Strangers in the night
Nehad Selaiha chases after a fugitive melody
Plays by women are a rare phenomenon on the Egyptian stage. This alone would make Nadia El- Banhawi's The Lost Melody (at Al-Tali'a) a welcome addition to Egyptian drama. But The Lost Melody is also an intriguing work, with a very special flavour. Like her two previous plays -- The Glow and Love and Death Sonata (both also staged at Al-Tali'a) -- it departs from the familiar, well-trodden paths of dramatic writing in Egypt and explores those tenuous, shadowy, illusive areas of human experience normally consecrated to the realms of myth and poetry.
"Grasping at shadows" would best describe the content of all three pieces. The Glow, which bristles with biblical allusions, features a surrealistic descent into purgatory in search of salvation -- spiritual, existential and even political. The setting is the valley of death and the images of the last supper and a cannibalistic banquet are counterpointed in a harrowing irony. The end is teasingly ambiguous: is the glow which suffuses the stage, in a sudden brilliant eruption in the final scene, a raging fire which obliterates everything? or a light which dispels the awful darkness of the nether regions of the soul and cleanses the deepest recesses of a seared historical memory? In Sonata the setting is more realistic and less gruesome; but the sense of spiritual desolation is equally intense, and the themes of loss and bereavement are all- pervasive. On a lonely seashore, a female painter -- heavily reminiscent of the painter in Virginia Woolf's The Waves -- struggles vainly to finish the painting which she believes would enable her finally to make sense of her failed life and of the many existential questions which bedevil her. The sea becomes a symbol of the sense of absurdity which threatens to engulf her and its waves, as they crash on the shore, throw at her the debris of broken hopes and relationships and many ghosts.
The sea also haunts the fictional world of The Lost Melody and though the setting is vaguely realistic -- the bar of a deserted seaside hotel on a cold night in winter -- the frame of reference is not quotidian reality but literature, painting and classical music. The mood is more lyrical than dramatic, the verbal texture is densely allusive and intertextual and the structure is modelled on polyphonic music. A chance meeting between a violinist, Elise, and a pianist and budding composer, Nabil, with wine to loosen the gates of memory, yields two intersecting, contrapuntal monologues which conjure up two absent figures: her former lover, a painter, and his ex-wife, a frail, doting, pathetic creature. Each is desperately trying to bypass the past and find a new link in the present; but the more they try to get closer to each other, the farther apart they are drawn by the ghosts of their lost loved ones.
As in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, nothing can be saved or recovered and the action takes the form of a gradual tragic revelation of the fragility of life, the illusory nature of existence and the essential loneliness of the human condition. But despite the taut Aristotelian structure (the unity of time, place and action and the coincidence of performance and fictional dramatic time, in the sense that the duration of the performance is exactly the same as that of the meeting between Elise and Nabil), as the past invades and takes over the present, time and space become unsettlingly fluid and all attempts at communication or any sort of action are inevitably doomed. To the question of why love fails, on which the play hinges, neither character can find an answer. But of the consequences we are left in no doubt. El-Banhawi plants in the background of the play Beethoven's piano bagatelle For Elise, and pointedly makes her heroine, Elise, mention to her companion that it was an elegy for the death of the daughter of one of Beethoven's friends. Living in the shadow of the past, Elise, we gradually discover, is hardly alive. What has remained of her is an elegiac melody; and when she pronounces at the end that she stands all alone, totally bereft of all illusions, she becomes a poignant image of the living-dead.
Staging a play of this kind can be an ordeal, especially for a young director making his debut in the professional theatre. When Intisar Abdel-Fattah, the artistic director of Al-Tali'a, proposed it to Amr Qabil, the latter "froze with terror", as he confesses. His apprenticeship as an amateur director at the French Cultural Centre had been in comedy and burlesque. But the offer could not be resisted and to get into mainstream, professional theatre, Qabil accepted the challenge and this terrible make-or-break risk. Happily for him and for El-Banhawi, Caroline Khalil was at hand, available and willing to take on Elise. In the hands of an actress of less talent, sensitivity, culture and technical sophistication, the character -- completely unfamiliar in the Egyptian repertoire of female parts -- would have seemed strange and hopelessly impenetrable. Caroline handled it with subtlety, passionate reserve and superb attention to mood and rhythm. Like a well-groomed singer assigned the lead in an intricate quartet, she led the rest of the cast (Ashraf, Shereef and Shatsi), orchestrating their performances, filling in the gaps, making up for the lapses and steering them clear of the pitfalls of melodrama and sentimentalism.
Amr Qabil was also lucky in his choice of Mohamed Abdel-Mon'im as set designer. Dressing up the whole of Salah Abdel-Sabour's hall at Al-Tali'a (a chamber theatre) in soft, white gauze, with a live guitarist (Mohamed Darwish) on one side, a bar in the middle and tables and chairs for the audience to make them share the same fictional space as the actors was an excellent idea. It created the sense of intimacy and the kind of vague, dreamy atmosphere essential for this kind of play. The whole space wore the aspect of a shadowy tunnel with a painting (by Khalid El-Halabi) at the far end, split in the middle, representing a woman and her silhouette. The few steps on one side led to an isolated, veiled area, as if suspended in midair, where the heroine withdraws at the end to make her final pronouncement, and the rocking chair in front of it, where the characters alternately seek comfort by rhythmically rocking themselves, were poignant touches. So was the old gramophone facing that area on the other side. The sea, the live guitar, a nostalgic, old, 1930s tune, as well as Beethoven and Chopin provided a stirring and structurally active musical background. At the end, as the action doubles back on itself and the striving to overcome loneliness ironically lead to a confirmation of irredeemable loneliness, with no prospect of a sudden glow, however dubious, each member of the audience is left with him/herself to trace, in this rich, enigmatic audiovisual mosaic, the faint notes of old, forgotten melodies.
