1 - 7 November 2001
Issue No.558
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 1 - 7 November 2001 Issue No.558 |
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Feud for thought
Nehad Selaiha flees one tale of revenge to get caught in another
Of all the vengeful heroines of ancient Greek drama, Electra, in whatever version, be it Aeschylus's The Cheophori or the two plays by Sophocles and Euripides that carry her name, has always struck me as the creepiest. That she should fear and shun her husband-murdering mother, Clytemnestra, feel shock and horror at her bloody deed is perfectly natural; what is sinister and deeply shocking is how those feelings fester into a feverish, deadly grudge, swelling over the years into an obsessive, all-consuming passion, fanatically blazoned to the world with virulent religious zeal as a craving for justice and divine retribution.
Unlike Medea, Phaedra, Hecuba or even her own mother on whose murder she is so single- mindedly bent, Electra is young, inexperienced and completely guiltless and therefore as hard and ruthless as only innocent youth can be. Frustrated and sexually repressed, "with no man by her side," as she says in Sophocles's play, no children or other source of fulfilment, and tantalizingly taunted with the spectacle of her mother playing the queen, living in pomp and enjoying a lover (while she lives like "an alien slave, a menial/Drudge .../ Dressed like a slattern .../And for my sustenance/ A beggar's dole"), she channels all her libido, jealousy and impotent rage into the lust for revenge. For her, the ghost of her father, Agamemnon, and the absent figure of her brother, Orestes, become surrogate, if ethereal, lovers onto whom she projects all her urgent needs and thwarted desires. This may seem a bit uncharitable, but the scene in which she stands behind the door while her brother slaughters their mother inside, screaming frenziedly: "Strike her again, strike!" is guaranteed to send a shiver down the sturdiest spine.
I would have liked her better if she had betrayed a glimmer of understanding, compassion, or even pity, however faint or fleeting -- a moment's doubt, hesitation, grief or regret, or shown herself as something more than a self-involved lump of hatred and pure venom. I could have at least respected her had she been less of a coward and a weakling; rather than take up arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, as her peer, the nobler Antigone, does, she refrains from incurring the wrath of the gods by sullying her pretty little hands with blood and prefers to wait for her much younger brother to do the dirty deed for her. Not for a moment does she stop to consider the dreadful fate that awaits him or his terrible punishment.
More than any other heroine in Greek tragedy, she seems to epitomise the Greek patriarchal ideal of womanhood enshrined in the goddess Athena -- a sexless female, not born of a mother and eternally incapable of mothering anybody. Indeed, she is the perfect embodiment of Apollo's misogynist claim at the end of The Eumenides, the third part of the Oresteia, when he says, in the course of defending matricide: "The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/ Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male./ So, if Fate spares the child, she keeps it, as one might keep for some friend a growing plant./ And of this truth, that father without mother may beget, we have/ Present, as proof, the daughter of Olympian Zeus:/ One never nursed in the dark cradle of the womb."
It was not until the advent of feminism in the latter half of the 20th century that Clytemnestra started getting some sympathy and understanding or that Electra began to be seen as a thoroughly brain-washed victim of patriarchy. But, to my knowledge, no artist has undertaken a more radical rereading of the Greek plays dealing with the legend of The House of Atreus, questioning their implicit values and assumptions and exposing their insidious gender-bias than French director Ariane Mnouchkine. In her quartet of plays, Les Atrides, which I saw in Paris in 1992, she prefaced her production of Aeschylus's The Oresteian Trilogy with Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis -- a moving and sympathetic account of Clytemnestra's agony and helplessness as she watches her daughter, Iphigenia, slaughtered by her father as a sacrifice to the gods in the interest of a military campaign. Deeply skeptical about war, religion, the male sense of honour and concepts of duty and heroism, the play undermined in advance the traditional reading of the trilogy, providing a new, ironical and deeply unsettling perspective. When Electra eventually appeared, in the third part of the quartet, she was more pathetic than repulsive -- as much a dehumanized victim of the male war machine as her sister Iphigenia.
The more recent Electra which I saw in Cairo during the last CIFET, in a Spanish production, seemed to have gone completely over the edge and become absolutely demented. Raving and ranting, with lots of intricate, vigorous body contortions -- Indian-style -- and despite an original, gorgeous set, an impressive display of fire (which threatened to burn down the National), she was thoroughly tedious. Would Electra's Mirrors by Metwalli Hamed prove any better, I wondered as I dragged myself to the small hall (Youssef Idris) at Al- Salam theatre last week.
Outside the hall was a big brass urn with burning incense. Four young women in long gray dresses, with loose hair and white-painted faces, appeared and started circling round it, intoning a ritualistic chant, like some pagan mourners or witches conjuring up the spirits of the dead. This done, they filed into the small, rectangular darkened hall with the audience stumbling in their wake. Luckily, we were guided to our seats by some invisible forces and sat pressed against the wall, on both sides of the cramped performance space which consisted of a tiny circle at one end connected to a narrow passage, flanked by candles and leading to the outside door. To my consternation, I discovered that instead of one Electra, I was going to have to put up with four. The young author had decided to split the character among four actresses, each displaying a facet. Not a bad idea if he intended to psychoanalyse her, reveal her murky depths and air her complexes. The initial dialogue and choral exchanges seemed to be leading that way; but just as I was beginning to become engrossed and enjoy the daring talk of sexual needs, repression, and the furtive, exciting hints at incestuous love, I was suddenly and rudely jolted onto a completely unexpected political plane. I was of course prepared for the appearance of Orestes, but certainly not in such a getup. He pranced in, fresh from the US, sporting a flamboyant bright-green satin shirt, a cowboy hat, and armed with a spectacular array of remote-controlled toys. From then on I found myself completely at sea, failing miserably to detect any connection between the Electras' sexual longings, their talk of revenge, forgiveness, old feuds, sacred missions and betrayals and the brother's starry-eyed fascination with the West, its progress and technology. Things got more convoluted when another Orestes suddenly materialised, dressed as a Greco-Roman warrior and waving a spear. It would take a pretty big stretch of the imagination, but one could construe this to imply an East-West, past-present confrontation. When, finally, the modern Orestes is forced by his ancient doppelganger to kill his mother, the murder is performed symbolically, but, funnily enough, with pronounced sexual overtones: a slab of wood is removed, revealing a round hole in the ground and all the Electras and Oresteses start stabbing into it hard with the spear and screaming in ecstasy. To cap it all and create the ultimate confusion, one Electra steps back from the hole in horror, crying out that now the waiting is over, there will be no more Electras. All things considered, not a bad thing.
Though I am usually inclined to make allowances when it comes to first attempts by young writers, I must admit that this multiple Electra has stretched my tolerance to breaking point. I am told by director Hanaa Abdel- Fattah that the text was originally much longer, far more muddled, and had to be extensively pruned. I wish he had been more thorough. Nevertheless, he did a good job as director, using expressive choreography, a decent cast (led by Azza El-Huseini), a minimalist set and simple costumes (by Fadi Fouquet), and impressionistic music and sound effects (by Intisar Abdel-Fattah) to help us wade through this verbal morass.
Within only a couple of days I found myself bogged down at El-Talia theatre in another revenge tragedy, but this time of Arab provenance. Shawqi Abdel-Hakim's Harb El- Basous (The Basous Wars) is his latest addition to a rich dramatic output which started in the 1960s and includes 23 plays, most of which draw on local tradition and folklore. Basous, whose name features in the title (played by Iman Salem), is another vengeful princess, but more cunning and destructive than Electra. According to the popular Arab epic, Sirat El-Zeer Salem, on which the play is based, she disguises herself as an old fortune-teller after the murder of her brother, the king of Yemen (Mohieddin Abdel-Mohsen), at the hands of Koleib (Hamdi El-Wazir), the son and rightful heir of another king whom he conquered and enslaved, and slyly worms her way into the confidence of the new king's cousin and his rival (Abdel-Nasser Rabi'), fueling his jealousy and ambition and sparking off a vicious war between them which lasts for 41 years, decimating both their tribes. Equally vindictive and more Electra-like is princess Yamama, Koleib's daughter (Amani El- Bahtiti), who militantly rejects all offers of peace and compensation, demanding the impossible: her father back, alive, and nothing less. Caught in the feud is her mother, queen Galila, the widow of Koleib and sister of his murderer (Mona Hussein), and the way her daughter treats her when she comes to plead for peace and a cessation of the bloodshed on both sides, accusing her of betraying her father's memory, faintly echoes Electra's attitude to her mother.
The Basous Wars, however, does not come across as a violent, gory tragedy, but rather as an amusing didactic tale, sketchy, simplistic, with an obvious political message. It unfolds as a series of quick scenes, interspersed with the satirical quips and comments of a modern one-man chorus (comedian Sami Maghawri) and framed with live narration from the original epic by Sira-singer, Aref El-Qinawi, accompanied by a live traditional band led by Ahmad Khalaf on the lute. The moral of the play, that Arab rulers should bury their conflicts and petty rivalries and unite, has been preached from the Egyptian stage for over four decades; but last week all it provoked was cynical laughter and sarcasm. Despite the relaxed atmosphere, the gaily coloured tent-cloth draped round the theatre, making it look like a marquee, and the spacious wooden baladi benches replacing the usual seats, the message that touched a chord in the audience and rang true was that of revenge.
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