Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Poles apart

By Nehad Selaiha

Before the 1990s Polish theatre was virtually unknown in Egypt. Few had heard of Grotowski or read his classic, Towards a Poor Theatre (though it was translated into Arabic by Samir Sarhan in 1968, and included in his book New Experiments in Theatre), and fewer still knew anything about Kantor, Wajda or Szajna. No one seems to recall ever seeing, or having even heard of a Polish show in Egypt before 1991 when the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), in its third session, hosted the Scena Plastycana company of the Catholic University of Lublin, with its stunning and, for Egyptian audiences, thoroughly disorienting Humidity (or Moisture), devised and directed by Leszek Madzik.

The show, which unfolded as a series of dimly lit, creepy images, floating across what looked like a huge dark void, and evoking a hopelessly dehumanised world, more like a graveyard, infested with death and decay, gave fresh fuel to the already ongoing controversy over what constituted, or could be rated as theatre. It had started in 1988, during the first CIFET, and gained momentum the following year when two modern dance pieces -- Bulgaria's Don Juan and Eva-Maria Lerchenberg-Thony's West German Geschlossional Gesellshaft (based on Sartre's Huis Clos) -- carried the awards for best performance and best director respectively. The traditionalists had argued that dance theatre did not rank as proper theatre since it banished the word; they had not bargained for Humidity, which banished not only the word but the human performer altogether. Completely out of their depth, they dismissed it, for the sake of convenience, as belonging more to the realm of kinetic art. Nevertheless, they could not ignore the overwhelming impact the show had on Egyptian audiences, the refreshing sense of liberation it inspired in young Egyptian artists, or the critical drive to rethink the concept of theatre it created.

The arrival of Josef Szajna in 1992, as one of the festival's honorees and to take part in the central seminar on theory and practice in experimental theatre, together with a series of video-lectures on the work of Grotowski, Szajna and Kantor given by Krzysztof Domagalik, one of Grotowski's students, at the Cinema Institute during the festival, bolstered the new critical interest in Polish theatre and enhanced its growing popularity. From that time on, guest shows from Poland have become notorious for generating frantic excitement, inordinate expectations and unfailingly causing furious rioting at the venues where they play. Indeed, for many of the festival's regulars the prospect of watching a Polish show, however delightful, has increasingly become shadowed by a sense of dread and trepidation. There is always the inevitable long wait outside the doors, in closely packed lobbies, the suffocating stink of humid heat and sweat, the growing panic as rumour spreads that only a limited number will be admitted, or that all the seats have already been taken by VIPs smuggled through the stage door and, finally, the awful rush and crush as the restless crowd heave forward, like a mighty tidal wave, at the sight of the first crack in the doors. Usually, twice as many as the number allowed by the director manage to get in, but invariably many are left outside, and it is not uncommon to hear them shouting and cursing everything and everybody -- the festival, the theatre, the Poles, the security and the audience who got in. Some would even unreasonably demand, screaming at the top of their voices, that any show, Polish or otherwise, that insists on a small, intimate space should be banned from the festival.

photo: M Kopec

When I was invited to watch two visiting productions by the St. I. Witkiewicz Theatre (popularly called Witkacy Theatre) two weeks ago, I was overjoyed; I had already seen and admired their For You the Way, and Fin at the festival in 1997 and '98 successively. But instead of saying how delightful, or anything to that effect, I found myself impulsively asking: Where? Al-Salam, I was informed. Which hall? I hastened to ask; the main hall, I was assured. At once my sudden anxiety, of which I had not been conscious, drained away. Thank God it was autumn and not festival time. One could go early, I thought, leisurely sip coffee in the foyer, then saunter into the large, well-raked auditorium, pick a good seat, preferably in the first row after the aisle which marks the end of the top-priced seats (it gives the best view of the stage), sit down, relax, take in the stage design if one can and put oneself in a receptive mood.

Of course, with the benefit of two Vitkacy shows behind me, I should have known better. At the entrance of the theatre, and before I had one foot into the foyer, I was firmly and somewhat ominously guided in the direction of the stage door. My guide whispered it was better to go in now since seats were limited. "Are we going to sit on the stage again?" I bleated hopelessly; his yes was all too predictable. I went past the back-stage visitors room, then plunged into darkness, feeling my way gingerly and stumbling over a couple of steps.

When I finally emerged, I found myself inside a huge tent which must have taken up the whole of the stage and most of the back-stage area. It was all black and draped all round with old, charred and tattered curtains, also black, though faded to a dusty tone. It was dimly lit, suggesting a ghostly atmosphere. Looking around for a moment to get my bearings, I found myself wondering about the secret of the Poles' obsession with black and dim lighting, and whether it was the effect of the country's climate, history, religion, national temperament or collective worldview. I remembered bringing up the issue with Domagalik back in 1992 and how he had stridently denied any such obsession; I quickly reviewed all the Polish shows I had seen since, and found that with the exception of two -- the Centre of Theatrical Practices' Carmina Burana in 1996 (directed by Wkodzimierz Staniewski), and the Theatre-Cinema's Dong (devised and directed by Zbigniew Szumski), which opened this year's experimental festival last September -- all corroborated my and many other Egyptian viewers' impression.

Grey was also very much in evidence -- in the round, soft, feather mattress in the middle of the tent which constituted the whole of the performance space (quite a challenge that), in the matching silver-grey hard disc hanging over it (Caligula's much ranted about and passionately coveted moon, made visible), and in the long, grey cloaks the audience were made to wear at the door before stepping in. All round the tent, on rows of tiered benches, ending with grey cushions at floor level, the audience sat, like the anonymous Roman citizens at the old sports tournaments, wrestling matches or circus shows, forming a circular mass of grey enclosing the smaller grey circle in the middle. Four aisles connected the performance space with four doors in the wall of the tent, drawing, by dint of their positions, an imaginary, horizontal cross over the whole tent, with the point of intersection right at the centre of the inner circle. Though invisible, this cross seemed to dominate the whole space, constituting the focus of the total scenographic composition and the gravitational force orchestrating the actors' movement. The characters could only enter and exit along the pattern of the cross and the only place they could meet to work out the drama was round its centre, on the small, grey and empty circle, representing human existence. I tried hard to find if something in the design suggested another imaginary cross -- a vertical one -- that could connect the disc above and the circle below, or man and God and heaven and earth. Needless to say, I found none: neither Camus's play about the Roman emperor driven to mad destructiveness and nihilistic rage by his confrontation with death and the absurdity of human existence, nor the frequently noted persistent preoccupation of the Witkiewicz Theatre and its artistic director, Andrzej Dziuk, with the theme of metaphysical hunger (dominant in the work of the Polish dramatist to whom the theatre is dedicated and named), and the confrontation between an individual, longing for transcendental absolutes and god-like powers and a flat, anthropocentric world, devoid of all metaphysics, could allow for such a vertical cross to exist.

The world of the globe-like tent pitched on the stage of Al-Salam theatre was alternately violent, savagely cruel, grotesque and ridiculous. But it was not without moments of real pain and tragic loneliness. It was Caligula's world and also ours. For the space of two hours we were made a vital and active part of this world, and this was achieved not only by the many cross-references to our times (through the costumes, sections of Tomasz Stanko's score, and the presentation of Caligula's transvestite antics and his masquerading as Venus in the form of a cabaret number and a striptease act), but also by resorting to familiar meta-theatrical devices, such as lighting up the audience at certain points, making them the object of the actors' gaze and of each other's, addressing them directly, or persuading some of them to step forward and participate as actors in minor roles, as in the poetry contest scene.

Dziuk's original staging of Camus's text, his use of his theatre space as poetic metaphor, his stunning control of mood and atmosphere, and his clever management of movement and props to create mock-religious effects (as in the case of Caligula's bath-tub which suggests a mock-baptism, or the round table in the banquet scene which parodies the disc overhead, hinting at a mock-last-supper, or Caesonia's net-like trailing drapes, worn over a flimsy, pale, shiny dress, making her look like a trapped fish and ironically casting Caligula in the role of the Fisher King who saves souls by fishing them out of sin) -- these and many other inspired images and memorable details invested the play's essentially traditional form and familiar dialogue with new vitality, making it come across as a thrilling, totally engrossing experience. The actors, as in most of the Polish shows that have visited Egypt, were simply marvellous, combining passionate abandon and austere discipline, touching spontaneity and technical sophistication, deeply human one moment and bestial, subhuman or thoroughly diabolical the next.

The same actors treated us the following evening to a completely different style of theatre, delighting us with further proofs of their versatility and masterful command of theatrical language.

The show, Sanduq Al-Dunya (Chest of Miracles), was a bit of an oddity this time: a collage of many kinds of oriental theatrical traditions, plus extracts from two modern poetic dramas on religious themes (Salah Abdel-Sabour's Murder in Baghdad and Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi's Al-Hussein as Rebel), performed in Polish by actors completely alien to those traditions. This curious and daring venture was the brainchild of director Hanaa Abdel-Fattah and was prompted, as he confesses in his programme note, by the attempt to "find values which are common for both Arab and Polish theatre," and to rediscover one's own culture and revise one's "subjective attitude" to it by projecting it in a different context and viewing it through the eyes of the other. There was also the curiosity as to what the other would make of it. It was not surprising -- indeed, it was rather inevitable -- that Abdel-Fattah should undertake such a project and engage in an intimate cultural and artistic dialogue with Polish artists of kindred interests. He spent close on 20 years in Poland studying theatre and working as an actor and director with various companies; back in Egypt he and his Polish wife worked hard and ceaselessly, inside and outside the experimental festival, to introduce and popularise the Polish theatre in Egypt. Indeed, no one has done as much as this couple to promote cultural dialogue between Egyptian and Polish artists and provide the necessary groundwork and knowledge it badly needed. Domagalik's valuable video-lectures would have been impossible if Abdel-Fattah was not at hand to address the relevant bodies and make the necessary arrangements, provide simultaneous interpretation and volunteer many helpful footnotes and illuminating comments. Besides his many translations of Polish books and plays, he has written extensively on the major figures in the Polish theatre. If you ask him why he does it, or why so passionately, he will tell you that for him cultural dialogue is an existential need, a fact of life and a daily experience. It happens every moment with his family and is bound to continue for the rest of their lives.

But what did the Polish actors make of those bits and pieces -- of the shadow play about the cheating matchmaker, the tale from the Arabian Nights about the pot-seller whose daydreaming costs him his small capital, the scene from the Iranian traditional Ta'ziyeh (a cycle of ritual, religious dramas of condolences featuring the events leading to the murder of Al-Hussein, the prophet's grandson), the female fertility or male Sufi dances or the excerpts from the modern texts?

"The actors of Vitkacy Theatre," Abdel-Fattah writes, "were very eager to get to know another culture, to discover its symbols, signs and, above all, the overriding values." And in the process of doing this, they tried, with the director's help, to make themselves temporarily at home in this culture by assimilating what they could of it, reproducing it in slightly altered, artistically and culturally modified forms that reflected both cultures without belonging exclusively to either. And this is exactly what is interesting and moving in this show for an Egyptian audience. They find it at once intriguingly familiar and palpably foreign; and impressed by the actors' sincere efforts and art, they enter into the spirit of the game (of cultural dialogue) and do their best to support the actors and make it a success. They do so by word and gesture, lots of delighted laughter and enthusiastic applause. The pronunciation of Arabic words by the actors always occasions a lot of hilarity, but the laughter also communicates a grateful, supportive recognition of the effort to cross barriers and come closer.

At the end of the show the actors and audience seemed like old friends and the tent which enclosed them, together with the large black chest which contained all the actor's props and costumes, and the colourful make-shift stage-cum-shadow-theatre booth they had erected, became an expansive, shared, communal space, embracing and celebrating difference as a basic asset to human existence and one of its great joys and the starting point for real human communication.

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