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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 2 - 8 November 2000 Issue No. 506 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 2 - 8 November 2000 Issue No. 506
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Interview International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A spectral pageant
By Nehad Selaiha
Whether one likes or dislikes Samir El-Asfouri's work as director, one cannot but admit that throughout his long and active career in the theatre he has been anything but timid, run-of-mill, bland, or boring. Whatever the play -- be it modern or a classic, foreign or home-grown, an original text or an adaptation -- it invariably comes across carrying that distinct El-Asfouri flavour: a wistful longing for truth and decency, almost romantic in its touching tenderness, but stoutly laced, in varying measures, with dashes of caustic humour, acrimonious wit, or sardonic (and, recently, often recklessly nihilistic) cynicism. Even when working-away from the sanctuary of his beloved Al-Tali'a theatre (where he did his best work, and was artistic director from 1975 till 1994), and producing farces, vaudevilles or musical comedies for the commercial theatre, and however light, lavish or spectacular the production, he is often shocking or at least disturbing and almost always controversial. His latest production of Mikhail Roman's last play, Isis, Habibti, is no exception.
The play had a rough passage reaching the boards; it took several months to find a cast and when finally the rehearsals started, half of it melted away, giving lame excuses. Replacements had to be found and in the case of some parts the search continued until 10 days or less before the (more than twice delayed) opening date. The play was originally scheduled for the summer season and should have opened in July at the latest; but by the beginning of August, El-Asfouri was still running around, frantically screaming that he had not yet had one rehearsal with a complete cast. "No actor is willing to sacrifice even a stupid, small or insignificant part in a T.V. soap opera to work in the theatre," he bitterly told me one evening on the phone. "I don't blame them," he added with a hint of sarcasm; "the work is easier, the pay better, not to mention the publicity. They get seen by millions. How many people go to the theatre nowadays?" Coming from a man who has never done anything in life but theatre -- never working in radio, cinema or television -- this was painful to hear and I felt the full force of his desperation.
Isis finally opened late in August, played for one week, then closed down for the duration of the Experimental Theatre Festival. Those first few performances gave the impression of a hastily scrambled, half-cooked production. It rambled, stumbled and hiccuped for four painful hours, losing half the audience at the end of the first part and many of those who stayed halfway through the second. When the actors finally took their bows, it was to a nearly empty auditorium. The production was obviously far from ready and badly in need of honing. The critical reception was disastrous; what could El-Asfouri be thinking of throwing at us this half-baked thing, many wondered. But those who knew the tale of woe behind this star-crossed production guessed the reason. The man had nearly despaired of ever putting the play together or getting it to the stage so that as soon as he had a complete cast he decided to open to prevent any absconding and use the one-week run before the festival as time for dress-rehearsals and for trimming, streamlining and polishing the show.
The Isis which opened in late September was a vastly improved version: lucid, compact and fast-paced, with vivid and powerful performances in all the leading parts and many of the minor ones. Unfortunately, however, because of the many unfavourable reviews which greeted the first opening, the play had acquired a bad reputation; and since the critics who had condemned it on the strength of the first viewing never came again, the reputation stuck.
When I watched the play a second time, it suddenly struck me that El-Asfouri's enormous body of work-- over 50 productions before Isis, Habibti -- had only included one of Roman's 15 or so known texts, and thought how ironical it was that when he finally decided to do another he found himself pursued by the same ill-luck which had dogged Roman's relation with the stage throughout his life. Indeed, of all the known playwrights of the sixties -- the so-called architects of modern Egyptian drama -- Roman, the most rebellious of them all, was the most unfortunate when it came to staging his plays; many of them were suppressed by the censor, surviving only as manuscripts, or banned during rehearsals or after the first performance; and the few that were performed in his life time (save, perhaps, The Night Guevara Was Killed, directed for the National by Karam Mutawei' in 1969), were either misunderstood, unfairly attacked, or lukewarmly received. His dramatic debut, Smoke, directed by Kamal Yasin and premiered at the National Theatre in 1962, was savagely torn to pieces by the redoubtable Lewis Awad who denied it the status of a play, scornfully dismissing it as "that thing called Al-Dukhan." His next play, The Siege, staged by Galal El-Sharqawi at El-Hakim (later Mohamed Farid) Theatre in 1965, had a short run and was never revived. El-Ardahalgi (The Logographer or Petition Writer), directed by Abdel-Rehim El-Zurqani in 1967, caught the angry mood of the times and fared better with the critics; and Hollywood El-Balad, a satire on the artistic scene in Egypt, using the Faust legend, was modestly successful when staged by El-Asfouri at El-Hakim Theatre in 1972. It was the last production of a play of his Roman watched, and one hopes he got some pleasure out of it since he was cruelly destined by wanton fate to miss an imminent and far more thrilling drama on the stage of life. Roman died on 3 October, 1973, only three days before the October War, the almost miraculous crossing of the Suez Canal and the storming of the invincible Barlev line. He had lived till the end with the bitter taste of the 1967 defeat, burning with shame and anger, and his death went almost unnoticed amidst the general jubilation.
Isis, My Beloved was Roman's last play, his swan song, and it is sad to think that he wrote it with no hope of sharing it with the public either in print or as a live performance. Reverting to the realistic mode of his early masterpiece, Smoke, he managed to avoid the irritating excesses and baffling ambiguities which marred some of his more experimental pieces and made others inaccessible to the general public. The writing remains as passionate as ever; but instead of the usual long monologues and fiery tirades, we have a lively, cunning dialogue which camouflages the growing sense of menace, the gnawing terror, the premonition of disaster, the gruesome brutality of the action and the final tragic fate of all the protagonists with a thin coat of mocking humour, light bantering, witty understatements and verbal horseplay. It is as if Roman wanted this final defence of freedom and democracy, and denunciation of dictatorship, its reign of terror and police state, to be as lucid, vivid and convincing as possible. This is perhaps why he labeled the play "a comedy in three acts", hoping that comedy would distance him somewhat from his characters, set them free from the dominance of his authorial voice and allow them to speak directly to the audience without his shadow coming in between.
Khaled El-Sawi as Ali, the chief of intelligence gone mad
Like many of Roman's plays, Isis, Habibti remained neglected for a long time. It was not published until 1986, in a limited edition, with an introduction by the eminent critic Farouk Abdel-Qadir. It was later included, with other unknown plays by Roman, in his Collected Plays, published in six volumes by the State Publishing House (GEBO). Why El-Asfouri should have suddenly decided to stage it in the year 2000 is any one's guess. Mine is that, apart from wanting to pay homage to Roman or do justice to an important dramatist unjustly treated in his life and unfairly ignored after his death, El-Asfouri perceptively realised that the play was as relevant today as it was the time it was written. The margin of freedom we enjoy at present should be jealously guarded and diligently expanded; and the only way to do this is to keep the frightful memories of the not so distant past green; never to forget the bugging, the sinister dawn-callers, the mysterious disappearances, the horrible tales of torture, the petrifying fear and crippling suspicion of everything and everyone, even one's own family, and the debilitation, morally corrupting and soul-consuming terror of living in a police state. After all, don't we still have emergency laws?
To drive the lesson home, El-Asfouri cast the play in an openly didactic, epic form, on the Brechtian model, dividing the text into short, quick scenes (which entailed some cutting and transposing of the original material); providing a narrator-commentator, a chorus, some sarcastic songs and dances, slide projections demonstrating the fabrication of damning evidence against the innocent (but for the crime of outspokenness), hero, Hamdi, and video footage of Nasser's funeral as well as of the fictional lives and activities of the leading characters by way of introduction or explanation. Some of the supporting characters were updated, amalgamated or removed and replaced with new ones like Miss X, the assistant of the head of the Intelligence apparatus, beautifully caricatured by the seductive Noha El-Asfouri.
But whatever changes El-Asfouri made, and they are many, he carefully preserved and sharply focused the central dual conflict -- between Ali, the head of Intelligence, and the dancer Farida, his mistress by force, and her invisible husband on the one hand, and between the self-same brutal Ali and the young married couple, Hamdi and Gamalat, whose life he eventually destroys, on the other. He also kept the story of the Greek orator, Demonsthenes (the ardent advocate of democracy who commits suicide when defeated), which Roman used as a parable, but removed it from its original place in the text, framed it in a scene all by itself, foregrounding it and giving it more prominence.
Na'ima Agami's set and costumes were simple and functional, paying little attention to aesthetic considerations. The same goes for Samir Zein's score, which had the added virtue of being less obtrusive, quicker to forget and easier to ignore. The real strength of the show, in its second, revised, and much curtailed version, lay in the directorial conception and actual composition, the careful balancing of the two sides of the conflict and subtle orchestration of the movement between them, and, surprisingly, in the acting. The cast El-Asfouri was finally landed with may not have been the one he originally visualised; nevertheless, he managed to get out of them the best they could and some of them, particularly Khaled El-Sawi, as Ali, and Fathi Abdel-Wahab, as Hamdi, gave powerful, psychologically accurate and profoundly sensitive performances. However painful the process of bringing this production to life, or untoward the circumstances that surrounded its birth, I hope El-Asfouri will not be discouraged and will continue to produce theatre. More than anything, I'd hate this production to be, like Roman's play, another swan song.
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