Another endgame
Nehad Selaiha watches El-Hakim's Death Game turning into a celebration of life
Notwithstanding his forbidding (largely self-manufactured) reputation as a writer of "dramas of ideas" that are meant for a "theatre of the mind" rather than live performance, Tawfiq El-Hakim continues to attract young directors. Early this year, on 29 March, I reviewed on this page an adaptation of his 1955 one-act play, Nahwa Hayat-en Afdal (Towards a Better Life), presented by the Angels Team at the 3rd festival of the Christian United Drama Teams at the Catholic Cultural Centre. The following issue (No. 838), dated 5 April, carried my report on an ambitious venture to present five of El-Hakim's plays successively, over a month, at Al-Zaqaziq cultural palace in Al-Sharqiyya governorate, east of the Delta. The project, entitled Layali El-Hakim (Nights with El-Hakim), was masterminded and directed by Amr Qabil, and the plays he chose out of El-Hakim's voluminous dramatic output were: Al-Sultan Al-Ha'er (The Sultan's Dilemma, 1960), Maglis Al-Adl (Council of Justice, 1970), Al-Safqah (The Deal, 1956), Rusasah fil Qalb (A Bullet in the Heart, 1931), and Ahl Al-Kahf (People of the Cave). Dealing with political, romantic and philosophical subjects, they eloquently displayed the impressive thematic and technical range of El-Hakim's talent.
Lu'bat Al-Mawt (Death Game), however, staged in early March by Osama Raouf at the Youssef Idris hall in Al-Salam theatre (the venue of Masrah Al-Shabab or Youth company), was the play which marked the onset of this El-Hakim fever. I forget exactly why I failed to catch it at the time; all I remember is that something always cropped up whenever I decided to see it. When finally, one evening, I found myself at the appointed venue, at the right time, it was gone. The thought that it would definitely resurface during the National Theatre Festival in July gave me some comfort; but, would you believe it, the festival came and went and it still eluded me. Had it not been for its lead, Youssef Dawood, winning the best actor award, I would have spent the rest of my critical life wondering what the cast and crew made of the rather verbose dialogue of this four-acts, 1957 piece. Luckily, the head of the state-theatre organisation, Ashraf Zaki, had publicly pledged to grant all winning productions a further run. The Death Game, rechristened Al-Hayah Hilwa (Life is Beautiful) was one of them. For better or for worse, I was destined to see it.
Death, whether of natural causes, or in the form of murder or suicide, is a favourite theme with El-Hakim who manipulates it in a variety of structural ways -- not surprisingly for a playwright who professes a fondness for the conflict of abstract ideas and metaphysical issues. Invariably, however, it is dramatically enlivened by intrigue, in terms of plot, and witty, often humorous, dialogue. In Sir Al-Muntahirah (Secret of a Suicide, 1929), a young woman hurls herself out of a window when spurned by her lover, wreaking havoc, in the process, with her psychiatrist's life; in Hayah Tahatamat (Shattered Life, 1930), a brilliant lawyer takes to drink and drugs and finally shoots himself when his beautiful wife leaves him for a new, wealthy husband; in 'Ureedu An Aqtul (I Want to Kill, 1950), a deranged young woman, with a compulsive murderous urge, shoots at an elderly couple and only succeeds in destroying their romantic attachment and mutual trust; in Milad Batal (The Birth of a Hero), an officer virtually courts death in the 1948 war over Palestine; in Arifa Kayfa Yamout (He Knew How to Die), an aged, retired politician engineers a plot to die gloriously and get once more into the limelight, and ends up falling ignominiously down an open manhole; in Oghniyat Al-Mawt (Death Song), a veritable little gem in terms of structure, a peasant woman orders the slaughter of her own son when he refuses to become a pawn in a hereditary vendetta, marking his arrival and demise with a song; and in Daqat Al-Sa'aa (Time is Up, or, literally, The Clock has Struck), Death, masquerading as an overworked, short-sighted and quite frail electricity inspector, descends upon a sick man, only to take away the life of his youthful son. I had not realised before this obsession with death on the part of El-Hakim, particularly the death of young people. It was only when I was looking for the text of the Death Game in his collected works, reading, or re-reading so many plays on the way, that I began to wonder if he had prophetically sensed in the 1950s the eminent death of his own musically gifted son not so many years later.
The death of a young son is an essential structural feature of the Death Game. The hero, an internationally famed historian, would not have found himself in such dire psychological straits had not his 24-year old son died in the 1956 Suez war (the play was written in 1957, long before El-Hakim's son died). The condemnation of war, as a vicious machine that leads to the gratuitous killing of humans, is the primary subject of the play. But the tragedy of the hero extends far beyond the immediate regional wars to hark back to World War II. Having lost his son, and soon after his wife, who died of grief, the hero in the play decides to dedicate his life to his science. But in the pursuit of that science, he gets fatally exposed to lethal radiation in some far off Asian country. Thoroughly disillusioned with everything he had ever believed in, and anxious to precipitate his ordained demise, the professor, who has turned into a thorough misanthropist, donates all his money and property to a third-class belly dancer, working in a sleazy nightclub and facetiously nicknamed Cleopatra. He is sure that she, and her lover-pimp, the knife-thrower Antonio, and mother-bawd (the Madam) at the cabaret, would plot for him a quick death to get the loot. His justification for this convoluted design is the rapacious, inhuman game of death that all nations and peoples are playing. Not for a moment could he imagine a hitch, a turning of the wheel, or an expediency gainsaying his design.
But it happens. The down-at-heel belly dancer registers a counter will, consigning all her to-be- inherited possessions to the impoverished students of the big professor. That he cared to put his trust in her and his legacy in her hands, is what matters to her; she feels reborn and is determined to be worthy of his trust. Rather than plot his murder, the faster to inherit him, the dancer, by her unpredictable act, restores his faith in life and the goodness of the human heart. Sentimental, elaborately unrealistic, and embarrassingly idealistic? Yes. But quite credible dramatically in the text so long as you treat the play as a dialogic thesis. Though feeble attempts at rounded characterisation are discernible, it would be futile to expect the characters to legibly answer all your questions. To process this unwieldy four-act work through a small black box, such as the Youssef Idris hall provides, and make it both palatable and meaningful to today's audiences, director Osama Ra'ouf, rephrased the classical Arabic into the Egyptian dialect, compressed the four acts into an uninterrupted two-hour run-through, and roped in comedian Youssef Dawood and the overwhelmingly voluptuous and refreshingly uninhibited Nahla Salama in the roles of the professor and the chaste prostitute.
That Salama overemphasized her physical assets most of the time and Dawood his comic ones more than what was actually required went a long way towards damaging the integrity of the anti- war, anti-death message of the text. Nevertheless, without these two stars, and their overwhelmingly attractive presence, I doubt if El-Hakim's Death Game would have survived for so many months at Al-Salam or drawn so many eager audiences.
Recommend
Comment
Printer-friendly
