In progress: Handling irony
By
Sherif Iskander Nakhla
Mahmoud El-Lozy, professor of theatre at AUC, has just finished rehearsing a production of Ibsen's Ghosts. Lozy has directed some 20 theatre productions in English, French and Arabic. He began acting at 18 and has performed in 60 plays and four films, and began teaching in 1985. He runs both activities in tandem.
We have been rehearsing Ghosts for the past five weeks at the mainstage theatre in AUC. I hope the audience will listen very carefully, that they will be moved. I hope they will appreciate Ibsen's ironic sense of humour, how he destroys icons that are still with us, and that it will help at least some of the people there to see into the hypocrisy of their own society and double standards.
I hope they will also appreciate the work that the students have put into it. This is a play that is very demanding even though it has a small cast. Usually such difficult roles are played by actors that are very experience and mature. We have a role that is usually played by an actress who is in her 50s played by a 21-year-old actress. So I think it places a lot of demands on them not only in terms of technical acting skills, that take a long time to adapt to and master, but also in terms of their emotional range.
I really don't know what to expect from the viewers or how they are going to respond to it because it's a very varied audience that we attract. We get older people from Cairo, people from other universities and AUC students, many of whom come because they have been assigned to watch it which is a very bad reason to send people to the theatre. If they expect to be entertained in a titillating way I think they will be extremely disappointed. This is a play that has no gimmicks. It's extremely sober and very verbal.
I've told my actors not to expect large crowds but this doesn't bother me. I'd rather have a few people in the house who are listening than having a large crowd that whispers and fidgets around.
I've always wanted to direct a play by Ibsen and this is the first time for me to do so. I used to teach Ghosts in the Modern Drama course and it would always generate interesting discussions in class.
Ibsen is a very important figure. He was sort of like a nineteenth century anarchist and he wrote plays that annoyed people, that confronted them with their own hypocrisies, their inadequacies, lies and pettiness. He had a sense of humour and an amazing skill in handling irony. He disturbed people in the nineteenth century and I think he can still disturb people now.
There was always a feeling that if you were going to direct a mainstage production in AUC, you should involve as many people as possible. I think I did my share in that. I directed plays with casts of 17 and another with 36, so I think I have earned the right to put on a play with a small cast at this point. I also think I have the right group of students to do the job.
The rehearsal process has been going smoothly and the atmosphere has been very relaxed. I knew what I wanted to do with the play and I had many discussions with the set, light and costume designers before we went into rehearsals. I can say that what I'm seeing now is largely what I had in mind.
I've worked the way I always have in directing such plays; a week of reading and improvisation followed by a week of rough blocking, then detailed work followed by more detailed work. Afterwards I started running the play and worked on cleaning and polishing it up. If you look at what the play looked like in the beginning and see it now you will see a completely different performance in terms of blocking.
It's very important for the actors to know that they are improving and building on something. To facilitate this I had them run the play at the end of every week in order for them to get a sense of the path that they were following and so that they could feel their progress and gain confidence as actors.
Regarding other current projects, I have a small part in Youssef Chahine's new movie Al-Ghadab which we have just finished shooting. It's been hectic these past two weeks between the film and directing the play, but I have a very good stage- manager/assistant, Yara, who has been running things efficiently.
After Ghosts, which opens tonight, I'm going to write a play, the third in a trilogy that I've been writing. After that there is a film project that I'm supposed to be involved in during the summer. For next year I'll be directing a play by Alfred Farag, in classical Arabic, which we will put on around the same time next year.
(For performance details see Listings)
