Time is out of joint
The premiere of Saadallah Wannus's A Day of Our Times at Al-Ghad Hall leaves Nehad Selaiha deeply frustrated
When I heard that director Amr Dawwarah was rehearsing Saadallah Wannus's A Day of our Times at Al-Ghad theatre I was thrilled. At last lovers of Wannus's work were going to see this ferocious, deliciously outrageous satire on the mores and morals of our times in a live performance. It was too good to be true. When Wannus wrote this play in 1993, breaking a dramatic silence which lasted 13 years, he couldn't get it published anywhere in Syria and though it appeared a year later in the Egyptian literary periodical Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism) and in the Lebanese Al-Adaab (The Arts) magazine in 1995, before it was printed in 1996 in his collected works, there has been only one production of it so far, by a Jordanian fringe troupe, if I remember correctly, which I saw during the CIFET some years ago. Apart from that I know of no professional Arab director who dared to touch it before Dawwarah embarked on his current production.
This is not surprising in countries where freedom of expression is severely curtailed and public performances are heavily censored. A Day of Our Times is simply too verbally audacious, too shockingly outspoken. In five scenes, which take the form of violent confrontations punctuated by narrative passages and comments by the author in a voice-over, Wannus traces the progress, or, rather, plummeting of his hero from innocence to experience, from blissful ignorance to a terrible awakening and from hope to the depths of despair. Farouk, an idealistic, happily-married mathematics teacher at a girls secondary school in a small town discovers one morning, through a brawl in his classroom, that some of the girls, all of them from respectable families with fathers in high office, frequent a chic, cunningly camouflaged brothel run by a wealthy and beautiful woman called El-Sit Fadwa. Shocked and horrified, he questions the girls but is brazenly told to mind his own business. When he appeals to the headmaster to open an investigation he finds him busy trying to track down the culprit who has scribbled offensive political slogans against the head of the regime all over the walls of the school toilets. This is a far more serious offence, he is told, since loyalty to the regime is "the mother of virtues" and the major task of the school. Moreover, he is roundly admonished for speaking ill of El-Sit Fadwa who is praised by the headmaster as an upright citizen and generous benefactress.
Not heeding the headmaster's direct warning and his veiled threats not to meddle in this business Farouk resorts to the mosque in the next scene to seek the help of its Imam, Sheikh Metwalli. He finds him recording his daily radio Fatawi programme and listens to his pompous, obscene drivel about the ideal Islamic toilet practice -- a perfect parody of such programmes. When innocent pious Farouk broaches the subject and asks for advice he is, first, severely rebuked for not attending the Friday lessons and then treated to a long, impassioned harangue denouncing all schools and secular education in general as useless, pernicious and the work of infidels and the devil and harshly censured for slandering a pious and charitable lady like "El-Sit Fadwa" who donates generously to the mosque. Nowhere in Arab drama can you find such savage lampooning of religious teachers and preachers as you get in this portrait of the venal, hypocritical, bigoted and thoroughly obscene sheikh.
When Farouk, now thoroughly confused and dazed, decides to inform the father of one of the girls, who happens to be the governor of the province, he is subjected once more to a lecture, this time about the virtues of crass materialism, the market ethos and the need for moral resilience. To illustrate his point the governor cites the example of one of his employees who after years of loyal service suddenly went berserk, hurled obscene abuse at all his bosses, then stripped naked and peed on everybody in sight. Though we never see this poor civil servant, driven mad by years of silently watching rampant corruption or, according to the governor, by his failure to adapt and move with the times, he is so vividly evoked by Wannus that his grotesque, pathetic image acts as an ironically bitter emblem for the whole play. When Farouk finally manages to blurt out his information, asking the father if he knew that his daughter was a regular visitor to the notorious house, the father retorts breezily, but quite maliciously too: "Of course. It is where she met your wife and made friends with her. Your wife is very popular there and El-Sit Fadwa is very fond of her and pampers her. You are a very lucky man."
The fourth scene inevitably carries the devastated mathematician to the sorceress's enchanting, mirror- lined den to verify the truth about his wife. Finally we get to meet El-Sit Fadwa about whom we have heard so much and by the end of the scene Wannus has built her into a metaphor for life, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, all its pleasures and sorrows. Though he resists her seduction, the poor school-teacher is unable to condemn her and this adds to his confusion. He rushes home not to avenge his honour but to hide from a world in which he feels a complete alien. He has lost all his anchors in reality; everything he had ever believed in has crumbled and turned to dust. Feeling utterly alone, in a place and a time where he does not belong, as he keeps reiterating, he could find refuge only in death. But he doesn't travel alone; his wife too feels that the world, or El-Sit Fadwa, has seduced her, robbed her of her integrity and reduced her to a tattered rag. The play ends in a suicide pact with two embracing corpses. Admittedly, this is the stuff of melodrama par excellence and Wannus makes no bones about it. The play, however, never comes across as melodramatic. The rage and pain are all too genuine and inform every line; the handling of the scenes and management of the dialogue are imbued with a tough sense of irony and the verbal texture has the richness and evocative power of poetry without sacrificing its uncompromising honesty or sardonic humour.
I had been so looking forward to seeing this text in action on the stage. Now that I have seen it I do not know whether to celebrate or lament, applaud or boo. The choice of cast, led by Sohair El-Murshidi, in a welcome comeback to the stage after a long absence, is admirable and guarantees good acting. The directorial conception, which takes inspiration from the many mirrors lining the walls of El-Sit Fadwa's pleasure dome is quite intelligent and saves on the production costs to boot. Instead of assigning each character in the play an actor Dawwarah makes El-Murshidi and Mamdouh Darwish play all the negative characters in the play, with each performing as many as five different parts. El- Murshidi plays the headmaster, the governor's assistant, the radio-broadcaster who interviews Sheikh Metwalli, El-Sit Fadwa, as well as her aged father in the sketch about her former life she enacts before Farouk to convince him that she was as much sinned against as sinning. Darwish plays the school supervisor employed by the regime to spy on both pupils and teachers, Sheikh Metwalli, the governor, El-Sit Fadwa's valet de chambre and her former, brutal, mercenary husband in the short play-within-the play. Not only does this allow them plenty of scope to display their technical prowess it also creates an eerie effect that all the evil forces are distorted reflections of each other, lending conviction to the hero's growing sense of disorientation and of the flimsiness and instability of the world he moves in, despite the very realistic sets. By contrast Farouk 'Eita and Hanan Metawe' do not double in other parts but remain Farouk, the teacher, and his wife, Nagat, throughout. This endows them with a firm sense of reality, making them seem the only solid presences in a world otherwise populated by shifting appearances, insubstantial shadows and transient reflections.
No amount of good acting or directing, however, can mend what the censor had hopelessly spoilt -- which is the text. At his orders chunks were hacked, whole scenes (like Sheikh Metwalli's radio talk) were completely rewritten and rephrased in a more polite idiom and many words, particularly those that referred to organs or parts of the body, were replaced with euphemisms. It was as cruel as plucking out the teeth and fangs of a lion and removing its claws to consign it to the circus ring. The censoring process left us with a tame, docile text that had no bite. The hero's raging against the world and its sinful ways, however, was mostly left intact (he is after all a romantic idealist and does not use offensive words) and so was the final repentance and suicide scene. Should one be grateful for that and go along with the old Egyptian proverb -- Nus el-'ama wala el-'ama kuluh (To be half-blind is better that not to see at all)? I, for one, do not feel particularly grateful.
