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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 November 1999 Issue No. 456
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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A breath of fresh air
By Nehad Selaiha
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The mere presence of Adel Imam on stage, even when he is completely still, seems to spark off waves of comic energy which cause the audience to tingle in anticipation. It is as if a shower of sparkling bubbles, shot through with the colours of the rainbow, has suddenly burst uponit and even exciting plot had the scriptwriters taken the trouble or dared to venture outside the tediously well-trodden paths of commercial comedy. The hero, a simple, downtrodden, marginalised but thoroughly upright citizen goes to prison to serve a one year sentence and ends up serving 12 for his repeated escape attempts. There he gets embroiled with a mafia-like gang of business sharks (who publicly pose as pillars of society) through the head of the gang who hires him as a bodyguard to shadow his beautiful wife (Raghda) whom he suspects of carrying on with his partner and plotting to betray him and get away with all the loot. The bodyguard, who takes his job very seriously, ends up being seduced by the lady and used by the crooked trio -- the wife, husband and lover -- as a scapegoat when things get too hot. Help comes in the shape of four young people, the three sons and daughter of the head of the gang from a previous marriage. Like the bodyguard, they feel alienated, are disgusted with their father and disillusioned with society and all its symbols of authority. Their rebellion takes the form of drugs and devil-worshipping orgies -- things the upright bodyguard thoroughly condemns. Nevertheless, a bond forms between them and when he is in danger, they wrench themselves out of their delirious fantasies and come to his rescue.
Instead of going straight to the heart of the story -- which is the two-pronged relationship of the bodyguard with the gang on the one hand and the four young people on the other, the authors seemed hell-bent on side-tracking it and frittering away the actors' energies and our time on trivia. It was vexingly frustrating to watch, scene after scene, all the dramatic and comic potential of the story being recklessly squandered in the interest of a tattered patchwork of stock characters and hackneyed situations, snatches from old hits (by Imam and others, including The Taming of the Shrew), puerile superman fantasies, stodgy, facile moralising and stale, heavy-handed patriotism. The overwhelming impression was of a loose series of belaboured comic sketches with no hinges or joints. Motives were blithely ignored and the crucial connections, transitions and turning points cursorily announced in brief, startling verbal statements. This was particularly obvious in the sloppy handling of the part of the story which deals with the relationship of the bodyguard and his four devil-worshipping saviours. He first meets them briefly, for five minutes, when they gatecrash a party given by their step-mother in the first part. Then late in the second, when we have completely forgotten they ever existed, we see the bodyguard crashing in on one of their black masses to thank them for bailing him out of custody. Apart from the fact that it is incredible that such a demented, hallucinating foursome are capable of such a sensible act, one feels that if they ever dared go near a police station looking the way did they would never get out. Prompted by sympathy and gratitude, the bodyguard tries to reform them and delivers a cloyingly sentimental speech about their duty to the future and their country and the need to trust in God and is promptly rebuffed with a blasphemous retort. He responds with violence and the short scene ends with a resounding slap which sends the blasphemer rolling on the floor. In the final scene, the foursome suddenly barge in, sober, clean-shaven, in light green suits (an obvious symbol), as if magically transformed. Moreover, they have recovered their faith in God and have become devout believers. After frightening the gang and their tough bodyguard off stage, they burst into song, underlining the need-to-fight-corruption moral of the play and trying, into the bargain, to convince us of the validity of the comforting old-fashioned notion that a good slap in the face cures all ills.
Such, and other absurdities, did their best to mire down the cast and crew whenever they soared and to chase the spirit of mirth off the stage. And without Rami Imam in the director's seat, they could have very well succeeded.
Though the story unfolded on the stage lacked dramatic tension, one sensed in the show a real conflict of generations and artistic directions. Judging by The Island of the Bald, his debut as director which he presented at Al-Hanager last year, a few months after graduating from the Performing Arts Department of the AUC, Rami's approach to comedy inclines towards a fast-paced cinematic flow of short, crisp scenes and pungent social satire laced with fantasy, burlesque and surrealism. In The Island he could freely indulge even the wildest flights of his artistic imagination: he worked with a young playwright, young actors, in a place designed to accommodate and nurture new experiments and youthful artistic adventures. The commercial theatre is a different kettle of fish: it is cliché-ridden, timid, and likes to play safe. Inevitably, Rami's vibrant style clashed with the sluggish star-based formula embedded in the Bodyguard text which had only one object in mind -- to showcase Adel Imam at the expense of everything else, and to exploit his charismatic presence and popularity as much as possible, even if it meant destroying the integrity of the part he plays, overstuffing the play with tedious irrelevant matter and rehashed scenes from the comic repertoire, removing its bone, muscle and fibre, and tearing the rest to shreds.
But Rami put up a good fight and came out slightly bruised but victorious. He managed to reduce the stuffing as much as he could get away with, using burlesque to undercut many clichés, sneaked in some hilarious surrealistic touches (like the Hawaiian banquet scene in the prison cell, Raghda and Imam's crossdressing in the bedroom scene, and the skipping burly man with the flower who always arrives at the wrong moment and drops down without a word). With the help of set-designer Nehad Bahgat and the incidental music he himself chose, Rami was also able to speed up the tempo, create the illusion of fast-moving action, and cover up many a boring scene and stagnant patch. For extra help and support, he roped in the two young actors who had played the leading parts in The Island and understood his style well -- Khalid Serhan and Tamer Abdel-Moneim -- and they have not let him down.
Another challenge was directing a star like Raghda and experienced actors like Izzat Abu Ouf, Sa'id Abdel-Ghani, Rida Hamed and Sami Sarhan -- always a sensitive and thorny task even in the case of veteran directors, let alone a budding one is his twenties and doing his first main-stream theatre show. But this was nothing compared to the awesomeness of directing one's own father, especially when he happens to be Adel Imam. I do not know what Rami did or how many battles he had to fight to have his way; what I know from the show is that he could control them and put them in the right context to give their best. He is definitely a breath of fresh air in the commercial theatre and hopefully, next time, he will be able to choose his own text as he did with The Island.
