21 - 27 June 2001
Issue No.539
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 June 2001 Issue No.539 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
All the world a movie
Nehad Selaiha tries to unravel a skein of ambiguities in Al-Hanager's The Days of Lulu and Shushu
I confess I have a pathetically inadequate background in American and European cinema, especially when it comes to films produced in the 1940s and 50s and, therefore, am the least qualified person to winnow the facts from the fiction in Orchids in the Moonlight (Orcadia en la luz de luna) -- an intriguing play by Mexican novelist and dramatist, Carlos Fuentes, that has recently made its way, through an adaptation, to the stage of Al Hanager. Featuring two Mexican film stars, Maria Felix and Delores del Rio, who hit the international film scene round the mid-20th century, in Paris and Hollywood respectively, it is set in Venice, which, in the play, comes across as a bewildering, teasing fabrication, vividly reminiscent of Thomas Mann's sombre, decadent, disease-ridden city, in his haunting Death in Venice. There, the two aged actresses have retired to wait for the final exit, whiling away the time with eerie fantasies, play-acting and remembrances of glories past.
The play opens on the day following the death of Orson Welles who, according to Fuentes's fictional Felix, was one of del Rio's lovers. But instead of regaling us with spicy details of their amorous adventures, the play keeps us puzzling why Delores insists on avoiding the subject and is so anxious to hide the newspaper bearing his obituary lest their mother should see it. Now, this mother is another mystery; she is somewhere upstairs, enjoys eternal youth, has been a friend of Welles herself, and fears nothing more than the death of her contemporaries. Both actresses maintain she will outlive them -- indeed, will outlive her own death. The word symbol kept flashing across the pages as I read, and in my frantic casting about for an explanation, I kept stumbling over Thomas Mann's favourite theme of the artist as both misfit and charlatan.
More confusing still were the insistent references to films done by both actresses which, needless to say, I have not seen, do not even know if they really existed, but which I could not help feeling had some bearing on the bizarre ongoings on stage. Did they hold the clue to the identity of the invisible, almost legendary mother? I wondered; or should one simply forget about questions of identity in this bizarre, make-believe world and accept her as a fiction, a figment of the two actresses' imagination or, possibly, a symbol of the glamorous film star, eternally fixed on the screen in all her youth and beauty, beyond the reach of time and its ravages?
Given the quasi-surrealistic mode of writing -- elegantly dubbed by critics as magical realism -- typical of Fuentes's work (in one of his novels, an illegitimate son goes round the countryside looking for his father and ends up having a man in every village claiming to be the object of the quest), one could never be sure whether the two aged women on stage were the people they said they were (they constantly pester each other for mutual confirmation of their identities), were living in Venice or California (since both cities are alternately and interchangeably used to refer to the setting), or make up one's mind about the theatrical death of Maria (gorgeously dressed as Cleopatra and surrounded by an opulent royal retinue who materialise out of the blue to aid her death and perform her obsequies) or the story of Delores murdering the nosy, meddlesome journalist at the end.
Since the Arabic translation of the play, via a French version of the original Spanish text, is far from accurate, with lots of ambiguous pronouns and gender declensions, one could easily understand, and readily sympathise, with Nabil Badran's predicament when he was handed this translation and asked to make an intelligible, accessible Egyptian script out of it. The culprit was actress and popular comedian Sanaa Younis who was made a gift of the translation by its perpetrator while on a trip to Jordan. She had just experienced the tragic loss of her mother -- not just a mother, but a lifelong friend and companion -- and, in her shock and grief, decided to quit acting and wear the veil. She thought it would be nice to do just one more play, her last, a kind of swan song in which to review her life and career, and Orchids, with extensive rewriting, of course, seemed a godsend. She entrusted it to playwright and theatre critic Nabil Badran, whose favourite dramatic form is political cabaret and who, by temperament, has no patience with poetic ambiguities or prevarication, under whatever guise, any formal conundrums of any kind, and little sympathy with what stolid machismos would call, silly female emotional writhings.
Consequently, he tailored the text to his own liking, ironing out its tantalising contradictions and setting it squarely on firm, rational grounds. The mysterious mother upstairs was the first to go; she would only obfuscate the audience. Then the paradoxical features of the two actresses were sorted out and freshly shared out between them to create credible stage characters, or, to be more accurate, recognisable stereotypes of the aged, retired film star. Delores del Rio becomes Shalabiya, or Shushu, the young peasant woman who escapes to the capital to seek her fortune, goes through several men as wife, mistress and one-night pickup, mothering a son on the way, before making it to stardom; and Maria Felix becomes Lulu, a lower middle-class Copt, who starts out as a belly dancer, sleeping around with all and sundry, then works up her way to stardom, sacrificing in the process the one true love in her life. Any hint of lesbianism (such as Maria fondly caressing and kissing Delores's bare foot at the beginning) was, predictably, firmly excised, with the result that certain patches in the dialogue that were retained became extremely puzzling and, on occasions, mischievously suggestive. To square things, a male character was added to play all the men in the two women's lives, and Shushu's neglected son was dragged out of the shadowy vaults of her memory and lugubriously thrust on stage to haunt and reprimand her in a style befitting the most lachrymose of melodramas. For dressing, Badran added a touch of topical relevance by alluding to the widely publicised row over the buying by Arabs of the originals of old Egyptian movies and monopolising the right of distributing and broadcasting them, and by replacing the two satirical altars Fuentes plants in his set, which bear the trophies, photos and relics of the two stars' careers, with real religious altars, bearing the symbols of Christianity and Islam, to affirm the unity and harmony of the two faiths in Egypt.
But such and other melodramatic trappings were only a ruse; the whole was cast in the delightful mould of parody and Badran's text made no attempt to disguise it. Indeed, it went all out to impress upon the audience the utter theatricality of the whole affair and to invite their laughter. No wonder Sanaa Younis rejected the script and withdrew from the project. She had wanted a swan song and Badran gave her a parody of one. Her role fell to Sawsan Badr, but, at least, one could seek comfort in the fact that after this debacle, Younis was so angry and frustrated that she forgot all about retiring and the veil and has embarked on a feverish search for another play.
In staging the play, director Hisham Gom'a and his crew and cast -- Ibrahim El-Fawi (set); Walid El-Shahawi (music); Mohamed Abdel-Raziq (video); Sawsan Badr (Shushu); Sahar Rami (Lulu); Sami Maghawri (the men in their lives); Yasser Farag (the nosy, hapless journalist); and Karim Sami (the deserted son) -- opted for open theatricality and burlesque in every visual and vocal detail. The stage, draped all round in tattered, off-white gauze curtains, was suitably cluttered with rocking chairs, chests, clothes hangers, a huge dressing mirror framed with bulbs, a table and chairs, and divided into two levels, with a huge screen at the back for video projections. On the raised stage, in the rear area, Badr and Rami performed scenes from their former lives in a manner that recalled similar famous scenes in old Egyptian movies. No one could possibly take them seriously. My initial embarrassment at the first line in the play, ceremoniously uttered by Badr ("Now, tell me about the men in your life.") soon evaporated in the sizzling heat of the comic scenes that followed. "My God, how could any one start a play like that?" I had said to myself, squirming in my chair with disbelief at the beginning. Within a few minutes, I was swept along by the spirit of ruthless, rollicking parody and asked no more questions.
The Days of Lulu and Shushu may not be, is definitely not, Fuentes's Orchids in the Moonlight; and it could reasonably be accused of being harsh, unfair to the thespian tribe, too direct and, possibly, too simplistic in dealing with the problems of identity and gender roles and duties; but it is at least funny and entertaining and has fitful flashes of warm human sympathy for the solidarity of women and the passing away of youth and beauty.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page