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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 October 2000 Issue No. 502 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 October 2000 Issue No. 502
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Elections Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Egyptian culture online
By Nehad SelaihaHyped as a play on the last days of King Farouk in Italy (he died in Rome in 1965 at the pathetically premature age of 45, 13 years after he was forced to abdicate his throne and go into exile by the 1952 revolution), The Last Whisper -- scripted and directed for the National by Hani Mutaweh -- turned out to be an intricate theatrical prank, a highly contrived imaginative hoax which sticks up two fingers at audience expectations and unabashedly, indeed, quite gleefully, sports the (in this part of the world) much frowned upon post-modernist slogan that history (with biography subsumed under this rubric) is simply a narrative, a fictional construction with no better claim to truth than a novel. Mutaweh's devastating Pirandellian skepticism about the possibility of knowing the truth, or even obtaining a clear and accurate factual account about anything or anyone blows like a hurricane through this show, almost splitting it asunder, scattering and sweeping before it the very last shreds of any belief in historical veracity. Sunk beyond any hope of retrievability are all the old cherished rational dams between legend and fact, history and rumour, life and art.
Farouk is there all right... in a way (and a very queer way it is), and so is Italy, or rather Rome, as a setting. But in this hazy, chimerical no-man's-land, nothing is quite as it seems. Tall and elegant film star Hisham Abdel-Hamid (the last person anyone would cast as Farouk) is grotesquely padded and made up to look faintly like the cartoon image of the fallen king, popularised by the press as a symbol of depravity, debauchery and corruption. But the fabricated image deliberately leaves a wide margin for disbelief -- enough to accommodate the dozen other characters, factual and fictional, whom Abdel-Hamid masterfully evokes by sudden and startling shifts of tone, voice, and physical demeanour, and superimposes on Farouk. These characters, who include Zaki Rustum (as we know him in old movies), Youssef Wahbi (in his famous declamatory melodramas), Othello and Hamlet, among others, are craftily linked to some of the dubiously known facts about Farouk's life, particularly his relations with women, and are manipulated to suggest a subtle link between the many shifting masks of Abdel-Hamid, making his grotesquely theatrical multiple figuration of Farouk a comprehensive symbol for many states of being.
To further frustrate and obfuscate the audience who came expecting to see Farouk satirised, romanticised or convincingly analysed in pseudo-objective dramatic terms, Hani Mutaweh eschewed all traditional dramatic forms, and any pretense to realism, opting for a highly fantasised version of the familiar picaresque novel. But Farouk here is no ordinary picaroon, though in the course of the play he nicks a watch, money, a gold pendant and fires a number of shots at imaginary spies and assassins. In his flight, he constantly finds himself inadvertently crossing over into fictional worlds, wandering through and partaking in famous scenes from old popular movies, TV soap operas, and well-known plays. For company, he is given El-Masri Effendi -- the cartoon figure devised and popularised by Saroukhan for Akhbar El-Yom during Farouk's reign (deliciously brought to life by Sami Abdel-Hamid), and Kishkish Bey, the omdah (mayor) of Kafr Al-Ballas -- a theatrical character created and popularised by Naguib El-Rihani in the twenties. It was dizzying to watch the lavishly talented Mokhles El-Beheiri impersonating at the beginning an ex-omdah in 1965, then gradually looking every inch like Naguib El-Rihani impersonating his omdah of the 1920's. I wondered afterwards if this magnificent actor would be able to peel off his triple mask and find his way safely home.
Hisham Abdel-Hamid
As this delightful trio, like three lackadaisical musketeers, skip and cavort, and often whizz, through this thick, bristling forest of references and cross-references, heedless of the fast-changing elaborate sets, the painted flats descending from the flies or props pushed from the wings, one experiences a dangerous sense of chaos, a painfully disconcerting awareness of the utter fragility and basic theatricality of that flimsy, artificial construct we call reality. The surreal crescendo reaches its climax when finally the trio find themselves in a cardboard Italian villa where a film about the life of King Farouk is being shot. Here, we meet Queen Farida, Queen Nazli and other members of the court and royal family, with the late famous comedian, Ismail Yassin, acting as chorus and master of ceremonies. When Farouk, who enters the villa under cover, disguised as a peasant woman with a big wicker basket on his head, is asked to play the star role and impersonate himself, and as the short, quick takes flash before our eyes, like memory-pricking needles, hinting at the crucial psychological events and watersheds in King Farouk's life (as far as the layman knows them), we feel as if we are about to be tipped (three hours after the play started) into a turbulent, psychological drama. But in the nick of time, and just as picaroon-Farouk with his many theatrical masks seems about to fade away and dissolve into this new drama, a newspaper vendor arrives shouting 'Farouk morto'. Kishkish Bey, himself a theatrical fabrication, begins to wonder if the other highly theatrical fabrication he has all along taken for King Farouk is not an impostor, impersonating the real (by this time the word means nothing) king. Hisham Abdel-Hamid roundly denies the press reports of Farouk's death, and the play, which has resuscitated Egyptian-Jewish actress, Camelia (or Lillian), after her death in a plane crash, tantalisingly withholds comment, leaving the audience to work out this teasing conundrum.
The impulse behind this fantastically mad, technically magnificent theatrical enterprise called The Last Whisper (in a clear nostalgic/sarcastic allusion to Farid El-Atrash's vastly popular, perennial song, The First Whisper), is shatteringly anarchic and poignantly nihilistic. The general impact, however, is perilously exhilarating, as if one is cunningly led to gaze on the dread of freedom. Strangely, however, it is completely free of even the slightest trace of hard-hearted cynicism. Neither a tragedy, a lyrical elegy, a satirical skit or a comic romp (and, definitely, thanks to its constant semiotic prevarication, not a political propaganda sheet), The Last Whisper is thoroughly non-committal and wholeheartedly egalitarian, sinking all distinctions between the myriad images, thoughts and sensations we are fed by popular culture, giving them equal, ambiguous status, and warning us all along that making sense is ultimately a question of ideology.
A "son of the revolution" who would not have been educated without it but who, like most of his (and my) generation had to pay for it by digesting the mind-boggling experience of watching history reborn and rewritten over and over, and having his memories as a school kid and adolescent constantly wiped out, like the classroom black-board, and then inscribed with contrary information, and denied the right to question or protest, Mutaweh inevitably faced the shattering discovery that, rather than Sisyphus bearing his burden up and down the mountain if only to prove the undefeatable toughness of the human spirit (an infinitely comforting and morale-raising myth in the sixties), he had been all along labouring under the weight of a soap bubble.
Since 1967 Mutaweh has taken every opportunity to voluntarily exile himself, spending years in the US then in the Gulf. The few years he spent here were arid and hopelessly barren. It was only in exile that he could begin to sort out his kaleidoscopic conglomeration of splintered images and piece them together in thoroughly subjective works -- subtle autobiographies of consciousness if you like -- beginning with Lone Traveller a few years ago (also at the National and reviewed on this page), and now with The Last Whisper. Lone Traveller also took its title from a famous popular song -- Abdel-Wahab's Ya Misafer Wahdak -- and, using the framework of the old English morality play Everyman, launched a deeply anguished investigation into the meaning of life and death. What remains for a person at the end of the day was the irking question. In The Last Whisper, life is left behind and we are plunged into a world beyond life and death. The question here is what remains of a person after the fall of night.
Old movies broadcast on TV after the 1952 revolution had to undergo a purgation operation; any allusions to Farouk or his Alaweya family were excised, and in any scene where the picture of the deposed king appeared you were sure to find a mysterious black blotch flickering somewhere in a vulgar bid to blur and obliterate history. For us, as children, those awful black blotches were fearfully forbidding traffic signals blocking all thoughts and questions. Farouk had been erected as a bogey and we felt that if we ever dared peep behind the blotch he would jump at our throats.
Now the blotch has gone but the scar on the imagination remains. Was it in such a scar that The Last Whisper found its imaginative root?
