In progress:
A character exploration
By
Sherif Nakhla
Frank Bradley, who teaches at the American University in Cairo, is a theatre director and professor. Born in 1954 and raised in North Carolina, Frank started teaching in 1983 in New York. He continued to teach, while forwarding his directorial career, in six other universities in the US -- until he arrived in Cairo in 1999. His productions for AUC include A Man's A Man, Don't Trifle with Love and Antigone, which was revived as a part of The Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. Bradley is currently rehearsing his latest AUC project, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.
In the past four years I've had the opportunity to direct plays that have lived with me since the beginning of my teaching career. Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play that I've taught my students over 13 times, it is one of the central plays of modern drama.
My attraction to the play is not only due to what it has to say, it's theatrical brilliance is such that it manages to forward a philosophical exploration of the difference between a character and a person even as it remains deeply engaging. At the same time it works like a ghost-story, full of surprises. The text's complexity is a great challenge for the actors. As for me, the play is full of wonderful tools with which to give the actors directions, because the story itself is about pure acting. Written in 1925, I think, Six Characters in Search of an Author is in a way about itself within itself. It raised issues that became extremely fashionable in terms of literary criticism and theory during the 1970s and 1980s, predating a great deal of post-modern thinking. Definitely it's ahead of its time in the sense that it points to its own frame of reference and destabilises itself.
A high budget is not a requirement for this play, it can be done with nothing but rehearsal lights because the story itself takes place in a theatre, but we actually have the benefit of an interesting set and a very involved lighting scheme. The characters in the script are, as far as I know, the only ones in the history of drama who actually announce that they are characters, that they can have no other existence except on stage. AUC theatre has always been 100 per cent educational, but that doesn't mean that people can't come in and watch and get just as much out of it as they would get from a professional production. Every aspect of what we do in the PVA department we do for the sake of teaching our students and anybody who works in theatre. AUC provides advanced facilities that give us the capability to include production values that are on a pretty high level. We can present a product that is quite watchable by audiences who do not need to think they have to condescend to come and see a group of student actors performing for their parents.
I can't say that I've had ongoing themes that I've always been attracted to through the duration of my career, my thematic attractions are more like cycles. Many years ago I was mainly attracted to Eastern European post-absurdist abstract pieces, I felt an inner sense of alienation that really came out in these plays and made them speak to me. In time I found myself attracted to completely different themes, but what strikes me about my last three productions (A Mans a Man, Antigone and Six Characters in Search of an Author) is a common thematic element. They look very particularly at the issue of character as well as what we understand as a "dramatic character" that is written in a script.
Sophocles (Antigone) invented what we know as dramatic character, Bertold Brecht (A Man's a Man) has this idea that what we call character is an artificial construction that is a result of our mindless surrender to the manipulative forces surrounding us. In Six Characters in Search of an Author we face characters who are condemned to being only what they are and yet they want to be something else. They are each caught in a trap, face to face with those who interpret them, and it torments them. I certainly realise that everybody has been in a situation where they felt misunderstood. It happens all the time, when you feel that an action you have done has been misinterpreted -- understood in a way different from your intention. This is a play that really digs deeply into that issue but in a way that is not simply abstract and philosophical but funny, compelling and absolutely terrifying.
My time in Cairo hasn't felt like four years at all, more like one extended journey that has only been going on for four months. But what I am happiest and proud about during my stay in Cairo is seeing some of my students grow from being just beyond adolescence, with a sort of high unfocussed excitement about theatre, into focussed actors and directors who have been able to make and perform major productions outside AUC. Theatre by nature is always changing and I expect that many of our future graduates will have a role and a voice in changing theatre in Egypt. Cairo is a place where time passes quickly because it is such a busy city, I haven't been bored since I arrived. Sometimes I want to be bored so I can at least relax and breath for a while.
I'll get a break for sure, but I don't know when.
