Chain-stitch
Nehad Selaiha wonders if Ibsen's Ghosts at the AUC should have targeted a different audience
In the 1992 Free Theatre Festival Abeer Ali and her independent El-Misaharaty troupe staged an adaptation of Ibsen's 1881 Ghosts. Instead of the countryside round Bergen, the rainiest part of Norway, in the late 19th century, the play, which Ibsen once described to a friend as "a family story, as grey and gloomy as this rainy day", was remade into a black comedy, in colloquial Arabic, and reset in a popular quarter of Cairo, on a sultry summer evening in the 1980s. The dissolute Captain Alving was revived and remodelled on "Si El-Sayed", the hypocritical, tyrannical head of the family who leads a double life in the famous Trilogy of novels which won Naguib Mahfouz the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. The new Mrs Alving, however, was far from the docile, acquiescent Si El-Sayed's spouse, Amina. Equally oppressed and illiterate, with physical violence as an added scourge, she retained the rebellious spirit, critical discernment, power of introspection and independent thinking of Ibsen's heroine.
The plot was drastically altered and refashioned into a dramatic monologue for one actress, centring on moral hypocrisy and made up of a string of short narratives to illustrate its damaging effect on the life of the heroine and all around her. The monologue was punctuated with the fleeting, shadowy appearance of silent, ghostlike figures, grotesquely impersonating the people she talks about, and interspersed with embarrassing, personal questions directed at the audience with a confidential wink to get them to express their views. For realism, Abeer Ali substituted expressionism and in her new scheme of things there was no place for Osvald, the story of his estrangement from home at the age of sever or the curse of syphilis bequeathed to him by his father, for Captain Alving's illegitimate daughter Regina and her fake father Engstrand, or the story of Mrs Alving's flight from home to seek refuge with Pastor Manders and his taking her back despite their mutual attachment. Moreover, Egyptian Ghosts ended on a frenzied note, in a kind of audio-visual conflagration, with a Zar, an African female traditional ritual for exorcising ghosts and evil spirits. Indeed, by the time Ali and her group had finished working on it Ibsen's play had become a ghost of its former self and was completely sunk into the new performance text, leaving no visible traces behind -- perhaps only a few ripples.
No wonder so many people failed to see the connection between the Norwegian and Egyptian Ghosts; but for Ali they were identical despite all the changes she made and the pronounced feminist viewpoint she adopted. Both were basically a protest against the iron grip of traditional, conservative bourgeois morality with its false, hypocritical ideals and oppressive valorisation of "duty", particularly where women are concerned. Both set out to prove that such inherited value-systems as are foisted on us cripple the mind, deplete the soul and shrivel the body, robbing our lives of joy and vitality. The rigid middle-class mores which spoil Mrs Alving's life in 19th century Norway, Abeer believes, still rule the lives of most Egyptian families in urban and rural areas and continue to breed deception, frustration and untold unhappiness. Mrs Alving, she asserts, could be speaking about our own society and way of life when she says: "we're all ghosts...; it's not only the things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and old dead beliefs, and things of that sort. They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there all the same, and we can't rid ourselves of them. I've only to pick up a newspaper and when I read it I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. I should think there must be ghosts all over the country -- as countless as grains of sand. And we are, all of us, so pitifully afraid of the light."
Egyptian Ghosts was performed twice, on two successive evenings, at El-Tali'a theatre during that 1992 festival and it caused quite a stir. The audience was socially and economically varied, but consisted mostly of young people, some of whom had never even heard of Ibsen, and it seemed to touch them on the raw. I remember thinking then what a pity it was Ibsen's plays were never performed in Egypt and wondered if our producers and directors thought him as dangerously iconoclastic and subversive as his own contemporaries did a century ago. When Ghosts was first published it was thought too shocking to perform; none of the Scandinavian theatres would touch it. Its first performance, in May 1882, did not take place in Norway or anywhere in Europe, but in Chicago, and when it finally reached London it was lambasted by the critics and dubbed "naked loathsomeness" and "an open sewer". In Egypt it wasn't until last week, well over a century after its publication, that the play found a director willing to stage it in toto, undoctored and give it its much belated Egyptian premiere.
In choosing Ghosts, rather than any other Ibsen play, Mahmoud El-Lozy was prompted by very much the same feelings as Abeer Ali ten years ago. In an interview (published on this page last week), he said: "I hope the audience...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." To achieve this and allow the play to "disturb" people now as it did back in the 19th century, El-Lozy cut a low profile as director, faithfully following Ibsen's conception, realistic mode and stage directions. Most of his work concentrated on the acting, its emotional timbre, rhythm and ironic undercurrents and on providing his actors with a fitting visual frame that can support them and enhance their performances.
For this he enlisted the talents of costume designer Jeanne Arnold and set and lighting designer Stancil Campbell. Arnold provided period costumes in emblematic colours which hinted at each character's temperament and place in the thematic scheme of the play -- black (for Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders who remain the hostages of ghosts), turquoise (for Regina) who finally walks out of the haunted house to seek the joy of living under the open, blue skies, dusty brown (for Engstrand), a nondescript, wishy-washy colour like his character, and a bright red velvet coat which stood out among the rest for Osvald. That red coat was a brilliant touch which visually set him apart from the other characters, as the play does, while significantly linking him to the crimson flowers in the vases, to the red and orange flames in the fireplace and in the background of the portrait of his father which hangs over the mantelpiece, as well as to the reflected auburn glare of the burning orphanage. These visual links vividly spelt out, in terms of colour, Osvald's longings and fears, hinted early on at his fate and made his collapse (or snuffing out) at the end seem inevitable on a purely sensuous level and, therefore, all the more pathetic.
Likewise, the elegant set was more than just beautiful or functional. While basically sticking to Ibsen's instructions about its layout, Campbell chose a cunning colour scheme in which the drab gray walls and doors which framed the scene stood in sharp contrast with its cheerful, graceful contents -- the cosy fireplace, the brown and cream sofas, the delicate lace table covers, and the vases of flowers and many potted plants. The contrast transformed the set into an eloquent visual metaphor for the lives of the characters in the play where the joy of living is always curbed and hemmed in by dead ideas or crushed under the lead weight of moral conventions. Though, like the grey walls, they are meant as a protective shield, these conventions, the stage image further tells us, are no more than a cover that hides shameful secrets, pain and misery. On the other hand the contrast between the look of the tidy, ordered drawing room and the stories we hear of what happens behind its solid, grey walls and closed door visually enforces our awareness of the double standards and false pretences which govern the world of the characters. Throughout the play this room, which opens on a conservatory, awash with tamed and protected potted plants (probably "ensured" like the rest of Mrs Alving's possessions), with a door leading into an invisible garden, swimming in darkness all the time except for the distant, flickering glare of the fire which consumes the orphanage at the end of Act Two, was a potent element which coloured our reception of what the actors said. Indeed, with the costumes and sensitive manipulation of the lighting, it created a stage image so powerful and suggestive that it seemed to provide subtle comments on what was happening, speak what the characters left unsaid, or ironically undercut the dialogue.
Within such a framework and with a director of long experience in attendance, carefully guiding their steps along this rough terrain of a text, the actors could only come out safe at the other end. Mariam Ali Mahmoud and Ramsi Lehner as Mrs Alving and Pastor Manders faced a terrible challenge and struggled valiantly to meet it. It didn't make it any easier that all the scenes they shared (more than half of the play and quite crucial ones in terms of confrontations and revelations) seem to proceed on a double-track, so to speak, and lead in opposite emotional directions. While Mrs Alving is intended to arouse our sympathy, Pastor Manders is supposed to provoke irony and satirical laughter. Needless to say, the two emotions are antithetical and tend to work against each other. Indeed, in some cases, Mrs Alving becomes a kind of agent provocateur of satire in her relation to Manders, and the emotional impact of her anguished revelations, as they shock the smug and pompous pastor, is cancelled out by the hilarious laughter his reactions provoke. That one was aware of this was no fault of Mariam or Ramsi. Even Dame Peggy Ashcroft, whom I saw as Mrs Alving in the 1960s, found it difficult to override this tricky double track. Considering their youth and relative inexperience, they did extremely well and so did the rest of the cast: Ratko Ivekovic as Osvald, Soraya Morayef as Regina and Shadi Alfons as Engstrand. I was particularly thankful for the clear enunciation which allowed you to hear every word however fast the actors spoke.
The thing that really bugged me in this production had nothing to do with the text, the cast or artistic crew; it had to do with the play being performed in the wrong language to the wrong audience -- or at least, to the kind of audience who seemed least to need it. To be truly subversive and disturbing as it was in the 19th century, to be able to shake up people out of their moral lethargy as Ibsen intended it and El-Lozy meant it to be Ghosts needs to be delivered in Arabic, to a wider audience, in a more popular venue than El-Falaki Centre of the AUC.
