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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Sayed and Ayman Khattab:
More than meets the ear
Can a whisper save the day?Profile by Hanan Radwan
What is the difference between a theatre prompter and a parrot? Sayed Khattab and his son, Ayman, both theatre prompters, tell it like it is. A parrot repeats your words, adding a cheerful melody. A weak prompter who simply mumbles the script of a play to the actors without emotion sounds like an electric generator rumbling backstage. True, like a generator, a prompter is a life-saver when actors "break down" on the stage, forgetting a word or a line in the play they are performing. But the way the Khattabs see it, prompting is by no means a mechanical exercise in dictation. It is an artistic profession in its own right, sometimes even more difficult than acting.
Theatre prompting is one of those bizarre professions almost no one wants to be when they grow up. In the past, it was the backbone of Egyptian theatre. Today, it is looked upon as an appendix that has been cut off from most stage performances. It requires a knowledge of acting and a decent level of education; but it is not taught at universities or artistic institutes. Those who practice it are indispensable for rehearsals and debut performances. For their efforts, however, they are rewarded with little more than headaches, crackled tongues, meagre salaries, and not a single clap from the audience.
Small wonder, then, that the Khattabs were hard to find. Not only are father and son a rarity in this field of work, the Khattabs are amongst the handful of prompters who still care enough to remain in this profession. They share few physical attributes. And when it comes to that most precious of attributes for a prompter -- the voice -- Ayman is hardly a chip off the old block. Most of the time, Ayman speaks in a tone that is so low-pitched your conversation with him is riddled with "excuse me?" For actors, however, those vocal cords are just right: the words of a script need to travel the right distance from the prompter's lips to their ears without disturbing the audience. While louder and deeper, Sayed's voice is also captivating, reverberating melodiously with each sentence and emotion. So father and son may not be able to compare dimples and birth marks. But when it comes to their career histories and skills, the similarities are mind-boggling -- so much so that a fortune teller needs to hold only one of their palms to trace the career paths of both men.
As young boys, both of them loved acting. Sayed entered the world of theatre through the proverbial channel of school activities. It was the same old story: the six-year-old excels in a small part of a small play. The art teacher sits up and takes notice of the new talent. Soon, the boy takes centre stage in front of an audience of proud parents at the school's end-of-year performances.
But for Sayed, who is now 58, that was only part of the story. "I grew up at a time when acting in Egypt was at its best, when actresses like [comedians] Marie Mounib and Zeinat Sidqi [who were both illiterate] only needed to listen to the words of a script once before memorising and acting it out perfectly," he muses. "Ah, those were the days." He pauses for a good while, stares at the floor, and sucks his lips. Ayman watches him with interest. "I also lived in Ismailia, when emotions over the [1956] Tripartite Aggression were enough to fuel any artistic emotion," Sayed continues.
Ayman, 27, was also singled out for school plays, but he had the added advantage of modern communications. "As a kid, I was always watching films and plays on television," he says. "Do you notice how people who are absorbed in watching a soccer or boxing match sometimes move their hands and bodies impulsively with the players? That's what I found myself doing when I watched those films. I was always acting with the actors on the screen." Sayed, in turn, listens to him closely.
At the beginning, neither of them had any doubts about their career choice. It was to be the theatre, of course. What else? Working at the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) after his graduation from the Naval Academy in 1964, Sayed gathered some colleagues and formed an amateur theatrical group that soon became known throughout Ismailia and Suez. Forced to leave Ismailia in 1968, at the height of the war with Israel, he settled in Cairo, where he joined with actors Badreddin Gamgoum and Mohamed Negm to form a professional theatrical group. ("I met Negm by accident one day at the naval registration office," Sayed recalls. "After discovering that we had both graduated the same year from the Naval Academy, we hit it off immediately.")
In his third year at Cairo University's Faculty of Law, Ayman joined the student theatre group. Interestingly, Sayed was not too happy about his son's penchant for acting. "I went through the difficulties and hassles that an actor must face. I didn't want my son to go through them as well," he says, throwing a wistful glance at Ayman, who grins back at him from behind a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. Nevertheless, Sayed frequently took Ayman with him to rehearsals and, against his own judgement, did not prevent his son from pursuing his dreams. He needn't have worried. Like his father, Ayman woke up one day to find that he had become a prompter. Both men took up the profession by default.
"Gamgoum and Negm did most of the acting and I used to enjoy prompting them at rehearsals," Sayed explains. "Then one day, I got a call from the National Theatre asking if I could be a prompter for one of their new plays. At that time [the early 1970s], there were very few prompters in Egypt. This profession was more active in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and most of the prompters were dead by then. So I got my chance and in 1974, I resigned from the SCA and became a full-time prompter for the National Theatre." Ayman, too, while still at college, was also called upon by the National Theatre for prompting work while his father was busy prompting for another play. He continued to work with his father at the National Theatre until 1996; then they both left to work at the Negm Theatre where they still remain.
Whereas Ayman performs his job standing in the wings, however, Sayed is one of the few remaining veterans of the kambousha. When modern Egyptian theatre took form at the beginning of the century, prompters crouched in a tiny depression covered by a wooden, box-like roof at the front of the stage. From the kambousha, they whispered the lines of a play to the actors performing above them.
Once an integral part of the stage, the kambousha was disappearing fast by the 1980s. "The kambousha is no longer practical," says Mahmoud El-Hiddini, head of the National Centre for Theatre. "Now, most plays include dances and for those you need a lot of room on stage. The kambousha takes up space and annoys the dancers. And because it's so close to the audience, often you could hear the prompter's voice easily from the front rows, and this distracted a lot of people. Even the prompters themselves complained of being cooped up in such a tiny, stuffy space for hours."
So out went the kambousha. Very soon after its disappearance, theatre actors also bid a mournful farewell to on-stage prompting. Rare are those performances today where prompters like Ayman are called upon to lend a helping voice to stammering actors from behind the scenes. As El-Hiddini explains, most prompting now takes place only at rehearsals; once the actors get on stage, they're on their own. And now, Sayed trudges on, probably the sole survivor of the belle époque of prompting. Ayman is happy to trudge along with him.
"Don't take this profession of ours lightly," Sayed warns. "It is a very complicated job and it was very much appreciated and respected by the actors in the old days." Come, now: what is so complicated about saying a ready-made script hidden in an inconspicuous corner, sheltered from the stares and sneers of an audience? Apparently, however, there's more to prompting than meets the ear. "It's not just a matter of reading a document," says Sayed. "You have to understand the script. You have to feel it. You have to appreciate the language and style in which it was written. Only then can you communicate it well to an actor."
Big talk? Not quite. An avid reader who memorised the Qur'an at the age of five, Sayed adores classical Arabic plays. Much of his conversation is speckled with words in classical Arabic. There's more. "You also need to know a lot about acting to be a good prompter," Ayman adds. His father nods, adding a musical "that's right." Ayman continues: "If there is a line, for example, where an actor has to say 'I love you,' I have to say it with the right emotion to put the actor in the right mood. The same goes for other parts where the actor needs to be angry, sad, or excited. If I repeat the lines mechanically, he may lose his emotional rhythm. I also need to be alert to the movements and physical side of acting. Just imagine if an actor needs to pause to look puzzled or make a gesture. If I don't understand that there needs to be this moment of silence during the act, I may go on and on prompting like a machine and distract him."
A good prompter must also know that not all moments of silence are the same. "Sometimes, these pauses don't last for more than two seconds. In that short period, I must be able to tell whether the actor has stopped talking on purpose or whether he's beginning to falter," Sayed says. "In the first case, I would also pause. But in the second, I would need to prompt him immediately, before the audience notices." To do this well, Sayed has often had to call on his telepathic skills. He knows, for instance, that comedian Younes Shalabi is automatically distracted if a baby cries out from the audience. Slight nuances in Mohamed Negm's tone of voice, understood only by Sayed, carry different signals for him to "slow down," "speak louder," or "repeat the last sentence." And when actress Samiha Ayyoub flashes a certain "gazelle-type look" on stage, Sayed knows that it carries a message for him.
On the other hand, actors know that when they hear the sound of soft kisses blown in the air or a smothered cough from the kambousha, they may mean "you've forgotten a sentence" or "that's your cue." For backstage prompters like Ayman, life gets more complicated as distances between him and the actors grow larger. Always keen on soccer, he speaks of having to learn how to "kick words to some actors and throw words to others, using a different tone of voice for each different actor," and ensuring all the while that the audience hears not one peep out of him. "I learned this from my father," Ayman says, glancing at Sayed. "No, no. Don't listen to him," Sayed says with a wave of his hand. "I didn't do anything. He learned it all by himself." "That's not true," his son exclaims, his voice now audible with enthusiasm. "How many times have I watched you prompting? I must have learned something from that, don't you think?" "Maybe," Sayed says. "But the important thing is that a prompter must have a good rapport with the actors to be able to understand and anticipate their every move, their every breath on stage."
That's why prompters were the darlings of Egyptian comedy theatre in the 1930s and 1940s -- the heyday of stars such as Naguib El-Rihani and Ya'qoub Sannou' -- and why they continue to be appreciated by present-day comedians like Mohamed Negm. "Many of the most successful plays in Egypt have been comedies, and they're always shown for long periods," Sayed says. "Imagine what it's like for a comedian to go on stage and repeat the same lines and jokes for months, sometimes years on end. He would go crazy with boredom if he didn't make small changes in the lines and act off the cuff. Having a good prompter around allows him to relax. He can improvise as much as he wants without worrying about forgetting the main story line."
These innovations can sometimes turn against a prompter. In the middle of a performance, an actor may throw in a cheeky remark about the prompter's hair-cut or even drag him onto the stage. But Sayed and Ayman are not ruffled by such side-shows. "It's all part of the fun of on-stage prompting," Ayman says. His father cheerfully recalls an incident during a performance when famous comedian Abdel-Moneim Madbouli accidentally tripped on the kambousha, knocking down its roof and exposing Sayed taking a quick bite from a fuul sandwich, which reeked of onions. The audience roared with laughter. After that, the incident was repeated deliberately at each performance and received the same applause.
Still, life is not all fun and laughs for a prompter. The kambousha has exerted its physical toll on Sayed, who has vertebral pains as a result of "being squashed in this small hole for five or more hours each day, sweating under the stage lights. And I did this for more than 10 years." But even from backstage or during rehearsals, prompting can be what Ayman calls "a killer job." No matter how demanding a role can be, a theatre actor can often afford to take short breaks as other actors take centre stage. But a prompter who dares to take a break would be told to take a hike by the producer. "You have to be alert all the time during rehearsals and performances. Sometimes, you have to repeat a line more than five times to a forgetful actor during rehearsals. So you need to be extremely patient. And you really have to love this job to be able to stick to it," Ayman says.
Yet love alone is not enough to keep the Khattabs going. With the disappearance of the kambousha, prompting is now a dying profession. Fully aware of a not-so-bright future, Sayed and Ayman are now turning to script-writing and acting respectively. Sayed even acknowledges that backstage prompters should not stay on longer than the first 15 to 20 days of a performance, until all the actors have learned their parts perfectly. He asserts firmly that "any actor who depends solely and fully on the prompter should stay at home instead." Nor is Sayed bothered by the fact that many actors who are "especially sweet" to him during rehearsals and the first few days of a performance look the other way if they cross paths with him afterwards, when they no longer need his backstage support. Far from looking upon himself as an anonymous solider, Sayed feels empowered by his profession. "There are many actors in a play, but there is only one prompter," he says. "And all of them depend on me. I don't need them. They need me. And only I can tell when an actor can be left to depend on himself [memorising the script]."
He indulges in the satisfaction of having saved many a fledgling actor from on-stage embarrassment. A few years back, actress Nahla Salama was called upon to act a part in a play just one day before opening night," he recalls. "She was scared to death. But I told her not to worry, that I would be close by, prompting her. You should have seen her on opening night. Her fingertips and lips were blue with fear. But half-way through the play, she started to loosen up and acted her part very well, because I was helping her all along." Small wonder, then, that when the curtain comes down and the audience cheers, Sayed and Ayman bask in the applause.
photo: Randa Shaath
