Brief reprieve

Nehad Selaiha has mixed feelings about the Egyptian premiere of Our Town at Al-Hanager

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Sometimes the timing of a production can be crucial in deciding its impact on an audience. The phenomenal popular success of the recent Al-Li'b fil Dimagh (Messing with the Mind) at Al-Hanager is a case in point. Riding on the rising tide of anti-American feelings after the invasion of Iraq it whipped up the audience's resentment against the policies of the Bush administration in the Middle East, turning the performance into a cathartic event.

That this vituperative piece of anti- American invective should be immediately succeeded, at the same venue, with a production of an American classic, staged by an American director and jointly sponsored by the American Embassy in Cairo and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, caused some eyebrows to rise and triggered a number of ironical comments. One critic read it as a kind of compromise on the part of the ministry -- "holding the stick from the middle", he called it -- and an attempt to pacify the representatives of the American government in Cairo. Another, equally suspicious, saw it as a clever American ploy, perfectly timed to offset the damage caused by the notorious Abu Ghraib photos, an attempt to persuade Egyptians that the American people and their culture were one thing and the Bush administration another (a moot point, some would say).

To people with niggling, suspicious minds, not only the timing of the event but the choice of play seemed significant, intended to gloss over the injustices suffered by the Iraqis and Palestinians by affirming that despite all conflicts and differences we are all essentially alike and partake of the same basic human experiences. Why else pick Our Town, a former student of mine asked -- it is a play, she said, which predates any serious involvement of the United States in world affairs, nostalgically harking back in its temporal setting to a simpler, more organic type of community and way of life, shutting off history in favour of a natural, cyclical view of human existence and arguing that, in the final analysis, human life is the same everywhere.

Her sardonic outburst reminded me of Roland Barthes' analysis of a photo on the cover of a number of Paris-Match showing a young, black French soldier saluting the French flag. To him it was a bourgeois representation with an encoded ideological message intended to peddle the idea, or myth as he preferred to call it, that France's empire treated all its subjects equally. In another article in Mythologies he had ironically exposed in like manner the comforting and deluding myth embedded in a photography exhibition intended to show that regardless of history, geography, economy or politics, human nature was the same everywhere. Ideology functions through myths, he claimed, representations or constructions of reality which ignore history and the socio-economics of their production to present themselves as natural, universal facts.

Is Our Town, with its quasi- documentary form and insistence on dates and facts, one such myth? Read in the light of Barthes' Mythologies, one could credibly argue, as American artists Ron Vawter, Elizabeth Lecompte and their Wooster Group did in a 1988 parody of the play called Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act), that the message of the play, though comforting, is specious and cannot stand historical scrutiny. Coming to the play fresh from watching on television the chaos and bloody clashes in Iraq, the dead and wounded in Gaza, bereaved mothers running after ambulances and dazed kids searching among the rubble of what was once their homes, it is difficult to see how anyone could expect us to believe that the lives and experiences of those unfortunates are basically the same as those of the Gibbs', the Webbs or any of the other inhabitants of Grover's Corners.

It is true that death features prominently in Our Town ; not only does the whole of the third act take place in a graveyard, all the characters in the play are supposed to have died long before the play starts and only live as memories in the mind of the godlike narrator/stage- manager who conjures them up at will. But to argue that because death comes to all it is a "leveller" would be crass casuistry. The way people die matters, and the quality of their lives before death matters even more. The final hymn to life Emily sings from the grave speaks of a loving mother and father, wall clocks and sunflowers, good food and freshly-made coffee, hot baths, clean, ironed clothes and warm beds. The play celebrates these simple pleasures and urges us to do the same. But it is exactly these simple pleasures, which the citizens in peaceful Grover's Corners take for granted, that are denied to many people in Iraq, and to most in Palestine.

Our Town, nevertheless, is a classic and remains, whatever reservations one may have about it, technically intriguing, especially in its treatment of time, and profoundly moving. It was chosen with the best of motives, no doubt, and but for the timing it would have seemed an excellent choice. The timing, however, was neither as deliberate, nor premeditated, as some would like to think. If someone must be blamed for it, it has to be Mr Bush. The idea of launching a collaborative theatre production with an American director and Egyptian actors and technical crew started months before the American invasion of Iraq. Director Seth Gordon, of the Cleveland Playhouse, was picked for the job and after some deliberation over possible texts it was decided that Thornton Wilder's 1938 Pulitzer- winner, Our Town, was a safe choice.

Tame, indeed prim by today's standards, free of verbal gimmickry and quite accessible in terms of story, setting and characters and with a universal theme to boot (what could be more universal than Daily Life, Love and Marriage and Death -- the titles of its three acts?) it seemed guaranteed to offend none and please many. An ordinary Egyptian middle-class audience would immediately identify with the characters' moral conservatism, especially in sexual matters, and their deep attachment to church and hometown and would heartily sympathise with its traditional view of men and women (women are virtuous but have weaker nerves, men are morally fallible but strong and dependable) and its strict definition of their distinct roles and spheres in life (father works outside, mother slaves in the home). It also had the added advantage of a big cast which would involve many Egyptian actors in the project. The old translation was deemed unsuitable -- too rigid and a bit inaccurate -- and so a new one was commissioned and promptly executed. But just when everything seemed ready and poised for the start the Bush administration put a spanner in the works and launched their military campaign against Iraq.

A postponement was inevitable. When the project was revived a year later politics seemed to be still grimly dogging its fortunes. All over the media, gruesome images of hooded Iraqi prisoners and wailing women outside the barbed wire fences of Abu Ghraib alternated with shocking, gory ones from Gaza. To put off the project once more, however, in the hope of better times was impractical; indeed, since the situation in Iraq and Palestine gets grimmer by the hour, with no signs of letting up, it would amount to putting the whole idea in cold storage. Better now than never, it was decided.

The play opened at Al-Hanager Centre last Tuesday where it played five nights to good houses before closing to prepare for a tour of Fayoum, Minya and Ismailia. Seth Gordon had auditioned scores of actors before picking an excellent 20-member cast led by Sayed Ragab as the narrator/stage-manager, Salwa Mohamed Ali and Mohsen Hilmi (her husband in real life) as Dr and Mrs Gibbs, Ahmed Mukhtar and Azza El- Husseini as Mr and Mrs Webb, Shady El-Dali and Dalia El-Guindi as the young romantic couple, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, Tariq Said as constable Warren and Hamada Shousha as the unhappy, drunken church organist. His direction meticulously followed Wilder's text and stage directions (as he had announced in a press conference a week before the opening), sticking to the play's three-acts-and-two-intervals arrangement (rarely used in Egypt nowadays) and attempting no new reading. With a minimalist set, consisting of two door-frames, two step-ladders, a couple of tables and a few chairs, period costumes and no props or accessories of any kind (as Wilder insisted), Gordon and his artistic team -- Effat Yehya (assistant-director), Sa'd Samir (lighting- designer), Jennifer Ferguson (costume- designer), Nayer Nagi (music), Maged Munir (sound) and Manal Ibrahim (stage-manager) -- treated us to a solid, smooth, traditional production which relied on the power of the acting to communicate the poetry of the text and body forth its thesis and message. Both came across quite vividly: while the thesis comfortingly assured us that people were the same everywhere, the message told us that life was wonderful but all too short and, therefore, ought to be valued and celebrated in every minute.

Of the five performances presented at Al-Hanager I watched three and every time I hated its parochial stuffiness, thought that Simon Stemson, the church organist, was absolutely right first to take to alcohol then hang himself in order to escape it, loathed Emily when she spoke of women's weaker nerves and didn't believe for a minute that everywhere people's lives were basically the same. And yet every time I cried, not knowing why. It could be that the play's innocent blindness to the evil in the world sharpened my awareness of the tragedy we are daily living through, of the pain and suffering all around. By contrast it seemed to offer a vision of the world before the Fall and innocence is always moving. Who knows? Maybe a play of this kind is just what people need in times of terrible stress. Gentle, lyrical and nostalgic, it could give one a welcome respite, like withdrawing into some kind of peaceful, restful retreat. What is wrong with some escapism?