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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Singing in the rain
By Nehad Selaiha
Only a Cairene can appreciate the thrill of skipping along the Corniche in an April shower in Alexandria. It was dry and sunny when I emerged from Mihatit Masr (the central railway station) at 4 pm last Wednesday; but I knew it would rain...it must. In more than 12 years, I have never been to Alexandria to watch a performance by Mahmoud Abu Duma's independent Alternative Theatre troupe without it raining. In my romantic moments, I like to think of this as a kind of magical tryst with the wind and the rain; but maybe Duma and his group schedule their performances to coincide with the rainy spells, or, as I vaguely suspect, only invite me to watch them when they are sure I will be deliciously drenched.
I became acquainted with their work in the autumn of 1988. At the time they had not thought of themselves as a permanent ensemble and did not have a name; that happened two years later when they came to Cairo to participate in the first Free Theatre Festival in the winter of 1990. They impressed the Festival's audience with a performance of Duma's The Dance of the Scorpions (a striking variation on Hamlet) in the open air theatre at the Opera House. In 1988, however, they were just a group of friends who had come together through the Theatre Department at Alexandria University where they studied. They shared, among many natural affinities, a strong dislike for what was being passed off as theatre by the professional companies from Cairo that descend upon their city every summer without fail. Those companies were rarely patronised by Alexandrians and only catered for the holiday makers. In the winter, the city which (though glibly dubbed the second capital) had no resident theatre companies, state-run or private, was completely deprived of theatre and rated itself extremely lucky if one of its chronically lethargic cultural palaces mustered enough energy to put on even a pallid, half-hearted show. This virtually meant that Alexandrians were denied the pleasure of theatre all year round. This deplorable state of affairs was resented all the more deeply by Duma and his friends since they were training to make theatre their profession and did not find the prospect of having to uproot themselves and move to Cairo to find work all that palatable. Besides, few companies in Cairo, if any at all, would welcome the kind of work they wanted to do: Duma's subtle, symbolic and highly poetic texts would seem almost esoteric compared to the regular fare, and his Grotoweskian mode of directing which requires spiritual discipline, a kind of mystical ecstasy and long rehearsal hours on a daily basis would be difficult to accommodate in any company -- indeed, would be regarded as penal servitude by the pampered Cairene actors.
I first knew Duma as a postgraduate student at the Academy of Arts. At the end of his two-year diploma he gave me three of his plays to read and disappeared. He was so quiet, aloof and hermit-like, so dreadfully shy of making an impression or putting himself forward in any way that by the time I got round to reading his plays I had forgotten what he looked like and could not connect the name with a face. I spent months afterwards trying to track him down. I was so impressed with the plays that I wished to have them published with an enthusiastic introduction from me and wanted his permission for that. When the book eventually appeared I got an invitation to watch one of the plays in performance; and it was then that I discovered what a magnificent director Duma really is, and how wonderfully talented and passionately dedicated his actors, particularly his long-standing female lead and co-founder of the troupe, Awaitif Ibrahim, genuinely are.
The Castaways vividly evokes the wild, primeval atmosphere of JM Synge's Riders to the Sea as well as the mysteriously shadowy world of Maeterlinck's plays and unfolds like a gruesome fairy tale about a lurid, demonic figure thrown up by the sea on the shore of a primitive fishing village, ensnaring the souls of its innocent inhabitants in a net of legends and fantastic dreams. It was fittingly performed in the idyllic settings of the Alexandria Atelier garden, and in the silence I thought I could hear the soft swish of the nearby sea. Within a few minutes, however, I was actually hearing the patter of rain drops on the leaves of the trees under which we sat. The propitious shower arrived right on cue, and as the actors became progressively soaked through, with water streaming down Awatif's face and dripping from her hair and flimsy gown, the performance gained in poetry and magic. It was an unforgettable evening: after the show, we made our way in the rain to a Greek tavern (which still used the emblematic blue and white checked table-cloths) to warm ourselves with talk and drinks.
Unfortunately, I never saw the production of Duma's second play, The Well -- another symbolic and profoundly disturbing and evocative text which takes its inspiration from folk legends and nursery rhymes; it was presented by the troupe in Alexandria after their 1990 visit to Cairo with The Dance of the Scorpions (the third in his trio of plays).
In subsequent years, after extended visits to London, the US and Germany, Duma decided to widen the scope of his troupe's repertoire and expose them to other authors and modes of dramatic writing. Inevitably, he faced the endemic, two-pronged problem as all free-theatre groups in Egypt: space and funds. His minimalist, poor-theatre style of production which depends mainly on the actor's ability to make up for the absence of sets, costumes, and all theatrical paraphernalia, went a long way towards solving the space problem: any place was a good place to perform. For the modest funds he needed (not to compensate the actors for the long hours of taxing work they put in a show but merely to help them cover their daily expenses during rehearsals: sandwiches, tea and coffee and transportation), he turned, like other similar troupes, to foreign cultural centres and institutions. This imposed a certain limitation of course, since foreign centres and institutes are not allowed to sponsor activities not relating to the promotion of their respective cultures. In Duma's case, however, it was not felt as a restriction: most of the texts he wanted to produce anyway were foreign; he would choose the play first, then approach the relevant foreign agency. In this way, he managed to present in succession, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Athol Fugard's A Place with the Pigs (which he translated), Peter Weiss's Marat-Sade, Friedrich Durrenmatt's Let Us Play Strindberg, and Max Frisch's The Fire-Raisers. I always think of the last three plays as Duma's German project and his apotheosis as director.
They were presented singly, in successive years, with generous moral support and material help from the Goethe Institute in Cairo and Alexandria and the Pro-Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland. To present all three plays in succession, twice in one week, however, to mark International Theatre Day, needed further financial help, and it was generously provided by the Swedish Institute in Alexandria. Strindberg was Swedish after all, and Durrenmatt's play was a variation on his Dance of Death.
It rained on the 22nd, the beginning of this mini German/Swiss/Swedish/Egyptian festival at the Goethe Institute in Alexandria. But the entrance hall, leading to the library, where the performance of the Marat-Sade took place, was overflowing with eager spectators. On the following day, it rained even harder, with gales and squalls, and the audience still came in hordes and throngs to watch Let's Play Strindberg.
On the third night, when The Fire-Raisers was presented, I was not there (I had already watched the play a few months ago); but I know from reliable sources that it was equally well-attended and enthusiastically received and, also, for all it matters, that on that night when I was absent it did not rain.
The performances I saw were mesmeric, enchanting, mind-boggling, soul-uplifting, and all such other epithets as we critics have been drilled into regarding as corny by our skeptical, cynical, postmodern times. With only seven actors, playing all the parts in all three plays, music designer Ihab Kandil and costume designer Aliaa El-Geridy, Duma treated us to a magical, richly variegated pageant where all the actors (Awatef Ibrahim, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, Iman Imam, Khaled Raafat, El-Sayed Ragab, Said Kabil, and Mustafa Moussa) acted like veritable shamans, taking the art of acting back to its roots in a magic and ritual reincarnation, and where humour battled with pathos, cruelty with sympathy, barbed satire with tenderness, and brutality with Christian charity. Such an exceptional theatrical event is a tribute to Duma and his Alternative Theatre troupe, and a credit to the Goethe and Swedish Institutes and Pro-Helvetia. Short of wishing that the whole of Cairo could move to Alexandria to watch this thrilling triple bill, I earnestly hope the troupe will find the means to present their work in Cairo, even though the chance of it raining here is practically nil.
