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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 24 - 30 August 2000 Issue No. 496
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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 Tempting the ghosts
By Nehad SelaihaEvery time I go to Emadeddin street it is an emotionally charged experience -- a tingling mixture of affection, nostalgia, despondency and deep resentment. Its graceful old buildings are reminders of its once elegant past when it was the hub of theatrical activity in Cairo. At present it has a tawdry, shabby look, and of its many theatres only one remains: El-Rihani theatre.
A visit to this old playhouse, however, whatever the quality of the play on show, is enough to reconcile you to the street. It is a treat in itself; the small ornate auditorium with its gilded statues, red velvet chairs and musty smell has an old world charm -- a kind of irresistible shabby-genteel appeal. Though it carries El-Rihani's name, it is not the original El-Rihani theatre. That has another story. Back from a tour in Brazil in 1925, El-Rihani could not find a suitable theatre to rent and so took the lease of an unused hall in the Radiom cafe, next to Ramses Theatre on Emadeddin street, and converted it to a small, exquisitely decorated playhouse in the style of the small Parisian theatres. It opened in November 1926, and El-Rihani and his company continued there until the summer of 1931 when a misunderstanding led Adah, the owner of the building, to terminate the lease. Adah made the theatre into a refreshment room for the British troops and eventually it was pulled down to make room for an apartment building.
The present theatre, which has carried El-Rihani's name since 1952, was originally a cinema called Radio. When Youssef Wahbi founded his Ramses company in 1922, he took it over and converted it into a relatively small but elegant and well-equipped theatre, paying the owner of the building -- the self-same Adah -- an annual rent of LE1,200. It opened on 10 March, 1923 with The Madam, starring Youssef Wahbi and directed by the first Egyptian theatre director (in the European sense of the word), Aziz Eid, and continued to thrive, housing more than 150 productions -- nearly two thirds of the company's total output. In 1934, however, Wahbi (who had invested all his money in an entertainment park which failed to pay off) went bankrupt and could not pay the exorbitant rent. El-Rihani stepped in, rented the theatre and rechristened it the Ritz. It continued under that name until 1952 when the government decided to name it after El-Rihani (three years after his death) in commemoration of his great work and talent. His company continued to perform there during the winter seasons until the late seventies. When it finally stopped, it could boast more than 50 productions.
Sitting in this theatre last week, I kept imagining all the great actors who had graced its boards -- Youssef Wahbi, Naguib El-Rihani, Amina Rizq, Fatma Rushdi, Mary Munib, to mention but a few. I was glad the theatre, which had been out of action for quite some time, was back to work at last and hosting a play worthy of its name and history, written, directed and performed by artists of comparable stature to the old pioneers. The play was Lenin El-Ramli's E'qal ya Doctor (Wizen Up, Doctor), a briskly-paced, intriguing affair, steering a middle course between a reflective morality play with somewhat psychological pretensions and a romping, roaring burlesque of old movie weepies. Though billed as a comedy it curiously, and quite disconcertingly for the audience, ends on a tragic note. But then El-Ramli invariably cares more for the integrity of his work than for audience expectations.
The setting is a mental hospital run by a scatty psychiatrist (Farouq El-Fishawi), with an unscrupulous, sycophantic, self-seeking assistant (Ahmed Rateb), and a group of weirdos for patients. Gradually we discover that the doctor of the title suffers from nightmares triggered by a repressed guilt complex. When a seemingly mentally-disordered young woman (Abla Kamel) turns up at the hospital, he identifies her as the woman who haunts his dreams and is forced to recognise his sense of guilt, admit the real cause of it and face up to his past. Taking the new patient to be the younger sister of the nurse whom he loved and seduced as a medical student, then deserted after qualifying to marry into money and social power, he believes that the cause of her ailment has to do with the fate of her deserted sister. To cure both himself and her and find out what happened to the nurse after he left her, he resorts to psychodrama as a method of psychotherapy.
In Lenin El-Ramli's most recent offering, there is zest, concentrated power and intimate rapport with the audience
When Vienna-born psychiatrist J L Moreno was developing his psychodramatic techniques at the Theatre of Spontaneity he founded in that city in 1917, and later at his Moreno Sanitarium in Beacon, New York, where he built the first psychodramatic stage in 1936, he little thought he was providing dramatists with a sure formula for comedy and farcical parody. In his theatrical psychodrama, projected as a play within a play, El-Ramli exploits many of Moreno's techniques (themselves derived from drama) including role-playing, role-reversal and the use of other patients as auxiliary egos to represent absent or imagined characters. (Here they go a step further to represent imaginary settings like Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" in A Midsummer-Night's Dream). The revelations this hilarious psychodrama yields take the form of a melodrama transposed from the movie to the stage in a parodic vein and in comic strip form. The story of the fallen woman, deserted by her lover after losing her honour (read virginity), ostcracised by her family and society, and forced to put her illegitimate baby in an orphanage and earn her living dancing in sleazy joints and selling her body, is more than familiar to Egyptian audiences from movies and old stage melodramas. It is for this very reason, perhaps, its sheer staleness, that El-Ramli found it attractive. He has a marvellous knack for breathing new life in to dead clichés, and injecting novelty in stock situations and old stereotypes.
The hackneyed clichés of the fallen woman and nutty psychiatrist are here reworked for laughs, quite plausibly, within the framework of a psychodrama which involves amateurs -- mental patients and a hysterical doctor. Declamation, exaggeration, over-acting, stock gestures and mannerisms look natural and unforced in such a context. El-Ramli, however, is not just out for laughs. He uses the innocent-victim-cliché, as enacted by the young woman, as a springboard for reflections on the meaning of sanity and madness, illusion and reality, of the kind we often come across in Shakespeare. Indeed, at the end, the barriers between illusion and reality become so blurred and confused, not just for the doctor but also for the audience, that we leave the theatre not knowing whether the young woman was a real person or just a figment of the doctor's imagination -- an optical and acoustic hallucination set off by his guilt complex. But whether real or imaginary, the young woman has a clear symbolic value as the embodiment of truth, purity, innocence and goodness -- everything the doctor yearns for and has to forsake in the name of sanity, worldly wisdom and common sense. The tragic note at the end casts a sombre shadow over the whole play, and makes it seem in retrospect a cynical morality play.
The cast, which sported three superstars -- Abla Kamel, Farouq El-Fishawi and Ahmed Rateb, some familiar TV faces and a group of fresh budding talents as the patients, acted with zest and concentrated power, establishing intimate rapport with the audience at every step. Mustafa Imam's simple, functional set was adequate without any stroke of scenic imagination. It had the virtue of being uncluttered, leaving the stage free for director Isam El-Sayed's intelligent deployment of his actors and his witty use of the chorus of patients as props. Imad El-Rashidi's music, played live on a synthesiser tucked in a corner at the back of the stage, with the player dressed the same as the inmates, underlined the text's many shifts of tone and mood, ironically undercutting some scenes and emotionally enhancing others. In almost every respect, E'qal ya Doctor is a play that Naguib El-Rihani would have enjoyed, admired and generously applauded.
