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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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After his writing debut, Oedipus, The President, an intricate polyphonic collage of a number of varied texts (including plays, poems, letters, memoirs, and documentary films in Arabic, English and French) which he directed and presented at the Wallace Theatre in 1995 during the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre, director Ahmed El-Attar (a graduate of the Department of Performing Arts at the American University in Cairo, 1992) went on to produce his first original, full-fledged play. The Interview (Al-Lagnah), performed in 1998 at The French Cultural Centre, the Swiss Club and Howard Theatre successively to packed audiences seemed startlingly different, in both conception and technique, from the earlier Oedipus. Gone were the mythological dimensions, the free overlapping and merging of past and present, myth and history, the grand, panoramic spatio-temporal sweep, and the studied use of montage to create multiple stages and perspectives. Oedipus was a fascinating experiment, if somewhat rambling, self-indulgent and over-embroidered. It is not unusual to come across scenes of funerals and death rituals in Egyptian plays, particularly those set in the countryside. One example that readily comes to mind is the memorable lamentation scene in Al-Warsha's Tides of Night where a group of women covered in black from top to toe sit around the corpse of the dead hero, keening and wailing and chanting heart-rending dirges. Abeer Ali's And No Condolences (at Al-Hanager), however, is the only play I know of that uses the traditional village funeral as framework, material and source of aesthetic inspiration. It was a risky choice considering the lugubriousness of such occasions and our natural aversion, particularly when we seek entertainment, to any thing that reminds us of our mortality. But the venture paid off, and Ali's funeral came across as an exquisite theatrical experience, "in equal scale weighing delight and dole" -- to quote Claudius.
The material, culled from various sources, including The Book of the Dead, a collection of traditional elegies and lamentation by Abdel-Halim Hifni, a study of folk songs by Ahmed Mursi and of folk literature by Ahmed Rushdi Saleh, was collectively pieced together, shaped and written by a team of researchers and dramaturges with Abeer Ali providing the overall conception, writing the final version, stage-designing and directing it. Besides the many folk songs and funerary chants she interwove in her text, Ali also added carefully chosen poems by Foad Haddad, Mohamed Bahgat, Amr Ali and Naguib Shihabeddin. The musical element was provided by Mohamed Izzat and Hisham El-Meligui and they drew heavily on the folk musical heritage, particularly in rural areas. The result was a performance text intensely lyrical, gently nostalgic, cunningly interlaced with earthy humour, and deeply engaged with contemporary Egyptian reality as telescoped through the experience of the various mourners.
Initially, the funeral context and choral lamentations of the female mourners, as they pick up their black mourning clothes out of primitively ornamented wooden chests, suggest a kind of ritualistic drama or an elegiac tragedy in the style of Aeschylus's The Persians. But as soon as the mourners begin to talk, exchanging the usual words of consolation, remembering the members of the family who did not turn up for the funeral and discussing those who did, the play moves on to a realistic plane. The seemingly fragmentary, random dialogue offers us, in quick, sharp strokes, vivid insights into the characters lives and thoughts, their resentments, disappointments, worries, hopes and broken dreams. Next we move to the male mourners who, like the women, represent different generations, standards of education and walks of life, and the revelations continue. Gradually these fragments, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, build a vividly dramatic picture of an ailing, disintegrating, parochial society, bristling with destructive tensions and conflicts, and hopelessly riddled with greed, materialism, selfishness and moral hypocrisy. The young men among the mourners are frustrated in every respect and doomed to a sterile, futile existence, and the young women are either sold in marriage to rich, old men, condemned to a life of self-denial in the interests of male relatives, or forced to kill themselves if they dare surrender themselves in love.
The play, which begins with the anguished mourning of the father, the benevolent head of the family and village, ends with a wholesale condemnation of patriarchy as a life-killing force which turns the women in the play into lonely, frustrated and embittered widows and spinsters, pathetically cradling and lullabying imaginary babies, or into objects for sale or dead corpses. In the final scene, as three coffins painted with Fayoum Portraits, and the mummies of a young man and woman, with faces painted in the same style, are brought in, and all the mourners exchange their weeds for sackcloth, the funeral of the deceased father is ironically and symbolically transformed into the funeral of a society that has unwittingly committed suicide.
To accommodate her relatively large cast and fast flow of images Abeer Ali opted for extreme simplicity in her set-design, restructuring the stage into different levels and using a few wooden chests, low tables and wicker chairs, and of course those suggestive replicas of Fayoum portraits. This, with the help of the lighting, allowed her to achieve a kind of cinematic flow and make use of synchronism. Abeer's perspicacity as director also shows in her choice of cast, particularly her actresses, who all had marvelous voices -- an essential requirement for this kind of show. Hanan Youssef as the deranged mother who becomes unhinged after helplessly watching her daughter forced by the males in the family to drink poison after losing her virginity before marriage, Minha Zaytoun as the kindly matriarch who fends off her loneliness and growing debility by a few happy memories, and Nehad Abul-'Enein as the embittered, alienated widow, grimly nursing her grievances -- all three gave unforgettable performances without a hint of sentimentality or melodrama. The others, some of them trained singers but acting for the first time, did admirably well.
And No Condolences is Abeer Ali's fourth production since she founded her independent theatre group in 1989. She called it Al-Missaharati after the title of a volume of poetry by Foad Haddad, to whom she is devoted. The word refers to the man who goes about the streets during the fasting month of Ramadan beating a drum to wake the sleepers to eat their sohour, the last meal before the dawn prayers announce the beginning of the fast till sunset. Haddad regarded himself as a kind of missaharati whose role was to wake people up in the human and political senses, and his poetry was his drum. Abeer Ali regards her art in a similar light and dreams of making theatre that can shake people out of their moral and existential lethargy. Her four productions so far have carried her a long way towards realising this dream.
