Gertrude's innocence
Youssef Rakha catches up with El-Warsha Theatre Company
For a long time, too long word had had it, there has been something rotten in the state of El-Warsha. No productions were being undertaken, disillusioned affiliates pointed out, because the company had run out of competent actors; while the more senior creative agents, in the meantime, remained entangled in the intransigent task, begun tentatively many years ago, of dramatising Sirat Bani Hilal, more stuck on the folk arts than inspired by them. It was the imperative to make an appearance, whether or not you had something to say for yourself, that prompted El-Warsha to put on fragmentary (and, many insisted, impossibly repetitive) layali (nights), a staple of short songs and story-tellings, group recitals and solo shows that came as a disappointment from the company that had produced Dayren Dayer and Ghazir Al-Leil, featuring such actors as Sayed Ragab, Vanya Exerjian and Hanan Youssef.
Sadly it was in such a spirit, more often than not, that one attended El-Warsha performances. Laden, pre-emptive and with a negative predisposition, you would end up seeing nothing but confirmation of your pre-judgments. Yet more recently the layali have proved heartening against the odds, a feeling that finds support in at least two large-scale projects announced by the troupe. One of these, produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture's Al-Bait Al-Fanni lil Masrah -- director Hassan El-Geretly's seemingly eternally postponed production of Tawfik El-Hakim's delightfully vernacular piece of 1930s Egyptian marivaudage, Rosasa fil-Qalb, with an impressive cast of three former El-Warsha veterans (Exerjian, Ahmed Kamal, Boutrous Raouf) and Ramadan Khater -- is to be launched in January. The second, an open-ended experiment with the Thousand and One Nights featuring the present troupe of mostly younger performers and conducted by writers Khaled and Naguib Guwaili, is gradually coming to life. The excitement of the two projects aside, it was during the last instalment of layali, held at the company's Sherif Street office last Tuesday, that the paucity-of-El-Warsha theory met with an effective refutation, evidencing not only evolution but growth.
The layali's abiding concerns have been the Sira and improvisations based on firsthand experiences of performers and referred to collectively as Daily Life. Notwithstanding Ghazl Al-Aamar, the troupe's initial attempt at producing a play of the Sira, in the absence of an appropriate dramaturgy of the folk epic, the effort to adapt it to theatre, undertaken by El-Geretly for the last few years, had resulted in little more than group recitals of the Upper Egyptian muraba'at (quatrains), the form in which the epic is performed, usually by a solo sha'ir (poet) or rawi (narrator), in that part of the country. (The company's association with Sayed El- Duwwi, the one remaining sha'ir, as mentor and fellow performer, were deeply appreciated by the audience during two nights devoted to the Sira at the Cairo Opera's open-air theatre the week before.) The recitals have clearly developed into a cleverer, wholly musical rendition of those parts of the epic tackled in Ghazl Al-Aama; with specific troupe members playing the main characters and an all-inclusive chorus taking on the role of the sha'ir, a dramatic dialogue of operatic proportions appears to be in the making. And rather than the evidently abortive attempt to rely on actorly impersonation, incorporating movement and light, an otherwise abandoned aspect of heritage acquires immediate, fresh and engaging relevance in the singing of El-Warsha's performers.
Nor should an interest in the Sira imply divorce from social reality. The longest and most inclusive of the Daily Life episodes, "Sounds of the City", is perhaps the only aural evocation of Cairo to marry various modes of authentic urban performance (contrastingly beautiful and horrendous calls to prayer, the goings-on on the "stages" of popular weddings, even a moulid tent promotion by the octogenarian folk arts figure Hassan Khannoufa) with the auditory qualities of an overcrowded metropolis, that ceaseless, inescapable murmur out of which, occasionally, the lone voice of a televised football match spectator or a child waiting impatiently in line, demanding foul and ta'miya sandwiches, intimates the magnitude of the human condition that gives rise to it. Other, relatively new solo episodes -- Ramadan Khater's rendition of one of Bairam El-Tonsi's humorous maqamat and Medhat Fawzi's impersonation of a village barber in Menya, for example -- proved equally absorbing. By the end of the evening you felt that, in discrediting El-Warsha on the basis of the fact that no full-length productions had been staged for years, perhaps the Hamlets of Egyptian theatre had done it an injustice.
Rosasa fil-Qalb can be seen at the Garage Theatre, Jesuits Cultural Centre in Alexandria, on 16 and 17 January
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