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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A room of one's own?
By Nehad SelaihaI do not think I am singular in my obsessive fascination with doors and windows. As a young schoolgirl, sweating over her books during exams late into the night, I used to step out onto the long, crescent-shaped balcony which connected my bedroom to the living room in our fifth-floor apartment, not for a breath of fresh air or to count the stars, but to draw comfort from the few friendly windows that still remained lighted. I made up all sorts of stories about the people there -- simple, silly stories. I could not see them except as shadows, or momentary silhouettes flitting across the friendly squares of light in the distance across the wide street. Darkened windows, shuttered or gaping open, filled me with dread -- like tombs and dark caves. Years later, I came across a passage by Virginia Woolf (in her Mrs Dalloway, I think) which described with poetic intensity the impact of lighted windows on the heroine; it was like an epiphany: I finally understood the meaning of those vague, undefinable childhood feelings.
From Woolf's windows I went on to her A Room of One's Own and it captured my imagination long before it became a classic of the feminist movement. (By the way, the book has been finally translated into Arabic by Sumaiya Ramadan and published by the Supreme Council for Culture, 1999.) For some time afterwards I thought of rooms, somewhat romantically, as private spaces confined by walls for protection, seclusion, the freedom to be yourself and do your own thing. But then Harold Pinter arrived on the theatrical scene with his dramatic debut, The Room (1957) and that romantic image began to crack, revealing not only the flimsiness of the security a room can afford ("A door can open at any moment and someone will come in," as Pinter said in an interview with John Sherwood), but also its grim potential as prison.
In his recent verse drama (and his dramatic debut), The Room (a study into the disintegration of the mind of a former left-wing revolutionary under the combined pressure of betrayal, political terror and disillusionment with the cause), Egyptian poet Mahmoud Nessim -- a prominent member of the 1970s Poets Movement -- uses the double identity of the room, as both refuge and cell, as a structural matrix. Instrumental in defining this duality and formulating it as an existential experience is the division between "inside" and "outside," the within and the without, which becomes more than just a topological distinction. Initially, the only connection (or separation) between the two spaces is a high window with a broken pane. Asked by Maged Omran, the owner of the room, what the world looks like outside the window, his former comrade, Ismail, describes it, almost echoing Pinter, as inexplicable, confusing, frightening, chaotic, peopled with demons and phantoms. Maged's room however, we soon discover, is not very different from the outside. Though it seems safe and sheltered, an impregnable asylum with not a single door in sight, it, too, is infested with demons and phantoms.
As the phantoms of the past (who, we discover as the lights go up, have been there all the time, lurking in corners, in the shadows, or behind a curtain) invade the room one by one, flooding in with memories and crowding it with other spaces, the barriers between inside and outside crumble; they merge into one another and are figuratively transformed into an internal mental space -- the landscape of a tortured mind.
The journey through this dismal internal landscape is conducted in the spirit of honest questioning and exploration of the reasons behind the frustrations, failures and defeat of the author's and his characters' generation of rebellious intellectuals and dreamers. The reasons can be summed up in one word: betrayal -- on every possible level. And though Nessim shows a lot of sympathy towards his vanquished, broken characters, he manages to steer clear of sentimentality and facile explanations. I only wish he had shown a similar degree of self-control and artistic discipline in his management of language. He often got carried away on the wings of poetry, saying far more than was necessary, so that at times, the verse became a burden, threatening to sink the fine conception of the play. The text could have been sharper, more moving, and, indeed, more eloquent with fewer words and some Pinteresque pauses. Still, it is a very promising beginning, and in time I hope Nessim will learn the virtue of verbal economy and manage to sneak from under the heavy mantle which the late poet and dramatist Salah Abdel-Sabur seems to have cast upon all writers of verse drama till this very day.
Perhaps director Abdel-Sattar El-Khodari, who has more experience of what works and does not work in the theatre, should have worked with the author on the text to trim it a bit. Instead of that (and as if we did not already have enough words), he added a prologue consisting of a collage of bits and pieces of poems from the 1970s, saying more or less what the play eventually says at great length. His choice of cast, set and music, however, was both sensitive and intelligent. The acting was at once passionate and carefully disciplined. No excess there. The same cannot be said exactly of the set which was a little too cluttered for my taste. It seemed as if stage designer, Ibrahim El-Fawi did not trust the audience to grasp the meaning of what was being said, and so decided to provide them with lots of visual equivalents. In his quasi-naturalistic, quasi-expressionistic set, the most irritatingly naive element was a bed with its underside compartment in the shape of an incubator containing a man-size, reddish, premature baby. I guess the reason for adding this gruesome detail was a reference in the play to a book called The Premature by Arwa Saleh who committed suicide a few years ago by jumping out of a window after venting her wrath on the 1970s intellectuals. The most effective elements in the set were the window at the back and the black iron door with the small barred window which filled the proscenium arch at the beginning and end of the show. Hisham El-Meligui's atmospheric music was suggestive and fittingly eerie, enhancing the sense of mystery, terror, and suspense and the lighting plan was sensitively thought out. What this show really needs, I thought as I left the theatre, is a lot of pruning and then, perhaps, verse drama can flower again.
