7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Anecdotes and vignettes
Nehad Selaiha travels to Mahrous Village to fall in love with a vanished place and its people
As I stepped into the small (Salah Abdel-Sabour) hall of Al Tali'a theatre I experienced a vivid feeling of having been transported in time and space. The inside of the hall had been carefully dressed to evoke the interior and atmosphere traditionally associated with old rural or provincial cafes where storytellers and Sira singers were once a permanent feature. The transformation was impressively thorough, extending even to the cunningly camouflaged lighting cabin. The two walls framing the audience seats and benches were coated with a thin wash of pale blue paint, with a decorative crisscross frieze in dark blue running round them in the middle, and were hung with wickerwork baskets and earthenware water jugs; the windows, real or imaginary, were covered with straw mats or latticework, and the wooden floor with coarse woollen rugs. The storyteller's capacious seat, dominating the centre of the performance space facing us, was of rough unpainted wood and spread with a plaited patchwork rug. Beside it, on the floor, was a water jug and a wicker tray holding a reed flute and a large checked handkerchief for the singer to mop up his sweat. The space behind him, occupied by a chorus of six singers (half male and half female), lead by a versatile soloist (Hala El-Sabbagh) and six musicians (violin, flute, accordion, duff, riqq, and percussion), and lead by composer Imad El-Rashidi on the lute, had the look of an open courtyard, with a rough stone wall at the back and a trellised canopy on top, piled high with palm leaves supported on thick tree branches. One could also glimpse a bit of embroidered, gaily coloured tentcloth in a corner at the back, suggesting an invisible extension of the space in the form of a traditional marquee. Were it not for the notable absence of the usual traditional drinks and anything faintly resembling a shisha, the illusion would have been complete.
Those of us who had seen last year's smash-hit, The Black Rabbit, at the same venue, starring the formidable, almost legendary nonagenarian Amina Rizq, in a splendid comeback after many years absence from the stage, did not need the play's programme to tell them that the spectacle they were about to see was the work of director Isam El-Sayed and stage-designer Mustafa Imam who had also collaborated on the Rizq play; it was palpable in the directorial conception and quite visible in the set. Both productions strove to create a powerful sense of the physical reality, the concrete, active presence of the place where the action happens, and achieved it by uniting the performance and audience spaces through a set which monopolises the whole interior of the hall. The intimate, gripping, and sometimes tense atmosphere generated by this restructuring of theatrical space into a total, enveloping environment, invariably inspires a sense of deep involvement that can be manipulated in different ways, according to the play and the kind of impact the production aims for. In the case of The Black Rabbit, a harrowing psychological drama where the initial realism gradually gives way to symbolism and gains figurative energy, the intimacy was disturbing, almost distressing, triggering a claustrophobic sense of entrapment. I remember feeling the darkness physically pressing on me and the lurid shadows on the walls, cast by the dim kerosene lamp, about to jump at my throat; I could not wait to get away and out into the fresh air the first time I saw it. And though I went a second time, like one hypnotically drawn by a siren (the siren being Rizq, of course), I could not shake off that feeling of nervous terror or the urgent impulse to flee.
In the Tales of Mahrous Village, however, the atmosphere was festive, jubilant, relaxed and I reveled in the pervasive spirit of camaraderie, of infectious mirth, and surprisingly, in the extreme physical proximity of my fellow human beings, despite the heat; at one time the spirit of the place overpowered me and I found myself sitting crossed-legged on my seat swaying to and fro to the rhythm of the music. No menacing shadows here, thank God, but strong, brilliant lights and a string of winking coloured bulbs; no eerie, scary music to rattle the nerves, chill the heart and make the skin break out in goose pimples; instead, bright, humorous singers and musicians who often interrupt the storyteller, playfully teasing and contradicting him, or break out in unexpected and enormously funny solo asides, or engage the audience, the narrator or each other in comic musical dialogue and witty repartee. But luckiest of all, no dreary, murky soul-searching, or delving into the dark and turbid recesses of a tortured mind; only stories, hilarious anecdotes and delicious caricatures of the people who once lived in Mahrous village. They belong to a vanished time and a vanished place, are unabashedly romantic and disarmingly redolent with nostalgia.
Sa'id El-Faramawi
For once, the traditional Hakawati, popular bard or storyteller, does not speak of ancient or legendary heroes -- of Antara or Abu Zeid El-Hilali, extolling their heroic deeds and exploits or singing of their loves and sorrows. Like Wordsworth's exemplary poet, who is "a man speaking to men," Sa'id El-Faramawi's bard is a simple man who sings of the lives of ordinary, and less than ordinary people -- the underprivileged and marginalised, the silent majority, who go through life unnoticed and ignored, and are soon forgotten when dead. Like a Fisher King, he casts his verbal net into the dark waters of oblivion to save as many memories as he can. And as he shares his catch with us in the Tales, he conjures up a cherished place, a way of life, the people who made it and passed away, taking it with them; and, in the process, out of the scattered memories and the floating spots of time, he reconstructs his own personal history and defines himself.
In the programme El-Faramawi describes his play as "an autobiography of a time as lived through and manifested in a place." The time it records, indeed recreates, are the early years of the July revolution -- years of innocence and glorious hope -- seen through the eyes of the bard as a child and recollected, across a gap of almost half a century, by the same person, but as a wiser and infinitely sadder man. Likewise, the place, Mahrous village, is projected in two contrasting versions, past and present. Curiously, it turns out not to be a village after all, but a street which lay on the outskirts of the city of Tookh in the 1950s, 35 kilometers from the centre of Cairo; now, with the city expanding in all directions and eating up the countryside around, it lies pathetically squashed and smothered in the city, hemmed in on all sides by a maze of streets and alleyways and tall buildings. But village or not, the geography of the place is accurately described and its shape and contours sensitively and lovingly dwelt on. What brings it to life though, and charges it with poignant personal feelings are the people El-Faramawi reproduces in the funny cartoons he executes on the spot or in lively verbal sketches, projects in old photographs on a side screen, or impersonates by voice and body language. For in case you have not heard of him before, El-Faramawi is a richly gifted, all round artist who is at once a poet, a fiction writer, a cartoonist and painter, a competent singer and flute-player, a fascinating storyteller and inspired performer. But here, he acts no part, wears no mask or costume. He represents himself, and the stories he tells are as much about himself as the people of Mahrous village. Through them he recovers his childhood and early youth and momentarily recaptures, for himself as well as the audience, something of the splendour in the grass and the glory in the flower. But for him, unlike Wordsworth, there is no comfort in the things that remain. A note of gentle grief, of tender sorrow creeps in at the end, clouding what has gone before, the funny descriptions, witty comments, ridiculous caricatures, risible follies and droll actions, with a mist of wistful despondency. A lover of biographies, which I find much more amusing and exciting than fiction, I could not but fall in love with this live autobiography, the first of its kind in Egypt, and one of the most moving, entertaining and rewarding shows I have seen in years.
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