8 - 14 November 2001
Issue No.559
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 8 - 14 November 2001 Issue No.559 |
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Travelling light
Nehad Selaiha finds Jean Anouilh's luggage entirely too heavy
Two years ago, scriptwriter Magdi Saber treated us over the whole month of Ramadan to a mushy local TV version of Jean Anouilh's Voyageur sans Bagages, rechristened The Other Man. The less than three hour play was blown out of all reasonable proportion, turned into a meandering 31- episode soap opera, stuffed to bursting point with melodramatic events, suspenseful twists and turnings and sensational discoveries. The whole was covered with a thick layer of traditional morality, liberally sprinkled with sexual shenanigans and romantic escapades and doused with generous ladlings of salty tears.
The amnesiac hero, Gaston, was now a middle-aged former philanderer and business shark, with an unconscionable wife who goes mad at the end, a greedy, unscrupulous son who gets himself killed by a gang, and a soppy, weepy daughter, left to pick up the pieces. His catalogue of past sins was altered accordingly; instead of sleeping around, seducing maids, swindling an old friend of the family, killing birds and squirrels and willfully causing a friend a permanent spinal injury by throwing him over the stairs, it now listed adultery, a second, secret marriage (followed by a third contracted while in his new, amnesiac persona), embezzling company funds and framing an innocent colleague (with a mentally handicapped son to boot) for theft, shady transactions and criminal business deals.
It is difficult to imagine any sane person sticking this rambling epic till the end had it not been for the casting of Nur El-Sherif in the starring role. His superb acting managed to give body to this formless mess and even inject it with a degree of credibility. Indeed, I suspect that the whole idea of this squelchy Egyptianised version originated with El-Sherif himself. Like most actors, he has a great admiration for Anouilh's ability to create stormy confrontations, heart-wrenching situations and parts that actors generally can get their teeth into. As a student at the Theatre Institute in the 1960s, he did Beckett ou l'Honneur de Dieu for his graduation project and has hankered after Traveller ever since.
El-Sherif was absolutely right in thinking that Traveller, like most of Anouilh's work, could easily adapt to the small screen. Despite the outward polish, the witty dialogue and the element of social satire targeted at the hackneyed values of the French upper classes (which invests the first act with so much humour and vitality), the secret of the play's wide, popular appeal probably lies in the author's cunning and sophisticated use of melodrama to reach a broader, middle-brow audience. He produced finely-crafted plays which, however, still retained the form's tried-and-true characteristics, eschewing moral ambiguities and subtle ethical distinctions, while avoiding grossly vulgarised sentiments. The serious life choices they posited through the protagonists seldom undermined in any serious way the audience's expectations or questioned the dominant value-system. No wonder that both the Egyptian stage and film versions of his La Sauvage, starring Sohair El-Babli and Soad Hosni respectively, were such huge successes.
This brings the whole problem of last week's AUC production of Voyageur sans Bagages into focus. Although it is, of course, grossly unfair to compare any younger actor with experienced veteran Nur El-Sherif, or, indeed, El-Babli or Hosni, the acting proved the Achilles heel of that production; instead of covering up the flaws in the text, it went a long way towards exposing them. For once Anouilh's well-hidden, possibly unconscious, masculine bias and faint, unsavoury misogyny, became glaringly obvious, an ironic and unintended bonus for a critic. Mahmoud El- Lozy's fine direction notwithstanding, it was not perhaps such a good idea entrusting a text written for seasoned actors to budding performers still trying to find their feet.
With a stronger Gaston who could get across to us more vividly the character's poignant, childlike vulnerability and bewilderment, and more proficient actresses who could fill in the gaps in characterisation, we would not perhaps have noticed how utterly negative, unsympathetic and thoroughly irredeemable the female characters really are. Instead, this production's Gaston (Ashod Toumayants) reveals his mother, Madame Renauld (Nadia Idle), as a proud, callous woman who betrays the male ideal of the selfless, all-giving and all-forgiving mother ("You should have grovelled... You did wrong not to go down on your knees", Gaston tells her), his sister-in-law and former mistress, Valentine (Jasmine Sobhy), as an insatiable, unrepentant, multiple adulteress who trades in her body in a loveless marriage, his patroness, the Duchess (Heba Morayef) as a selfish, snobbish featherbrain who pursues charitable causes for self-aggrandisement, and Juliette, the maid he seduces in the past (Lulie El-Ashry), as a deceitful, lascivious, vain female who feeds off pulp fiction and reels it off to impress her lovers.
With the whole female species discredited in the play, appearing at best pathetic, no wonder Gaston's salvation becomes an all-male undertaking. First, his angelic, if somewhat stodgy brother George (Sherif Nakhla), absolves him of his past sins on the grounds that he was a "lonely, fatherless boy" who lacked guidance, and takes all the blame on the family; then his ticket to a new life appears, in a kind of deus ex machina, in the form of a little boy (Ahmed El-Lozy) who has conveniently lost his entire family. Having laid the ghost of his young self to rest, Gaston is at liberty to embark on a new role as a good father in a setup blissfully free of pesky females. The play ends with three generations of males -- Gaston, the boy, and the boy's aged lawyer -- sailing off to a new life.
Having said this, the performance was not without its merits. For one thing, it gave us the first production in Egypt of Anouilh's original text. The young cast struggled valiantly with difficult parts, and -- considering that English was not their mother tongue -- generally acquitted themselves better than many professional actors of their generation in Egypt. There was a moment when Toumayants as Gaston became quite touching, namely the scene when he stood among all the dead, stuffed animals and birds -- relics of and mute testimony to his ugly past self -- with his hands deep in his pockets, staring into space. Nadia Idle, too, as the mother, particularly in her final confrontation with her son, contrived to infuse her character with a measure of credibility and make her sympathetic, contrary to Anouilh's intentions and despite Gaston's hectoring. The minor characters, all types, had an easier task and managed to bring a breath of comedy and vivacity to the stage. El-Lozy's choice of music created a kind of wistful period atmosphere and a nostalgic mood, while Stancil Campbell's elegant, uncluttered two-level set, with its sensitively matched colours and lighting created a visual metaphor for Gaston's situation and bodied forth the texture of feeling underlying the play. In a stroke of brilliance, El-Lozy and Campbell put Gaston's room up above the living-room on the lower level, which after the initial scene remained darkened for most of the play, making it seem as though the hero's private space was suspended above a dark void, without roots or anchor. This also underlined his isolation and introspective self-absorption, a visual echo of the small boy's phrase "the little place where you can be by yourself" -- exactly what he longs for. The characters who visited him up there seemed to materialise out of the darkness and melt back into it, which made them more like insubstantial memories surfacing out of a distant past. And when the ground level was finally illuminated at the end for the hero to make his exit, it had a powerful impact. He was back on solid ground at last.
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