Sobhi's revival of Naguib El-Rihani's and Badi' Khayri's Hikayet kul Yom (An Everyday Story, 1940) better known in a film-version of it, retitled Li'bet Al-Sit (Her Plaything).
According to TFAF's terms, the Egyptian television undertakes to fund a series of musicals and musical comedies based on famous works from the Egyptian and world theatre repertoire, and starring Mohamed Sobhi and the well-known pop singer Simone. The proceeds from the box-office during the run of the plays go to Sobhi and his company. In return, the Egyptian television gets the copyright for recording, televising, and marketing the production.
Television-funded productions are not a novel thing. At the end of '61, Abdel-Qader Hatem, the minister of information then, established 'Television Theatre' which initially consisted of three companies each producing a new play every fortnight. By the autumn of '62, the number had swelled to 10, employing 184 performers, and the plays ranged from adaptations of well-known Egyptian novels and foreign plays to original works by budding dramatists, like Mahmoud Diab and Ali Salem, and popular plays, particularly farces, from the repertoire of the National Theatre and Naguib El-Rihani's company. The companies continued to thrive, reaching a peak of activity in '64 and '65. But in the summer of '66, there was a change of mood in the upper echelons of power; Hatem came suddenly under a cloud, and the companies were taken over by the Ministry of Culture. It was the end of Television Theatre.
Sobhi and Simone in Carmen
Though it ultimately has the same objective, i.e. to provide television with much-needed material for its many new channels and have the edge on rival Arab televisions in the fiercely competitive TV drama and light entertainment market, the TFAF is not a revival of the old state-run Television Theatre formula, or even a modified version of it. It is a new enterprise, based on a long-term partnership between the state and the private sector, and, therefore, very much in tune with the country's current liberal economic policy. Here, the role of the state is limited to putting up the money, providing publicity, and making sure that the final product gets the approval of the censor; the rest of the work, indeed, the whole job from A to Z, is managed by private individuals, groups or companies, with an executive producer (in the case of TFAF, Mohamed Imara) acting as bursar. On the face of it, this seems an ideal arrangement to get state subsidies for the arts without state interference or bureaucratic entanglements.
But money, as everyone who works in fund-raising for the arts knows, never comes without strings attached. If the state television invests money in theatre, it will be on the clear understanding that the productions it finances, and quite lavishly too, meet the requirements of the Arab markets. But then, most sponsors and funding agencies have hidden agendas, and in the case of the Egyptian television, at least the agenda is well-known to everybody. Taken all in all, this new form of partnership between the state, represented by its television, and the private theatre companies could provide an acceptable alternative to complete reliance on the box-office or on private capital, which is usually timid, stinting, and solely profit-oriented.
In this respect, I remember Lenin El-Ramly (who wrote most of his plays for his and Sobhi's now defunct 'Studio 80' private company) once telling me that a little financial help from the state, be it in the form of tax concessions or reduced publicity rates, would substantially reduce the forbiddingly high prices of theatre tickets in the private sector and save it from the ravages of commercialism. Now that Sobhi has the state support, his former, long-standing partner, El-Ramly, once dreamt of, what has he done with it? At 100, 75, 50, 30, and (for the very last rows) 15 Egyptian pounds, the ticket prices show no dramatic reductions and remain, even in these days of inflated prices where a hundred pounds does not seem like a lot of money, prohibitive for the average Egyptian family.
That was one reason which put me off attending the opening of TFAF last year. Another was the ungracious timing which blatantly (and quite childishly, I thought), pitted TFAF against the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) in order to force people to take sides. There wasn't a whiff of subtlety anywhere in the publicity campaign of TFAF, and its denunciation of CIFET as the root of all theatrical evil, clearly echoed (though much toned down) in a kind of manifesto which took up eight pages of the printed programme of the new version of Her Plaything. I would have still gone, out of sheer curiosity, if nothing else, except that I am passionately enamoured of the film Sobhi's play was based on, and could not imagine anybody matching the inimitable performances of El-Rihani and Taheya Karioka as the 'Her' and 'Plaything' of the title, or the glow and zingy verve of the supporting cast which included some of the best comic talents Egypt has ever known. Where could Sobhi get another Mary Munib, Aziz Othman, Abdel-Fattah El-Qusary, Hassan Fayeq, Suliman Naguib, or Bishara Wakeem? I opted for safety and decided that since I had the film on videotape and could (as I often do) watch it whenever I liked, the last thing I wanted was a different version of it, or to watch anyone meddling with it.
With Carmen, it was different, I was there on 'the critics night', all agog with excitement. I am fond of Sobhi's style of acting and greatly respect his finesse, sense of rhythm, and careful attention to detail as a director. And though, barring Simone, singer Arkan Fouad, and, to a lesser extent, Khalil Mursi, the cast consisted of actors of modest fame (though some of them, like Magdi Sobhi, are quite gifted), or relatively new comers (like the graceful and confident Abir Farouk, who could dance, sing, and act, and do them all with competence and captivating elegance) -- nevertheless, the billed artistic crew was enough to whet the appetite and raise great expectations. It included Omar Khayrat (musical score); Mohamed Baghdadi and Yusri Khamis (adaptation and lyrics); Samir Ahmad (sets); and Karim El-Tonsy (choreography); and, in line with the current fashion in most state and commercial theatres, the corps de ballet consisted almost exclusively of immigrant Russian dancers. But, above all, there was the irresistible pull of Bizet's sensational story of love, betrayal and desperate revenge, the overpowering sensual appeal of its wild, fiery heroine, and the prospect of a spectacular musical full of passion, energy and colour. With a good adaptation that takes into account the rich emotional palette of the original and tries to reproduce its full range of diverse passions and variegated moods, the show could not go wrong. Success, artistic and financial, was assured, I thought, sipping my coffee in the foyer before the show and trying to spot one of the censors to put in a good word for Sobhi. Any Carmen cannot be but disturbing and boldly passionate and daring in some degree, and I was afraid some stuffy, parochial censor might find it too shocking to pass.
I need not have worried; Sobhi's Carmen was an extremely chaste, even prudish affair -- as bland, bloodless and pallid as you can imagine. The decorous love scenes breathed an icy wind that numbed the audience, and made them shiver with cold; Sobhi's forced comic effect and laboured, heavy-handed humour made them yawn; and Simone's clumsy, contorted attempts to seduce Don José sent them to sleep. To wake them up for the final curtain, Sobhi winds up this depressingly lifeless jumble of scenes, which sluggishly meandered for the best part of four hours, with a turgid blustering tirade against dictators, the herd-like mentality and submissiveness of their people, globalism, the U.S.A. and other superpowers, and, of course, and only too predictably, against Israel, normalisation, the Copenhagen meeting, and the whole peace process. To add insult to injury, the tirade was written in sing-song rhyming verse.
This may sound harsh; but I really can't forgive the treatment Carmen received in this play. While constantly reminding us of the opera by deliberate insertions in the soundtrack of the show of familiar bits of Bizet's score, the adaptation and mise-en-scène took for its model that most American of all theatrical forms, the Broadway musical, and openly flirted with the famous Phantom of the Opera which Sobhi watched, greatly admired and wanted to emulate. Unable to shake off the memory of the American Phantom, he conjured it up here in the form of a dictatorial director who falls in love with a much younger showgirl, leads her to stardom in the face of fierce opposition from the prima donna of the company, and kills her when he discovers that she loves another. This new Phantom is allowed to roam freely, overtake the plot, the relations of the characters, and even repeat the famous scene in which he causes a huge chandelier to suddenly drop and crash down near the audience. With Phantom, impersonated by Sobhi, on the rampage, the Carmen plot was seriously disrupted, lost all coherence, and was often forgotten. When it was remembered, it was suddenly dragged in, in a ridiculously haphazard fashion, used as an excuse for dance and soon forgotten again. The most striking example of this is the scene in which two drug smugglers suddenly materialise out of the blue, and barge into the company director's room in search of Carmen. I was quite startled when I suddenly heard her confess that she had dabbled in drug-trafficking during a spell as a dancer in a disreputable nightclub! The play was nearly halfway through and we had not been given an inkling that she had such interesting skeletons in the cupboard. The scene ends with the director volunteering to do the risky job for her out of love, and walking off with the contraband and the two smugglers. I waited in suspense for the outcome of this dangerous escapade; but I could wait till doomsday. Neither the smugglers, nor Carmen's sensational past were ever mentioned or even obliquely alluded to again. The whole episode (obviously an afterthought intended to remind the audience of the opera's plot by clumsily introducing a detail from it in the mainstream of the Phantom plot) was completely forgotten, as if it had never happened. It remained an irritating loose end, dangling with others in the foreground, and confusing our perception.
Merging plots from different sources is an old and legitimate dramaturgical practice, and popular theatre usually thrives on a number of hackneyed, well-worn, and well-tried plots which are occasionally put in the mixer and beaten together. In the case of Sobhi's Carmen, no such beating and blending took place. The different elements remained separate with the result that the performance seemed to be constantly swinging and jumping between three different plans, or trying to move in three different directions all at once -- Bizet's Carmen, Phantom of the Opera, and a political allegory about dictatorship. The marriage of all three could have been managed, but it required the ministration of a gifted and skillful dramaturge.
In its present condition, the play comes across as a confusing discordant jumble of audio-visual impressions which keep wrenching the viewer from one frame of reference to another, without a moment's notice; one often felt at a loss where to situate the action and characters, and could not tell whether the setting was Cairo, Seville, or New York. I realise how much effort and hard work went into the making of this recklessly ambitious production. And if the outcome is not what one had anticipated and hoped for, in live theatre, it is never too late to try to put things right or minimise the faults. Thank God theatre is a living, changing thing.
