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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 March 2000 Issue No. 471
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Interview Features Focus Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A bankrupt nostalgia
By Nehad Selaiha
Odd that the first theatrical crop of the year 2000 to grace the boards should consist solely of revivals of old plays updated in a way that gives them a pronounced contemporary political relevance. In some cases the recycled product is sent to the market with the tag '2000' dangling at the end of the title. A prime example of this phenomenon and the first to start the trend is Mohamed Sobhi's Sikkat Al-Salama, 2000, adapted from Saadeddin Wahba's 1965 hit, "The Road to Safety", and turned into violent political propaganda against peace with Israel. I was told by one of the team of dramaturges who, with Sobhi, masterminded this adaptation that it had been approved by Wahba before his death. This explains, in part, the new version's popular success, since it has kept the original's basic situation, character-configuration, earthy humour and barbed satirical thrust.
In the '65 text a group of travellers on their way to Alexandria (for various purposes, all shady and reprehensible as the play eventually reveals) lose their way in the Western Desert when one of the passengers, a writer and journalist whose destination is Marsa Matrouh, misleads the driver of the bus who is making his first trip on this route. In the grip of despair and the certainty of imminent death, the characters bare their souls to confess their sins -- moral, social, and political -- and repent. Wahba cleverly couches his political message in these revelations (some of them quite spicy, others hilarious), and the gist of it is that the 1952 Revolution, led by Nasser, a novice in politics like the hapless bus driver, has gone astray because of the corruption, selfishness, and dishonesty of his companions, foremost among them the hypocritical, self-seeking intellectuals. Predictably -- the play is a comedy -- the passengers are finally saved, and predictably too, and quite ironically, their repentance and fervent decisions to reform evaporate at the first sign of rescue. The only exceptions are an ignorant, third-rate actress-cum-prostitute, a vulgar actors' agent-cum-philanderer, and an aberrant husband on his first extra-marital escapade.
Written two years before the cataclysmic '67 military debacle (it was performed at the National in January '65, directed by Saad Ardash), the play was eerily prophetic and those who watched it at the time dimly sensed it. It did not matter that the plot was hackneyed, that most of the characters were stereotypes rather than individualised human beings, and that the whole thing was a thinly-disguised political parable. Despite its witty dialogue and broad humour, it had a kind of urgency that vaguely suggested a feeling of approaching doom.
Now that the historical moment which back in '67 gave the play its emotional vibrancy, impact and power has become a dim memory, a cynical narrative or a cold collection of facts, what remains of Sikkat Al-Salama and has saved it from oblivion are its most conventional aspects: the well-tried, ever-appealing suspenseful situation, the rising tension and inevitable bickering between the characters which sometimes explodes into deliciously funny slanging matches between the women, the sexual innuendoes which often extend to other biological functions, the punning on the agent's name, Qurani, which literally means "horny", the spirited repartee, the secret rivalry between the men to gain the favours of sexy Susu, not to mention the sentimental presentation of the self-same Susu as the honest whore or virtuous prostitute of melodrama, and the vividly-drawn caricatures of familiar types, such as the omdah (village mayor), the acrid, youth-clinging, aristocratic old spinster, the effeminate youth, the crooked lawyer, the vainglorious, philandering company chairman...etc.
A recording of the original '65 production in black and white is frequently broadcast on TV and has maintained its popularity over the decades. This is perhaps the reason Sobhi hit upon it as a suitable vehicle for a different political message. He realised that it had lost its original political significance but could easily be recharged with another. All it takes is a simple geographical twist, and the updating of the topical references and slangy expressions in the dialogue to suit the times. Sharm Al-Sheikh and Taba replace Alexandria and Marsa Matrouh, and the bus is lost in Sinai, near the Israeli border, instead of the Western Desert. The demented survivor of the battle of Al-Alamein and self-appointed guard of the tombs of its victims in the original becomes in this version a deranged bedouin living among the mass-graves of Egyptian soldiers in Sinai. Whereas the former lost his mind when he killed his wife after watching her being raped by foreign soldiers, the latter goes mad after watching the brutalities of the Israeli aggressor. When rescue comes in the form of an Israeli border-patrol, Sobhi, in the role of Qurani, suddenly reforms and gains heroic stature; he delivers an impassioned harangue, reminding his hesitant companions of the old and bloody feud with Israel, and urging them to refuse this form of rescue, even at the risk of death, since it will only lead them further astray from the road to safety. As director of the show, Sobhi bolstered his loud message with film clips of massacres and other Israeli atrocities, ending with a rousing patriotic song chanted by all the cast. It was as if the show had suddenly taken a sharp turning, plunging headlong into agit-prop.
I have no quarrel with the message, warmongering as it struck me: it's a free country and everyone is entitled to his views; indeed it is the kind of message many would jubilantly embrace in the light of the recent bombing of Beirut and the regrettable deterioration of the peace process. Indeed, the bombings provided the ideal mental framework for the reception of his production and whipped up enough anger to blind the audience to the repulsive coarseness of many jokes and scenes, Simone's many illogical costume-changes, the simplistic sugar-coated-pill approach (Simone, her costumes, the omdah's irrepressible bladder, the male-chauvinist jokes about women and homosexuals being part of the sugar), the high-handed, incontrovertible, pedagogic tone, and the startling switch to agit-prop at the end.
One would be a fool to complain of the abject absence of subtlety or any dialectical complexity of thought or feeling in an agit-prop show, especially one designed and directed by an artist who has publicly confessed on three occasions at least that his first passion is teaching, rather than acting or directing. (And in this show and his previous Carmen, Sobhi has virtually, and effectively, turned the theatre into a classroom.) Nevertheless, I cannot help wondering, and I think it is legitimate to ask, if Sobhi wanted to stage an agit-prop piece and lampoon the supporters of the peace process, particularly those who have established contacts with pro-peace intellectuals in Israel, why didn't he and his dramaturges work on the whole play and recast it from beginning to end in the agit-prop form? Why go along with Wahba's original form and substance up until near the end, cashing in on its comfortable conventionality and popularity, then suddenly leave it behind? Or, indeed, why not write a whole new play and leave Sikkat Al-Salama -- as people know it and love it in Ardash's '65 production -- alone?
