Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

	Egypt Palestine International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters

Confessions and confrontations

By Nehad Selaiha

It is always a mistake to arrive late at a show, however slightly, or leave before the final curtain, or the now more fashionable black out. But if you do, you would be well advised, especially if you happen to be a critic, to keep your trap firmly shut and resist any temptation to air your views on what you have seen however much you are provoked to the contrary. I pride myself on being always on time and on having managed over the years to build up the necessary stamina for tolerating the intolerable and stoically sitting through the endless, incredibly insipid ramblings of the deadliest of deadly boring shows. My friends detect a hidden masochistic streak in this, but I call it professionalism. Another reason is that on the rare occasions when I arrived late or when my power of endurance let me down and gave way somewhere before the official end, when it seemed to me that the show had already fizzled out halfway through and I sneaked out, I always ended up feeling guilty. You think no one will notice, but they do; and if you meet a member of the cast or crew afterwards, as is bound to happen, you will invariably be told: "Pity you came late, or left before the end. You missed the crucial scene that makes sense of everything." It makes you feel sheepish, as if you have been caught playing truant. The first time this happened, I was fool enough to believe it and rushed back to gaze on the loathsome piece once more, hoping to experience that magical glow of enlightenment which the last bit would, reportedly, shed. Needless to say, I went away feeling I had sprouted two long ears and a tail. Ever since I make a point of arriving early, even though Egyptian shows never start on time, and leaving last. More often than not this entails a minimum of half an hour's wait and many cups of nauseating turbid liquid masquerading as Turkish coffee and bought at highly exaggerated prices; but everything is better than being taunted with having missed the magical key to the whole thing or, worse still, having to undergo the torture of watching the thing again.

Last week, for the first time in years, I was late for a show. I set out in good time, but when I finally arrived at the French Cultural Centre in Mounira, after a particularly nasty battle with the raucous Cairo traffic, the first part of Effat Yehia's double bill, Les Rythmes de la Memoire and Le Tobogan, had started. I was deeply vexed; not because I would have to come again (I always do that anyway in the case of Yehia's work and see her productions more than once for the sheer pleasure of the experience), but like someone who had been looking forward to a special meal and starved herself in anticipation, then arrived late for the first course.

I tiptoed into the darkened theatre and was invisibly guided to a seat facing a shiny white catwalk which stretched from the stage to the middle of the auditorium. I made out a shadowy female figure, wrapped in trailing gauze, rolling and writhing on it to the tunes of a live band ensconced below the stage and hardly visible except for the singer Sayed Shafiq, who was placed above them on the stage and spotlighted. Strumming his lute, he sang Nida' Abu Murad's famous song, Al-Atmatu Hawli Tashtadu (The Darkness is Deepening around Me). The stage itself, suffused in ethereal violet light, presented a curious and intriguing sight. Against a bare stone wall a man, his face painted white and dressed in a tent-like white gown the edges of which were fastened to the floor in a circle, his right hand attached to a mysterious black rope stretching down from the flies, sat on the floor facing a woman dressed in a primitive wrap-over gown, her face similarly painted white and her hair tied to a number of similar ropes. Between them, at the back, was a lamp in the shape of a globe, a few low steps and a few candles, and in front was a big gift box tied with ribbons.

The set, the white-paint masks, the costumes, the minimalist movement, the sitting position the two characters maintained for the most part, the orange, pink, blue and violet lighting-plan vaguely smacked of traditional Japanese theatre. The dialogue, however, seemed quite out of place in this visual context and, indeed, at odds with it. The man and woman talked of desire, sexual attraction, prostitution, pimps, seduction, rotten memories, what is legitimate and what is not, arrogance and humility, affection and violence as well as of sunrise and sunset, dawn and darkness. But whatever the subject, the general mode of the verbal exchange, though disconnected and irritatingly inconsequential, was one of a business transaction between a dealer and a client. I dimly guessed the situation; an inverted version of the one Sinatra immortalised in Strangers in the Night -- only these strangers were a bit odd; quite loquacious and thoroughly abstruse. I could hear and understand every word, but could not make sense of the drift of the ongoing argument or guess where it was leading. I kept feeling there was something wrong, or something missing; and when at the end the woman stood up, ripped off her skirt and threw it down (telling the man that rather than pick up his jacket which she had thrown in the dust when he offered it to her, to mollify her she would assign her skirt to the same fate), then walked off proudly into the auditorium in her knickers, I gaped in utter bafflement, feeling a complete dunce.

Nehad Abul-Enein in The Slide

I met Effat outside the door and asked her the name of the play I had just seen, and she said it was B M Koltes's La solitude dans les champs de coton which she had translated into Arabic from an English translation, had her translation revised against the French original by Yves Glass, then adapted it and rechristened her version Iqa'at min Al-Dhakira (Memory of Rhythms). I had feared she would ask me what I thought, and she did. Crushed and mortified by my obtuseness, I stammered that I thought it was "interesting" but would have to see it again since I had arrived late. "Of course," she said; "that business with the jacket at the beginning is very important. It explains a lot of things." Ah! So that was it; there was a missing link after all and I had missed it because of the traffic.

The next day I was there half an hour before Iqa'at was due to start and was the first into the auditorium, looking forward to that business with the jacket which would clarify everything. I soon discovered I had already seen it the previous day. I had only missed the sight of Mirette Michel slithering down a row of seats from the back of the auditorium to the edge of the catwalk, and that took no more than three minutes. Watching the business with the jacket and the whole play a second time did not improve matters, and I walked out at the end as baffled as ever. If I did not know Effat and respect her work I would have dismissed the whole thing as an elaborate, puerile prank, or a pretentious, titillating stunt. But knowing her, I felt there was a mystery somewhere and decided to pursue it.

I asked her for the text; she only had it in Christopher Rathbone's English translation which was issued free to audience members when the play was performed at the Edinburgh Festival a few years ago. The copy she gave me was a shoddy, mangled typescript, quite illegible in parts and with the first few pages and many words and whole sentences missing. Nevertheless, it did the trick and dispelled the mystery. It was clear at once where Effat had gone wrong and why her version seemed so strained, artificial, opaque and muddled. Koltes's play is not about a man and a woman or the intricate mechanisms of desire, attraction, rejection and repulsion in the context of heterosexual relationships. It features two men, both homosexuals, but sharply differentiated in terms of race, colour, wealth, social class, mode of life and system of values. One is a pauper, a hooker, a mugger, a potential rapist and black. ("But what darkness could be thick enough to make you appear any less black than itself?" the client tells him in Rathbone's translation.) He skulks in the dark; inhabits the murky, lower depths with the "rubbish that's been chucked from windows"; he has not "come down from anywhere," does not "intend on going up," and steers "clear of the lifts the way a dog avoids water." The other is a respectable, upright, middle-class, law-abiding pillar of society who only moves "along the straightest of lines," does not "take a single step that wasn't sanctioned, authorised and legal, awash with electric light even in the slenderest nooks," and firmly believes that "there is neither peace nor law in the elements of Nature," that "all natural light and all unfiltered air and the unadjusted temperatures of the seasons make the world hazardous." Nevertheless, he is as much of a whore as his opposite, as he admits; "but if I am," he says, "my brothel... spreads out its goods under the light of the law, and shuts its doors in the evening, being registered according to law and lit by electric light."

The chance meeting is soon revealed as inevitable since, according to the client, "there is no way anyone going from one height to another can avoid coming down, for having to go back up later on, in this fashion creating the absurd situation of two self-eliminating movements... and the moment the lift drops you off at ground level it condemns you to tramp through everything you wanted to get away from up there, through a heap of rotten memories." What begins as a simple situation of sexual solicitation rapidly develops psychological, social and even metaphysical connotations and is poetically metamorphosed into a ritualistic battle, a kind of dance of death which ends with blood "flowing on both sides." And though this blood unites the two men "like a couple of Indians next to the fire who exchange their blood surrounded by wild animals," as the client says at the end, it does not bring about the reconciliation of opposites. Rather, it yields a horrendous irony: the dealer can neither love, dominate, conquer or kill the client because he's already dead or, in the client's words, "because first of all a man dies, then seeks his death, and finally chances upon it on the risky path foam one light to another light, and says: so that's all it was."

In Egyptian slang, what Effat kept of the dialogue sounds convoluted and rings false, and the stylised set, faintly suggestive of the inside of a Buddhist monk's cell, fails to inject it with poetry or give it a philosophical, quasi-religious aura as, I think, she intended. The setting in the original play is more powerful and dramatic. The English copy I have gives no stage directions, but the title and the dialogue vividly suggest a dark, festering void, with the lights of civilisation glimmering in the distance, or a rubbish dump at the edge of a cotton field with a heavy, humid heat thick with the stink of blood and rottenness.

"Why change the basic situation and with it the whole drift and mood of the play?" I asked Effat, and her answer -- that the relationships of men and women were more relevant to Egyptian audiences than relationships between homosexuals -- did not convince me. Was it that tiny little censor inside most of us who curbed her style and made her compromise the text?

The second part of the evening, however, was sheer delight and more than made up for the disappointment of the first. Effat was here on safe grounds. With a perfectly respectable (though over-worked) middle-class wife and mother for a heroine, and no tramps, hookers or homosexuals loitering anywhere, the little censor could happily go to sleep. Yehya was really in her element here, and quite at home with Claire Flohr's Veronique, la vie commence a 5h.30 (an adaptation of Armand Gatti's La Journée d'une infermiére, ou pourquoi les animaux domestiques), translated into Arabic by Menha El-Batrawi and adapted, or rather Egyptianised, by Yehya and retitled Al-Zohleqa (The Slide or Le Tobogan according to the programme). The play is basically one long self-revealing monologue, delivered by a woman while she washes the floor. Alternately addressed at the audience and a close friend on the phone, it draws a vivid, humourous picture of the daily routine of this woman's life as a school teacher, wife and mother of two children. Yehya's adaptation stays close to Flohr's Veronique, with very few minor alterations; and the fact that the daily life of a French, middle-class working mother does not differ significantly from that of her Egyptian counterpart, indeed is almost identical with it, serves as a strong reminder of the sisterhood of women across the barriers of race, nationality and cultural differences. The monologue unfolds in an empty room, with bare, white walls, very hygienic-looking, almost like a hospital, and by way of an overture, the heroine, in a white baggy nightgown hitched round her waist (a mockery of the wedding dress?), empties a bucketful of water on the stage, splashing it everywhere, kneels and starts scrubbing with a vengeance. In this wet, bedraggled state she tells her story, one that most women are familiar with, often enacting what she describes. The effect is at once hilarious and painfully moving. In the harassed look on Nehad Abul-Enein's face as she flattered or pleaded with the headmistress, wrangled with fellow teachers, or counted the minutes to the last lesson of the day; in her tense, strained voice as she barked at the pupils in the music class; in her haggard figure, shambling walk and pathetic shabbiness, I recognised many an old school teacher and remembered with a pang how ruthless we were as kids.

One does not get to see Nehad Abul-Enein on stage often. Though talented, conscientious and sensitive to mood and tone, she is seldom offered good parts; and it was really a pleasure to see her at last, and thanks to Yehya, with a part she could get her teeth into. Indeed, among the many assets of Yehya as director is her knack for picking the right actors and bringing out the best in them. Notwithstanding my problem with her adaptation of the first play of the evening I thoroughly enjoyed the performances of Hamada Shousha and Shahira Kamel as the man and woman. Though what they said did not make much sense or add up to anything, their powerful presence and polished acting enthralled the audience. In the second play, they further displayed their virtuosity, providing all the sound effects, including street noise, parodies of songs and a variety of television programmes whenever the woman switched on her imaginary set. I saw The Slide twice, and would watch it a third and fourth time -- not to look for clues or missing links, thank God -- but for its sympathetic humour, warm-hearted tolerance, spirit of camaraderie and, above all, for the sheer fun of it.

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg