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Al-Ahram Weekly 19 - 25 August 1999 Issue No. 443 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 19 - 25 August 1999 Issue No. 443
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A summer phantasmagoria
By Nehad SelaihaThis summer it seems that Cairo and Alexandria have recovered their former status as the favourite playgrounds and amusement parks of oil-rich Arab tourists. Whether, because of the debts incurred by the Gulf War, they are not so rich now as to afford holidays in Europe, or because the sad destruction of much of the infrastructure of beautiful Beirut has entailed the rerouting of hundreds of holiday packages to Egypt, the fact remains that they are back in throngs.
To mark the occasion of their return -- an outbreak of almost epidemic proportions, a rush of garish playbills sporting the names of famous comedian, film and television stars (including Poussi, Hanan Tork, Hayatem, Madeleine Tabar, Samir Ghanem, Said Saleh, Ahmed Bedeir, Mohamed Nigm, Sayed Zayyan, not to mention Mohamed Heneidi, Raghda, and Adel Imam) and such enticing titles as "My Wife, Monica", and "Stains on the Blue Dress" (Ms. Luwinsky's, of course), "Twenty in the Loony Bin", "Helter Skelter", "Afrotto" (the diminutive of Efreet), "Hullaballoo", "Hidden Camera", "Hotchpotch", "Naughtiness", "Bodyguard", etc...
To swell out this ferocious contingent of comic vaudevilles, the state-theatre sector has contributed three (at best rumbustious, at worst vapid and murderously long-winded) theatrical concoctions. The worst, "The Dinner of the Blind" (at Al-Salam), starts off as a feeble-minded political satire on the myths forged by dictators to delude their subjects (the blind of the title) but soon graduates through rough slapstick, scabrous humour, tedious gimmickry, stale comic routines, humdrum musical numbers, and offensive jokes about the blind to a vulgarly titillating showcase for Madeleine Tabar's physical attractions and the flimsiest items in her wardrobe. I was at a loss how to reconcile the name of a reputable stage-designer like Ashraf Naim with the tawdry sets, the clumsy lighting and the mercilessly jangling colours on stage. The show dragged on for what seemed like an eternity, and though the slits in Tabar's dresses kept getting higher, no amount of leg-baring could lighten the heavy burden of those four hours.
Of Two Minds at the Balloon Theatre
By comparison, "My Sweetheart and I" (at the big Floating Theatre off University Bridge in Giza) was a positive relief. Not only is the cast (led by the piquant and spritely Hanan Tork and the bubbly and charismatic Wael Nur) infinitely more competent, disciplined and appealing, but the text, despite occasional half-hearted spurts of blatant moralising -- a concession to bourgeois morality deliciously undercut by an offhand mode of delivery -- was blissfully free of pretentiousness. It is a simple fairy tale about a poor, kind-hearted singer suddenly becoming a Pasha and inheriting a great fortune after the death of his long-lost father and his struggle to fend off his shark-like relatives, particularly the voluptuous and comically vampish Inas Mekki. Hanan Tork played his ghaziya wife, and the contrast between her fragile, dainty figure and the character she portrayed -- a pert, sharp-tongued, quick-tempered kind of Amazon -- was a constant source of mirth. And while Nur and Tork nightly cavort on their Nile float in Cairo and clown their way into the audience's hearts, El-Muntasir Billah, as Sidi El-Mur'ib (St. Fearful) in another Comedy Theatre production, is holding his summer-long Fair in Alexandria, and performing his quaint antics on the sea shore in the company of Ranya Farid Shawqi.
To correct the balance and salvage something of its fast-fading reputation for artistic integrity and intellectual depth, or, perhaps, as a necessary measure to meet the impending demand for decent plays to represent Egypt in the approaching Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) competition, the state theatre is also putting on display four middle-to-heavyweight productions, averaging one to one and a half hours: an abridged version of Fathya El-Assal's full-length 1980s play, "Betwixt and Between" (at the Youssef Idris Hall, Al-Salam Theatre); Sayed Imam's "Of Two Minds" (the idiomatic equivalent in English of the Arabic title, Ein fe el-janna wa Ein fi el-nar) at the Balloon Theatre (Al-Ghad hall); a modified version of Heiner Muller's The Hamlet Machine, retitled Hamlet Kida wa Kida (Playing Hamlet) at Miami Theatre; and Abdallah El-Toukhi's 1960s one-act play, "The Black Rabbit", at Al-Talia (Salah Abdel-Sabour hall).
By a curious coincidence, both El-Assal and Imam's plays unfold as allegorical fantasies of the after-life and pungent social and political satires. Both begin with the departure to the other world (through death or suicide) of the heroes -- a small, frustrated clerk in the one, and a politically disillusioned playwright in the other. There, their histories and the events which preceded and partly prompted their untimely exits are reenacted, realistically or allegorically, and examined. In both cases, the retracing of the past yields an image of a dismal, godforsaken world, overrun with greed, injustices, violence, deceit, oppression, lust, hatred, and betrayal -- a world far worse than hell. In the case of Imam's play, however, the canvas is broader and the design more sophisticated; it combines an intricate, dialectical pattern modern Arab history with scenes from the life of the famous Arab poet, Abul-Ala' Al-Me'ari (973-1057), as well as episodes inspired by his sceptical and ironic portrayal of heaven and hell, Risalat al-Ghufran (literally, An Epistle on Forgiveness, translated into English by G. Brackenbury as Risalatul Ghufran, A Divine Comedy in 1943).
The metaphor of human life and history as hell crops up again in Assem Nagati's realisation of Muller's Hamlet Machine and dominates it, but this time as a pronouncedly surrealistic vision in which figures split, double, merge and dissolve into one another, where language disintegrates, meaning breaks down, perception is irremediably fragmented, the rational spatio-temporal coordinates of reality are hopelessly lost, and humanity is hurled, screaming and clawing, into the darkest pit of hell.
Though far from perfect, and occasionally marred by gratuitous emotionalism, an excess of physical activity, faulty tempo, turgid political preaching, or an over-zealous chasing after theatrical effect (to the extent of drowning the stage in water, introducing a wheel of fire with real flames, and having Ophelia perform a series of acrobatic movements), not to mention the pervasive impression of seediness created by the palpably sloppy execution of the drab costumes and tacky sets, these three productions have a modicum of good acting and provide a relatively absorbing and moderately enjoyable theatrical experience.
But if you are looking for a real treat you can only find it at Al-Talia. There, in the cosy Salah Abdel-Sabour hall, the legendary Amina Rizq will treat you to a heady draught of rare Dionysian vintage that will make all the other shows in town taste like vinegar. I saw her last week and am still intoxicated. When I sober up I will have a lot to say about her and her "Black Rabbit".
