 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Reflected glow
By Nehad Selaiha
A play entitled Rusasah fil Qalb (Shot Through the Heart) would normally suggest either a gory melodrama or a blood-curdling thriller. To most Egyptians, however, particularly old-movie fans, the phrase spells nostalgia and is redolent of romance and old-world charm. What have old movies got to do with it? Well, practically everything.
The play, which Tawfiq El-Hakim (1898-1987) wrote in 1931, following his return from a five-year spell in Paris, was a conscious attempt to introduce romantic high comedy to the Egyptian stage, then wallowing in farces, vaudevilles, musicals and melodramas. Paris had changed him and weaned him from his earlier fondness for these forms. In his autobiography, The Prison of Life, he says: "At the time, theatre was dead... There was nowhere I could present the kind of plays I was writing at the time. The only serious groups were the amateur ones, like Jam'iyat Ansar Al-Tamthil (Acting Champions Society)... I wrote Shot Through the Heart especially for them... I wanted it to be different from the general run of comedies, mostly adapted from foreign texts, which presented caricatures rather than characters and relied on verbal jokes and farcical situations and surprises... I wanted a comedy which depends for its whole effect on dialogue between real people, and on that alone."
For a theme he picked the age-old conflict between love and friendship, idealising both through the self-sacrifice of the hero and playing on the old romantic belief in the power of true love to reform rakes. Mohsen, an attractive, happy-go-lucky playboy, living wildly beyond his means and constantly chased by debtors, glimpses rich, beautiful Fifi at Groppi's, eating ice-cream, and is suddenly and hopelessly smitten with love. It soon transpires that she is the fiancée of his closest friend, Sami, a hard-headed opportunist and social-climber who covets her wealth and family name. Predictably, Fifi gravitates towards the good-natured, prodigal Mohsen and, having seen through Sami, breaks off her engagement. When she offers her love to the reformed Mohsen, he declines on the plea that it would mean betraying his friend, even though as he admits, this friend does not deserve her.
El-Hakim does not explain why the Acting Champions did not go through with the production, only saying that "the group were soon infected with the general apathy." Maybe they deemed its elegant, witty dialogue and refined humour unsuited to the vulgar times. In any case, the failure of the project was one of the reasons which led to El-Hakim's public championing of "closet drama" and his famous statement, in his introduction to Pygmalion, that his plays were intended for "a theatre of the mind."
It was not until 1964 that Shot Through the Heart was presented on stage, but by that time it had become hugely popular in its 1944 musical film version for which El-Hakim himself wrote the script. The stage production was intended to cash in on the popularity of the film. But those who went to see it missed all the things they loved in the film: Mohamed Abdel-Wahab's inspired and thrilling musical innovations; Hussein El-Sayed's dramatic and witty lyrics; the harmonious blending of song and spoken dialogue in the crucial scenes between Fifi and Mohsen; and Mohamed Karim's daring and original direction, including a sequence showing Abdel-Wahab in a foamy bath tub, singing of the virtues of water on a hot day and prescribing having a bath as a cure for all aches and pains, including those of the heart. Indeed, this song is emblematic of the whole tone of the film, which is consistently lighthearted, playfully cool with subtle shadings of suave irony, and which contributes to the air of elegance and sophistication which permeates the whole movie. People, like Hussein Fawzi, who criticised its glorification of love at first sight, failed to grasp the essential make-believe nature of the artificial world it presents. It was like asking a comedy as fragile and sparkling as Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest to present a complex, analytical view of human passions and foibles. Also missing from the '64 production was the new, happy ending El-Hakim provided for the '44 film script at the insistence of Mohamed Abdel-Wahab; no wonder it did not last a week.
The current revival of the '31 text, by the State Theatre Comedy Company (at Miami theatre), was the idea of veteran musical theatre director Hassan Abdel-Salam. The modest budget he was allowed drastically curtailed his ambitious conception and curbed his usually lavish style. Nevertheless he has managed to come up with a formula that guarantees popular success: plenty of music, a wistful sense of faded elegance in the sets and costumes, and two attractive popular singers (Ali El-Haggar and Angham) in the lead. But the really potent element was playing up the sense of nostalgia through the use of humour. Abdel-Salam knew very well that every member of his audience had seen the film and that a comparison was inevitable. So, rather than try to avoid it (a futile effort, he shrewdly judged), he openly embraced it and made it part of the fun. The sections of El-Hakim's dialogue immortalised by Abdel-Wahab and Raqia Ibrahim in the film were heavily underlined, nudging the audience to project what they remember on what they see, to superimpose images upon images and watch the present in the reflected glow of an elegant past. Comedian Sami Maghawri (as Sami), on the other hand, did his comic best to drag the past, as idealised in the movie, into full view and subject it, together with the present and our sense of nostalgia, to a shower of gentle mockery. The result was a liberating sense of playfulness, a faint aura of glamour, and an affectionate celebration, not just of El-Hakim or Mohamed Karim's old movie, but of the whole art of manufacturing images and fabricating illusions.
