Issue No.589
Culture
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6 - 12 June 2002 Issue No.589 Culture |
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In progress: Bottom's bottom
Sayed Ragab's acting career began in 1977, the year he joined the administrative staff of Nasr Automobile Company. Besides trailblazing the company's extracurricular theatre programme, he participated in a number of Ministry of Culture productions and was a left-wing activist from 1979 to 1989. Ragab joined Hassan El-Geretly's El-Warsha Theatre Company in 1982, becoming the troupe's principal story-teller and starring in the major productions Dayren Dayer and Ghazir El-Leil, for which he received the best actor jury award at the 1993 Experimental Theatre Festival. Before leaving El-Warsha as a full-time actor in 2001, Ragab began recalling political detention and other experiences in poignant colloquial Arabic texts, one of which, "Rat", has since been produced as a monodrama directed by Islam El-Azzazi.
What+am+I+working+on,+indeed?+Let+me+think+what+I'm+working+on.+I've+just+moved+house,+that's+one+very+exhausting+task.+And+I'm+still+trying+to+bring+up+my+children,+yes.+Other+than+these+two+activities+there+are+a+number+of+projects+related+to+theatre:+some,+like+a+dramatic+reading+of+my+texts+with+director+Islam+El-Azzazi+--+that+was+in+Syria,+during+the+Amman+Theatre+Days+last+summer+--+already+concluded;+some+underway;+and+some+still+pending,+like+a+production+of+the+minor+French+playwright+Roland+Topol's+magnificent+play+Apocalypse+with+director+Ahmed+El-Attar,+because+people+are+too+busy+with+other+projects.+Funding+for+this+kind+of+work+is+not+always+forthcoming,+either;+it+tends+to+be+protracted.
photo: Kristina Davies
The most absorbing task I've been assigned is that of coming up with a practicable colloquial Arabic version of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- well, the Swedish choreographer Eva Bergman's dance- oriented adaptation of the play, the text of which I was given in standard Arabic translation. Naturally I've been consulting as many Arabic translations of the original as are available, too. Having discovered Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum -- a literary revelation I mustn't forget to mention -- I'm now reading a lot of poetry to help with the more lyrical requirements of the task. The problem is that, while Shakespeare's text seems to be very earthy and playful and lively, the translations -- including that of Eva Bergman's version of the play -- tend to be stilted, monotone, more literary than dramatic, terribly dry.
The challenge is to bring the text to life in the rhythms and cadences of the vernacular; a very big part of the challenge is to make Shakespeare sound convincingly Egyptian, the way he would have sounded had he been living and working in Egypt at the present time, without compromising the power and the majesty of his poetry. It is a difficult process, this. When Bottom awakens, for example, he says, "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was." In the Arabic translations, this sensory and conceptual confusion is obscured if not completely omitted. The idea probably is that, since it doesn't work as comedy in Arabic, it just sounds like a mistake on the part of the translator, assuming, as most people do assume, that this particular author is beyond making mistakes.
So you have to think of a way to bring all this back in, choosing your words very carefully while you do so; the puns are especially taxing, as you might expect. Bottom's dream "hath no bottom": here is another example of the difficulty I'm talking about. No Arabic word denotes both senses of the word: "bottom" as in "backside", which must also work as somebody's name; and "bottom" as in "the bottom of a well", which is the sense of the line I quoted. In the end I came up with qa'r, which, while conveying a fairly strong impression of the former, is the most common colloquial word for the latter sense. Qa'r also works as an equivalent for the name; this is why it feels like such a success, a rare triumph.
So much for "Egyptianisation", but let me put A Midsummer Night's Dream in context. After leaving El-Warsha I did one play with the Nasr Automobiles, that was very recent. But for a while my only supplementary source of income was doing acting and directing for a cartoon dubbing company. I also did some coaching in Mohamed Abdel- Hadi's actor training studio at the time. In 2001 I participated in a dramatic writing workshop in Aqaba, Jordan. It was held within the framework of the Amman Theatre Days but supported by many institutions from all over the world, including the Gottenberg Festival and Backa Theatre. Eva Bergman was there and I think she was interested in this idea of Arab harmony: Arabs from different countries are in some ways very like each other but equally they are different and they don't always realise this; they tend to assume an identification that is not necessarily there. Anyway, Eva Bergman thought of turning what was already a successful Swedish performance into a large-scale, kind of pan- Arab production. There are people from Morocco and Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and Sudan. Auditions were undertaken here in March and I was given the role of Peter Quince, making this my first fully-fledged production since leaving El-Warsha.
I am to go to Sweden in a month to discuss the progress made on the text; I think I will need a lyricist to help me with the songs, at least. Rehearsals will begin in December, it is very exciting, the play itself, being in a production, working with Eva Bergman and all those Arabs, different and the same. As exciting as bringing up children, at least...
Based on an interview by Youssef Rakha
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