All for a happy ending
Nehad Selaiha wonders if commercial success is an excuse for everything
Marriage on a Divorce Paper (Gawaz 'ala Waraqit Talaq) premiered in 1973 at the comedy theatre in a production by director Abdel-Rehim Al-Zurqani starring Karam Metawe' and Sohair El-Murshidi. The date is significant. The play was written after Nasser's death, Sadat's accession to power and the beginning of the ideological turnover from socialism to a vague, unconscionable brand of utilitarian, rightwing liberalism. Using the old, Cinderella formula of rich-boy-loves-poor-girl, Alfred Farag mournfully documents, as he steers the action to a tragic end, the collapse of the socialist dream of a classless society.
Murad, the son and sole heir of a rich, aristocratic family, falls in love with Zeinab, the daughter of ' am Sayed, a poor, ailing driver. Neither Murad's love nor socialist convictions can withstand the willful pressure of his mother who promptly sends him abroad to nip his romance in the bud. When he comes back and meets Zeinab by chance, however, their passion flares up again and this time they heedlessly and secretly indulge it. Zeinab's pregnancy, however, shatters the wispy dream and shocks the couple into facing both reality and themselves. As Zeinab, who repeatedly declares that she has sacrificed everything -- her family, honour and reputation -- for the sake of her love, waves the threat of suicide while pleading with Murad to marry her, one cannot help giving some credence to Murad's rising suspicions that she had meant all along, if even unconsciously, to ensnare him. One does not doubt the depth of her love for him; but there is always an uncomfortable hint of social climbing which momentarily surfaces in her father's description of her as a person who has always coveted things above her station in life. Murad, on the other hand, though passionately in love with her, selfishly insists she has an abortion and, for compensation, proposes a secret, legal marriage to save her honour. This way, he could continue enjoying her love while avoiding the social stigma such a marriage is bound to cause if made public. It would also make him feel magnanimous and put his conscience at rest.
The secret marriage proves a disaster and the couple are finally forced to realise the truth they had always suspected but refused to acknowledge: that it was not Murad's mother who stood in the way of their love but, rather, the social barriers they themselves have internalised. However much they may rebel, they cannot escape the ideology they have been born into and which has formed and continues to inform their consciousness. Farag seems here to be dramatising the concept of "interpellation" proposed by the French structuralist thinker Louis Althusser which "describes a mechanism whereby the human subject is 'constituted' (constructed) by pre-given structures," which, together, make up the dominant ideology in society. Internalised ideology functions here like fate in Greek tragedy and dooms the lovers as it has doomed, in Farag's reading of history, the dream of socialism in Egypt.
Cognisant of the immense melodramatic potential of his conventional plot, and keen on foregrounding its political implications, Farag resorted to the handy device of the-play-within-the- play, setting the love story within the framework of an ongoing heated altercation between a playwright and a director in the throes of putting together a production. The argument which continues in snatches throughout the play, alternating with the acted scenes, debates the relation of art to life: whether art should honestly reflect reality as it is or transcend it to offer a more hopeful alternative or forecast a brighter future. The actor and actress playing the lovers are occasionally dragged into the discussion too and asked to air their views. Apart from providing some comic relief, these argumentative frame-scenes are meant to distance the spectator emotionally from the dramatised action and are also used as markers to regulate the temporal flow of the inside-story which covers many years.
The twin structure chosen by Farag obviously creates a twin- time scheme: the past of the play, as it were, and its present. The first looks back to Egypt in the 1950s where the love story is set; and the second relates to the process of staging the play in front of the audience and in their time sphere. Though both time- frames are more or less contemporary, represent more or less realistic settings and share the medium of colloquial Arabic (features which distinguish this play from the rest of Farag's major works), they remain distinct in mode, with the tragic love story coming across as a nostalgic elegy for a lost dream and the frame scenes providing a detached, reflective perspective on it.
In the original text, the author finally has his way and ends the play tragically despite the director's vociferous objections and his plea that people prefer, indeed need happy endings. In the production at Al-Salam Theatre, however, this was not the case. Instead of the play ending with Zeinab's suicide and the author's plaintive comment that we live in a deeply fissured, schizophrenic society, director Ahmed Abdel-Halim has the leading actor objecting to this defeatist finale and insisting on a white wedding to symbolise the power of love to conquer all obstacles and bring about social reconciliation. Such an ending, needless to say, runs contrary to the ideological drift of the play, subverts its political message and makes a travesty of its dramatic logic. It is, however, completely in harmony with the director's intention of turning the play into a glitzy, multimedia, commercial musical comedy. With his eye on the box office, he went for a star-studded cast, led by Hisham Abdel-Hamid and Wafaa Amer as the lovers and Aida Abdel- Aziz as Murad's mother. Two popular comedians, Sami Maghawri and Youssef Ismail, were roped in as the author and director and Abdel-Halim gave them free rein to embroider their scenes with comic improvisations so that, by the end, the scenes ran into double their original time, lost their focus and function and seemed to detach themselves from the play and come across as isolated, bantering, comic duets in a variety show.
The comic input was bolstered by a strong dose of parody, particularly in Hisham Abdel-Hamid's debonair performance. Hisham started off as a gifted mime actor before he was snapped up by the film industry. In this play, he was given ample scope to display this neglected aspect of his talent. He took off a number of Egyptian film stars, including Omar Sharif, in famous scenes and parodied nightclub singers as well as the stereotypes of the rake and the romantic lover in old Egyptian movies. Indeed, with extensive footage of the hero and heroine in conventional, romantic settings, displayed on a huge screen at the back, together with excerpts from old documentaries featuring Nasser among the people or with factory workers and played against his proclamation of the 1961 "socialist laws" and a period patriotic song by Abdel-Halim Hafez (the singer most associated with the Nasser period) in praise of socialism, not to mention an excerpt from the most popular romantic movie of the 1950s ( The Empty Pillow, starring Abdel-Halim Hafez and Lubna Abdel-Aziz), cinema seemed to overshadow live theatre in this production.
And since all the happy, romantic scenes, except for one, were projected through film, while the single live romantic encounter was played behind a gauze screen with recorded dialogue, making it a close simulation of a cinematic projection, it was quite clear that Abdel-Halim had decided to use cinema as the equivalent of both the lost, socialist dream of the Nasser era and the romantic dream-world of the lovers in contrast to the live scenes which portray reality with all its conflicts and restraints. At one point, in part one, Abdel- Halim manages a spectacular transition from one world to the other by showing the two lovers on the screen, driving in a car through the desert, then letting them physically materialize on stage in the same car. The sight of a real car shooting from the wings onto the stage thrilled the audience. But there was more to the scene than just the thrill. As soon as romance is transposed from the screen to reality, the menacing voice of a watchman intrudes on the lovers' privacy and chases them off back to the screen.
This metaphoric counterpointing of cinema and live acting as dream versus reality was a brilliant idea. Unfortunately its dramatic efficacy was seriously impaired by the production's general tendency to excess and redundancy. There was simply too much of everything: too much cinema, too much needless dancing and too much lacklustre comedy. No wonder the less than two-hour play ran into nearly four. Not that this deters the audience. They flock to Al-Salam Theatre every night and seem to enjoy everything: the titillating love scenes, the melodramatic confrontations, the endless ad-libbing of the comedians, the sumptuous costumes, the impressive two-level set, the energetic frolicking of the dancers and, above all, the two leading stars' irresistible charm, glamour and charismatic presence. If you ask them what the play is about, they would probably tell you it was another Cinderella story set in modern times. Marriage on a Divorce Paper, however, has been running for over two months, playing to capacity audiences, and is likely to go on until the end of the season. When you have a box-office hit like that, does it matter that the significance of the original play has been lost?
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