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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 11 - 17 November 1999 Issue No. 455
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Amina Rizq and, right, her "teacher, mentor and maker" Youssef Wahbi
Age cannot wither her
By Nehad Selaiha
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters On a mild night in late September, two months ago, I went to see The Black Rabbit at Al-Tali'a. (It is now back for a second run and you would do yourself a big favour if you go to see it). After the show I was too excited to leave at once and hung around for a while in the courtyard of the theatre sipping tea and chatting with friends about the play. They shared my excitement; though written in 1967, Abdalla El-Tukhi's text does not date. The symbolic quest for an illusive black rabbit on which a crippled, selfish, cantankerous old woman arbitrarily sends her daughter -- an affectionate, meek and guileless soul -- one night, with nothing to light her way but a spluttering kerosene lamp, exposing her to the danger of snake bites or a sudden seizure induced by her fear of darkness and terror of ghosts, would have had a political meaning in the sixties when the regime used the same hard-and-soft technique, the same tactics of coaxing and intimidation the mother uses to wear out the resistance of her daughter and completely dominate her.
But in '99 the play comes across as a symbolic psychological drama about the insidious power-games underlying family relationships, about the ruthlessness of old age feeding on young lives, and about the frustration, hidden resentment and guilt-ridden feelings of daughters torn between their duty to care for their aged and senile parents and their natural youthful longings. The daughter's journey through the dark, rambling, rundown country house becomes a voyage into the dark recesses of the mind, a dive into the unconscious to discover the root of the suffering and find the way to liberation. To bolster this interpretation, the original muted end was replaced by a violent confrontation between mother and daughter, spelling out the ugly reality of their relationship and the daughter's rebellion and decision to leave; and though she comes back when the mother collapses, she does it of her own free will.
Another of the show's assets, we agreed, was Mustafa Imam's stage-design which opted for realism and magically transformed the interior of the Salah Abdel-Sabour hall into a typical, old country house of a once well-off rural family. The transformation was so thorough it extended to the brick ledges and wooden seats and benches on which we sat, on different levels, around the hall. But the most riveting aspect of the play, however, was the acting. The casting of Amina Rizq and Sanaa Yunis as the termagant mother and timid daughter was ingenious and refreshingly bold. Although Rizq has a vast repertoire of mother roles, ranging from tragedy to comedy, melodrama and farce, one would not normally associate her with vicious, domineering mothers. Nor would one normally think of a versatile and very funny comedian like Sanaa Yunis as a possible candidate for the daughter's part. But director Isam El-Sayed did, and has reaped the rewards. The parts were a challenge to both actresses and they defiantly accepted them. Every night they give a thrilling acting match, played with great dexterity and immaculate timing; and day after day they prove that Yunis can take on serious and complex parts and handle a wide range of emotions with masterful ease, and that the fluffy, frail Rizq can transform herself by the demoniac fire of genius into a rapacious, malicious and loathsome old hag. And though Rizq sits all the time and never changes her place, her eyes seem to draw the whole place into their orbit and even when the area she occupies is darkened, her presence continues to be eerily felt, becoming even more sinister because shrouded in darkness.
We had talked for half an hour and just as I was preparing to leave, I caught sight of the great Rizq emerging from the darkened entrance of the hall and advancing towards the steps leading down to the courtyard. She walked slowly, with difficulty, limping and leaning heavily on the arm of the young assistant director. I gazed at her in wonder, trying to reconcile this small, fragile figure, in a homely black dress and turban, with the overpowering presence I had experienced during the show. Sanaa Yunis crossed my line of vision momentarily as she rushed up the steps towards her, and her earthy, twangy voice rose above the distant din of the Ataba Square traffic and the loud medley of garish noises issuing from the crazy carnival of tradesmen in the street outside. She was coaxing Rizq to stay on for a while with the promise of a sweet and juicy watermelon -- something she could never resist. After a feeble demurral, Rizq allowed herself to be led to an armchair and lowered herself into it gingerly.
I smiled as I remembered her reputation for thrift, which the uncharitable sometimes describe as a miserly streak, and her appetite and passion for food. My hairdresser, who once accompanied her to Libya on a trip, in his professional capacity of course, describes her proudly as a hearty eater with a wonderful digestion, capable of consuming four big meals a day then asking for a light snack of cheese, bread, fruit, and yoghurt before she went to bed. Was it a kind of compensation, I wondered, a substitute for another need? A yearning to fill a different kind of emptiness? When people are deprived of one pleasure they usually over-indulge another; and this woman, as far as is known, has never married, had children, a steady boyfriend, love-affairs, or even the odd romantic escapade. While every step of her career is well documented, her private life, apart from a sketchy description of her family background and strict, harsh upbringing (whose reliability rests solely on her), remains shrouded in mystery. It is not that she is reluctant to give interviews or talk about herself in public; she does both as often as any other actress, and even more liberally. It is that every time she would have us believe that her public and private life are one and the same thing -- that "having married the theatre" early in her life, as she is fond of saying, she "never had any other life outside it." Can a woman dissolve so completely into her art that it becomes her sole reality?
"Yes," I remembered her saying in a long interview to the Cairo Theatre magazine in 1995. "I was besotted, infatuated with acting and loved my art with my whole being," she said. "It completely possessed me," she went on; "I acted the whole time, even as I walked in the street and when the play was over, I would act it all over again to myself, at home, in front of the mirror." She could still recite from memory whole plays and not just the parts she had acted, she proudly declared, adding, "I used to kneel in the wings and watch the actors on stage through a small slit in the curtain until my cue arrived. This meant experiencing the play as a whole and learning all the parts by heart. I could, therefore, stand in for any part at a moment's notice."
Citing The Confession Seat as an example she said: "I started in it as an extra, then played the attendant, then the heroine, then the mother. The only part I didn't do was the Cardinal, and Yussef Wahbi who played it used to kid me about it and say that one day he would give it to me."
The image of Yussef Wahbi sent my thoughts on a different track: I remembered all I had read about his life-long friendship with Rizq, their long successful artistic partnership in dozens of plays and films, her passionate loyalty and candid acknowledgement of her debt and gratitude to him during his life and after his death (in 1982), and her single-minded dedication to his Ramses company which she joined at the age of 13 soon after it was formed in 1923 and stuck to it through many vicissitudes until it was finally dissolved in 1944. When Wahbi tried to revive the company afterwards - in'47, '57, '60, '69 and '70 -- every time managing only a short season, Rizq, though she had joined the National Theatre Company in 1944 was always there, supporting her "teacher, mentor and maker" and often acting her old parts. And when in 1960 Wahbi recorded for television 23 plays from the Ramses repertoire, Rizq was by his side in many of them.
In the light of all this, would it be too wildly far-fetched to suspect a kind of romantic attachment in the Wahbi/Rizq relationship, whether mutual or just on her side, and to suggest that this, perhaps, was the real reason why she never married? Conjectures along this line were tentatively made in the past but could neither be proved or disproved, and the nature of this rare relationship remains as enigmatic as ever. When questioned directly about it (in a commemorative book issued by the Cultural Palaces' Organisation in 1998 on the centenary of Wahbi's birth), Rizq dismissed it as ridiculous and totally unfounded. "I was only a child when I joined the company," she protested, "and Yussef Bey (as she always calls him) treated me as such and used to put me on his knee and play finger games with me." Wahbi continued to regard her as a child, and so did all his wives, who were never jealous of her, she assured her interviewer, adding, "but the public tend to confuse life with art, and the love scenes on the stage or screen with reality."
I was nudged out of my musings by a friend urging me to join the group who had clustered round her, and were lapping up her reminiscences and anecdotes. It was a rare treat. At 90 Rizq rarely stays up late and prefers to rush home and to bed directly after the show. She was explaining, in her rich, melodious voice, one of her major assets, about her knee which she had hurt when she stumbled over a high kerb, hence the limp. She could not understand why they made them so high and neither could anyone else. She spoke of a health-farm abroad suggested to her by a fellow actress who went there for beauty treatment. "She tells me it's quite cheap," she assured herself rather than us. "But would they cure my knee?" she wondered.
"Health farm my foot," grunted Sanaa Yunis in disgust. Personally, she was going to London when the play stopped to "have a break, see a play or two and do some shopping"; she invited Rizq to join her, assuring her that it would do her a lot more good than any "newfangled health-farm" and that she could also have her knee checked there. "After all, weren't farms supposed to be for animals?" she asked, looking impishly at her. It was obvious that Yunis had no great liking for the actress who frequented the health-farm and Rizq laughed. But already her mind was busy calculating costs. When Yunis mentioned a nice little hotel which gives her substantial discounts, Rizq said, as if thinking aloud, "I could always stay with my niece who studies there; no need to spend money on a hotel."
London awakened memories of a distant holiday she spent there once, all by herself. After an impatient "where is that watermelon you mentioned?" directed at Yunis, she said in a dreamy voice that after years of exhausting work with the Ramses company, performing in Cairo in winter and touring the provinces in summer, she decided to give herself a holiday and spend it in Europe. She had visited Europe before with the company, as well as Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, North Africa and Latin America; but that had been hard work as well, even harder, since they always travelled third class by boat or train, had to put up with cheap accommodation, sleeping five to a room, look after their own luggage, costumes and accessories throughout the trip, and perform in make-shift theatres, in primitive conditions. And on top of that, they had to pay for their own meals out of their regular salaries since they were not given travelling expenses.
As she spoke, she seemed to shed off years and her voice and features softened and acquired a strange liveliness. In the dim light, the fine wrinkles disappeared and her complexion looked pale and translucent while her big blue eyes gleamed like two fresh puddles in the moonlight. I suddenly thought how beautiful she must have been when young.
"I had given myself three months and decided to start with London, go on to Paris and end up with Italy," her voice nudged me. She rented a comfortable, small flat in Notting Hill Gate overlooking the park and soon discovered in the same building a Greek grocery store which stocked all the ingredients used in Egyptian cooking. Instead of three weeks as she had planned, she spent the whole three-months holiday there, blissfully cooking and consuming her favourite dishes and looking at the park. "It was wonderful and very cheap," she wound up, and I did not know whether she meant the flat or the whole holiday.
It is not the kind of holiday I would relish, but she made it sound so idyllic and, somehow, deeply touching. It suddenly struck me that the bustle and glitter of the theatrical world meant little for this woman, that what really interested her in the whole pageant was the work she did there. I also felt that she was perfectly honest when she said in the '95 interview that she had lived her real life on the stage and enjoyed the whole gamut of human feelings and experiences, including love, marriage and motherhood, through her parts and therefore did not feel she had missed anything and regretted nothing. Having waded through so many violent tragedies, sentimental comedies, turbulent melodramas, light vaudevilles and social satires on stage, it is no wonder that once in London, far from the madding crowd of actors, fans and admirers, and from the patriarchal sway of the dictatorial, domineering Wahbi who controlled her life, all she wanted was peace and quiet, solitude and, of course, the comfort of plenty of good food.
"I can't wait any longer for that watermelon," she said as she heaved herself up in her chair, leaning on the arms. Yunis rose to help her, saying: "You'd better take it home with you. Everyone is leaving." Rizq was delighted but like a polite child tried to demur; Yunis duly pressed her and she nodded, asking her with a shy smile to have it put in the car of the young woman who had offered to take her home. She waved to us through the window as the car left.
I sat looking at her empty chair for some time afterwards, trying to remember all she had said -- her sardonic remarks on today's spoilt, spineless actors, on the deplorable lack of discipline and good management in the state-theatre companies, on the paucity of productions and their depressing artistic quality, her genuine sorrow at the disappearance of the repertoire system, her brisk and wry dismissal of the sisterhood of veiled, repentant actresses as having unwittingly done us all a favour and helped to clean up the artistic scene, her funny anecdotes about fellow Ramses actors and actresses, her ardent pride in the history of the company, and her solid, unwavering faith in the art to which she had given her life.
I finally left, thinking of all those brave female pioneers of the Egyptian theatre who, young and vulnerable as they were, without money or education and heavily trammelled with backward ideas and taboos, had defied their families, society and traditions and ventured forth on the treacherous theatrical seas, alone and unaided, except for the lucky patronage of a Wahbi, as in Rizq's case, or an Aziz Eid, as in that of Fatma Rushdi, Rose El-Yussef and Zeinab Sidqi. What pluck, what stamina, what determination to embrace such a dangerous, stigmatised profession as acting was at the time, and mount the boards unveiled, living in the public eye, when most women were content to stay behind bars and thick veils, in the safe cloisters of their homes. With infinite faith, such pioneers as Amina Rizq had fought the waves, tamed them, and soared on their crests to the stars.
