No exit
Nehad Selaiha joins a group of travellers lost in a desert at Al-Hanager
If you decide to watch Lenin El-Ramly's Ein Al- Hayat (Spring of Life) which opened on the second day of the Greater Bairam holiday at Al- Hanager gallery, you would be well advised to avoid any fancy footwear or expensive clothing. Since you are going to wade through heaps of sand to reach your seats and squeeze against your neigbours on rough, wooden benches arranged in tiers, in three blocks, and dressed to look and feel like hard stone, jeans and sneakers are indicated. To create the desert scene in which the play is set, director Essam El-Sayed and stage-designer Hazem Shebl have chosen to cover the whole floor of the gallery at Al-Hanager with a thick layer of sand, using over 20 truck-loads of it. Though sand had featured in an earlier production at Al-Hanager, Effat Yehya's Desertscape I in 1994, the audience in her case were spared any discomfort; her play was performed in the regular theatre there, with the audience sitting comfortably in the clean auditorium while the actors floundered about in the sand on stage. In the present instance, however, we shared the set with the actors, facing them at close quarters, smelling and touching the sand with them, and occasionally getting it into our eyes, and feeling with them the oppressive presence of the forbidding wall of rock enclosing the whole space. It was a calculated effect and the experience was well worth the discomfort.
The choice of the gallery was deliberate, since the stage of Al-Hanager is currently free. As a sensitive director, Essam El-Sayed felt that Ein Al-Hayat required a claustrophobic, menacing atmosphere to underscore the irony of the title and meant to tell us that we shared the predicament of the characters and were all in the same boat with them. El-Sayed had resorted to environmental sets in two earlier productions: Black Rabbit in which the small hall of El- Taliaa theatre was transformed into a typical rural house complete with a traditional oven; and Mahrous Farm where the same hall became a semi-rural café roofed over with straw and palm leaves. Both were atmospheric one-act plays like Ein Al-Hayat and in both cases the rewards were immense. With a gifted stage-designer like Hazem Shebl in the artistic crew, how could he resist opting for this kind of set? To be lost in a desert can be frightening; but in a real desert one could possibly draw comfort from the openness of the space and the skies above. In this production, however, the terror of such a situation is multiplied by the insistent sense of entrapment created by the set, the low ceiling of the gallery which is left dark and seems as if about to descend lower and crush you into the sand, and the fact that whatever openness might exist is out of view and the whole of the desert seems enclosed within one hellish spot.
Ein Al-Hayat or the spring of life, the name of the spot in which a group of holiday-makers out to enjoy the beauty of the desert find themselves after losing their way, a spot which, according to the archaeologist in the group does not exist on the map, turns out to be a graveyard lorded over by a demented Bedouin (Mohamed Tawfiq), with an unquenchable blood-lust, armed with a machine-gun and served by a pathetic, tormented hunchback, strongly reminiscent of Lucky, Pozzo's slave and beast of burden in Waiting for Godot. Like Lucky who goes dumb in the second act of Beckett's play, Saber (Mohamed Nashaat), Wahshi's obsequious and passive servant, loses his power of speech towards the end of El-Ramly's play at the hands of his master whose name in Arabic combines the meanings of savagery and barbarism. Though the holiday-makers -- a lawyer and member of the People's Assembly (Zein Nassar), a rich businessman (Mohamed Alieddin) and his veiled, thickly bejewelled wife, Rukaya (Nivene Mohamed), a bigoted, sanctimonious doctor of Islamic law or Sharia (Mohamed Bayoumi), a tourist guide (Hamada Barakat) and his girlfriend, an American nurse (Nirmeen Zaazaa), an archaeologist (Yasser El-Tobgi) and the driver of the Jeep they hire (Mohamed Nasr) -- all wear contemporary clothing and outwardly carry the gloss and veneer of civilisation, they soon crack up under the pressure of the situation and reveal their true characters.
When Wahshi asks them to choose one of them to be sacrificed to satisfy his urge to kill, promising to let the rest go safely back to civilisation, they dither and prattle and fail to make a united stand. Each is after protecting their own skin and avoiding any risk to their lives. The worst in them, the most abominable traits in human nature, come to the surface and we are treated to a veritable, shameful galaxy of human vices -- a sardonic display of cowardice, selfishness, ridiculous wishful-thinking, meanness of spirit, servile hypocrisy, vanity, bigotry and fanaticism. The only people who preserve a modicum of human feeling and dignity in this ordeal are the poor driver, the American nurse and the Egyptian archaeologist/ geologist who is significantly named Gharib, meaning "stranger" or "alien"
The wonderful Russian critic Tvestan Todorov once said that when the everyday rational logic of causality fails to explain a phenomenon, the hunt for symbols begins: it tries to bridge the gap between seemingly disconnected incidents. Therefore, in the absence of any logical explanations which could make sense of the situation we face in El-Ramly's Ein Al-Hayat, or Ein Al-Haqiqah (spring of truth), as the scientist Gharib re-defines it, and is supported in this by the driver and the American nurse, we are forced to read into the play more than meets the eye -- something approaching a denunciation of ideological bigotry, of religious hypocrisy, of our intellectual, economic and media subordination to oil-rich desert cultures, and a plea to open up to the Western "other" who champions human rights.
Needless to say, the basic situation in Ein Al- Hayat is not new; think of The Swiss Family Robinson, J M Barrie's Admirable Crighton, and, in Egypt, Salah Abu Seif's films The Beginning or Between Heaven and Earth, and of all the plays, stories and novels about shipwrecks and castaways on desert islands, or go back to The Arabian Nights and you will know what I mean. But apart from such stuff, think of Saadeddin Wahba's Sikket Al-Salama (Road to Safety) and you will realise that Ein Al-Hayat, like the recent Salam Al-Nisaa (Women for Peace) in which El-Ramly burlesqued Aristophanes' Lysistrata, is another parodic, intertextual engagement with an older, hallowed text. Indeed, the echoes from the earlier Wahba play are unmistakable. The driver in El-Ramly's play echoes the driver in Wahbi's when he says it was only the second time he drives this route and that someone must have turned the road- sign round. Wahba's play was politically symbolic, or, rather, allegoric. Its message was simply that the 1952 Revolution lost its way when the intellectuals failed to match up to its objectives and decided to change directions. But in Wahba's play all was not yet lost, even though the only people who benefited from the experience when rescue came and decided to change were the prostitute, Sousou, and the poor, helpless driver. In Ein Al-Hayat no rescue comes or is likely to come, and there is no repentant Sousou. The driver here, and Sousou's surrogate, the American nurse, Madelene Friedman, fail to maintain their humane stand for long and eventually capitulate. In the face of such moral laxity and servility, the crazy oppressor, once he killed the brain of the group in the figure of the scientist at the behest of his companions and silenced for ever his servant, asks for more victims.
One way of reading the performance is that we have, as Egyptians, sold our souls to the devil, the devil being the culture of the oil-rich desert countries and bowed down to their bigoted ideologies. But whatever other readings you may reach after the experience of the show, which can be deceptively hilarious, considering El-Ramly's comic craftsmanship and infinite resources of wit and humorous parody, you will find it difficult to shake off the sense of bitter dismay and nihilistic hopelessness deeply ingrained in the text of Ein Al-Haqiqah or spring of truth, and communicated in every detail of the show. Not only the show, but its timing too -- Greater Bairam, the season for blood sacrifices the date of which is decided by Saudi Arabia -- were tellingly and bitterly ironic.
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