19 - 25 April 2001
Issue No.530
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 19 - 25 April 2001 Issue No.530 |
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Bright and brittle
Nehad Selaiha picks her way through the splinters of a star in Optical Illusion at Al-Hanager
That performers, however competent, personable, dedicated and even charismatic, can never hope to achieve fame, let alone make a living by the stage alone, is one of saddest and most depressing facts of our contemporary theatrical life in Egypt. Even when employed by the state-owned theatre companies (originally launched to guard actors against penury and unemployment), and supposing they manage somehow to make do with the measly stipend dispensed to them at the end of every month, actors can never be sure of regularly getting work, or ever having the chance to realise their full potential. The lucky ones make it in television, though usually in small, supporting roles -- mostly stock characters. The unlucky, or those who lack the knack for self-promotion, or are unwilling to compromise their art, end up at home, frustrated and despondent, and progressively lose shape and grow fatter as the seasons go by without a single order.
"Where are you my dear girl?" I exclaimed at Aida Fahmi as we warmly embraced in the foyer of Al-Hanager at the end of Optical Illusion where she played the lead. I had not seen her for years and had really missed her on stage. "At home, where else?" she answered laughing and I was glad to see once more that sunny, infectious smile of hers I so well remembered from the past. She had put on weight, but seemed to have lost none of her former youthful zest or joyous, irrepressible high spirits. "I am always there for the asking," she added, and I vaguely registered something forced in the gaiety -- a faint trace of bitterness, perhaps? A hint of disillusionment?
In the mid 1980's, Aida Fahmi seemed confidently set for a brilliant career in theatre. She was young, enormously attractive, with a chubby, baby face, small, twinkling eyes and a mischievous smile which disarmed everybody and endeared her to all; and, on stage, her striking presence, impressive figure, vocal range and technical skills (amply demonstrated in such varied parts as the bereaved, aged Maurya in J M Synge's Riders to the Sea; the gay, voluptuous Polly Peachum in Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, and the vengeful, embittered Electra in Euripides's eponymous play) led many to view her as the rightful successor and natural heiress apparent of the great 1960's National Theatre star (and Fahmi's professed model) Samiha Ayyoub.
Then the Itinerant Theatre Group (a branch of the Youth Theatre), of which Fahmi was a member, fell foul of the theatre administration, purportedly for financial and managerial reasons, but more likely, as one suspects, on account of its political outspokenness; it was summarily dismantled in 1987, only four years (the most fruitful in Fahmi's career) after it was founded. Since then, Fahmi's stage-appearances have been distressingly few and far between and at times she seemed to completely pale out of sight. I expected that, like many of her peers, she would drift into television. But somehow, and despite the ceaseless demand for new faces imposed by the torrential flow of TV soap operas, Fahmi rarely appears on the small screen. The reason, I guess, is that she belongs to that tribe of performers who, like opera singers, are intrinsically, intensely theatrical and larger-than-life, and can only come into their own on a stage, before a live audience; put them in a studio and they immediately wilt and droop.
Aida Fahmi and Mokhles El-Beheiri
I went to see Optical Illusion with no expectations except one -- to enjoy Fahmi's acting, and for that I was willing to forgive anything. As it turned out, there was little to forgive -- at least where Amir Salama's text and Amr Dawwarah's direction and choice of cast were concerned, Salama's play, though it involves six dramatis personae in a realistic, contemporary setting, is essentially a one-woman psychological drama set on the borderline between illusion and reality, fact and fantasy -- an arid mental desert haunted by phantoms and infested with mirages.
The set (by Fady Fukeih) represented a garish waiting-room in some famous psychiatrist's clinic. On a red plush sofa, a glamorous woman sits, obviously waiting, smoking a cigarette and leafing through a glossy magazine. When Zaher, the handsome and strangely refined clinic's attendant, ushers in a dishevelled, tense and harassed-looking, middle-aged bank clerk, called Hamdi, in the company of his sick, teenage daughter, Maggy, who at once recognises the woman as Magda Saleh, the famous film, stage and TV star, the drama begins. The star who acts neurotically, speaks disjointedly and aggressively flirts with the dazzled, dazed and drooling newcomer, fitfully confusing him with her ex-husband and father of her aborted child, who was also called Hamdi, turns out to be not a patient, but the psychiatrist's wife.
Through a series of poignant revelations and harrowing confrontations, punctuated with a rehearsal of a planned elopement with the attendant, two attempted seductions -- one real, the other, imaginary -- and two suicides (which dispose of both Hamdi and his daughter), we gradually discover that the woman at the centre of it all is no more than a "ghost", as her husband describes her, an empty shell, the mere husk of a person. Having bartered her real identity, her true love, marriage and motherhood for a plethora of screen images and stage characters, the bright star has become the victim of a chronic sense of guilt and spiritual emptiness. We see her in the last stages of her mental disintegration, just before she completely loses her grip on reality. Like a drowning person, she desperately reaches out for anything she can hold on to and this makes her dangerous -- like a voracious, treacherous vortex that engulfs and devours anyone who comes near her. She drives her first husband into loneliness and exile, her second to drink and unethical conduct with his patients, kills her unborn baby, and unwittingly destroys a family, causing the death of two innocent people.
In the hands of a less skilled craftsman, such stuff would have made the play a prime candidate for melodrama -- and corny, gory melodrama at that. What saves Optical Illusion is the subtle, intriguing suggestion that, perhaps, despite the realistic veneer, the characters we are seeing do not exist at all except in the mind of the star -- are only projections of her splintered psyche and deranged imagination, in other words, optical illusions. The suggestion is enforced by the end which links up with the opening scene, bracketing off what happens in-between, and tentatively consigning it to the realms of fantasy, memory and day-dreaming. The beginning shows the star waiting for her husband to finish attending to his patients; the end shows the couple still in the clinic, one hour later, preparing to go out to celebrate their wedding anniversary with other celebrities. But just as they are about to leave, the woman slumps lifelessly down in a chair and stares stonily into space. Whether anything really happened during that hour remains a teasing question.
As the pervasive, overriding, all-engrossing consciousness of the play, Aida Fahmi gave a virtuoso performance, displaying to the full her amazing emotional mobility and control of voice. Her startling change of mood and tonal shifts were uncanny; but every word and gesture had a faint hysterical edge and communicated an ominous sense of danger, of growing strain, of something about to snap. But to give her best, Fahmi needed good, experienced actors in the supporting roles and she was lucky that director Amr Dawwarah could rope in such fine talents as Mokhles El-Beheiri, in the part of the second husband, Mahmoud Mas'ood as the hapless bank clerk, and Ashraf Tulba as the clinic's attendant. They were a great asset to both Fahmi and the show as a whole; and though Karima El-Hifnawi and the young, sylph-like Nisreen made brief appearances in very small parts (as the bank clerk's wife and daughter), they were fully in tune with the rest of the cast. The only discordant note and source of irritation in the play was the salmon pink, pistachio and red velvet set. But with Aida Fahmi on stage at long last, and in such a rich, complex part, to complain of this would seem like ungracious carping and wilful, gratuitous nitpicking.
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