Temporary truce
Nehad Selaiha is delighted to find herself back at Al-Hanager watching a performance
You can't imagine how happy I felt making my way to Al-Hanager last week to watch Abu El-Ela El-Salamouni's Taht El-Tahdeed (Under Threat). The play itself, though eminently watchable, had nothing to do with it; I would have felt the same whatever the play on offer. It was the place itself, the fact that it was defiantly back in action despite the constant threat of sudden, peremptory closure, and that I could go there, once more, for a performance.
For two years now Al-Hanager has been closed by official orders pending renovations that would make it purportedly 'fire-proof'. If you ask me, it is the safest theatrical venue around in this respect, being a one-story building, with more convenient exit routes, alarm systems and prominently placed fire extinguishers than I have seen in any other theatre. But putting that aside, why hasn't it been renovated yet? Why is it taking so long? Why was such a vital venue promptly and diligently gutted and ripped apart as if by vandals then abruptly deserted and left to rot?
I once wrote that Al-Hanager was not simply a place, but an idea. For young artists, it stands for freedom, enlightenment, creativity, opportunity and a place under the sun. Since it opened at the end of the 1980s, it has been an incubator and a home for burgeoning talents. Over these years, slowly but surely, it nurtured a whole generation of new, talented theatre-makers who currently rank among the best on the market and won itself a prestigious reputation both at home and abroad. Its relaxed, informal atmosphere, friendly, courteous staff and bright, cozy cafeteria made it a favourite haunt and dating place for artists of all generations. On cheerless winter nights, there was always light shining through the glass doors of that low, tin-roofed building, dispelling the surrounding gloom, and the elegant, red-walled cafeteria looked warm and welcoming.
When the stage of Al-Hanager could no longer be used, its artistic director and manager, Huda Wasfi, put on performances at the gallery (which now you could only access through a small back door) or took her productions to the converted garage downtown called Rawabet. In the face of severe opposition and mounting obstacles, Wasfi has battled on to keep the idea of Al-Hanager alive and protect the space it has created for young artists and new experiments on the theatrical map of Egypt. The story of that struggle was partly recorded in my article "Nothing can defeat her" published in the Weekly on 28 February this year (issue 886), and a later article, "Fracas on the fringe" (see the Weekly, 23 October, issue 919), described how that struggle developed into a head-on- collision with the authorities during the last CIFET.
As I sat in the auditorium, waiting for Under Threat to begin, I found myself remembering where and when I first saw this play. It was nearly 20 years ago, and the place was El-Sammer theatre, the main Cairo venue for productions of the Cultural Palaces (then called Mass Culture) Organisation. It used to stand next to the National Circus in Agouza, facing the Nile, and consisted of a huge, gently tiered auditorium, roofed in with canvas, a low, broad stage, of little depth, a modest backstage and a few rooms in the big courtyard outside for offices.
Though the auditorium was austerely plain and often draughty, the hard, wooden seats were extremely uncomfortable, the bare cement floor was unsightly and made your feet freeze in winter, the stage curtain looked grubby and pathetically threadbare, the canvas roof sported some flapping rents through which you could watch the stars, and the lions next door occasionally provided some curious sound effects, El-Sammer was never dull or idle and I remember spending countless wonderful evenings there. For a number of years, in the 1980s, it used to annually host performances from all over the country for 100 successive nights, treating you to a pretty comprehensive view of what was happening theatre- wise outside the capital. During those distant 100- night festivals, every other night you met a new troupe and heard a new story, usually as interesting as Scheherazade's tales.
Where is El-Sammer now? I little thought when I sat there, 20 years ago, watching El-Salamouni's Under Threat that the place itself faced the threat of demolition. One fine morning, a few years later, the bulldozers arrived and razed it to the ground, with the promise of a better building, which never materialized. The site where El-Sammer once stood is now a derelict, empty space, strewn with rubbish and fenced off with billboards carrying vulgar advertisements. A pity that once a bustling theatre, El-Sammer had no staunch champion like Wasfi to defend it.
I still vividly remember what that first production of Taht El-Tahdeed was like. Tawfiq Abdel Hamid was stunning as the sensitive, embittered, and slightly unhinged artist who was traumatically abused as a child and later thrown in prison for ten years for a crime he did not commit, while soprano Neveen Allouba, in a rare appearance as a dramatic actress, competently took on the part of the artist's loving and faithful wife whom he mentally torments, saddles with a guilt complex and ultimately drives to suicide. Directing them was Abdel Sattar El-Khodary -- a gifted, but highly eccentric and volatile artist -- who adopted the pseudonym 'Papillion' after a spell in France, had a strong penchant for murky, sadistic, psychological plays (he also staged Mahmoud Neseem's The Room, which similarly centers on the tortured mind of an artist, in a memorable production at Al-Hanager), and, like El-Sammer theatre, suddenly vanished while still in his prime.
With the memory of that earlier production still green, comparisons were inevitable. El Khodary had opted for an all out expressionistic style, symbolically setting the artist's studio in a basement which the wife could only reach by climbing down a flight of steps, and cluttering it with weird looking statues, with a gigantic hand hanging menacingly above them; he had also added a ballet dancer who flitted around in silhouette like a ghost, manipulated the lighting to create a bizarre, nightmarish atmosphere and generally transformed the whole stage into a visual counterpart of the shadowy, turbulent and ghost- infested inner world of the artist. To compound the visual effect, the action was accompanied by an eerie soundtrack which solely consisted of non-verbal cries of pain, melodiously voiced by Allouba and musically arranged by Maestro and composer Sherif Mohieddin. The acting partook of the same style, was loud, studiedly exaggerated and occasionally stylized.
The current production, on the other hand, was predominantly realistic and emotionally restrained. It seemed more intent on showcasing the text and skills of the actors than displaying the director's imaginative prowess and personal obsessions. While El-Khodary plunged us right into the middle of the nightmare, Mohamed Metwalli, who directed here, made us watch it from outside, and Mohamed Gabir's minimal realistic set, together with Amr Shakir's unobtrusive, soft, incidental music helped his design. The play came across as a domestic tragedy, with some psychological depth, modeled on the treatment of such instances of the genre in cinema and on television. Both Alaa' Quqa and Amal Abdallah, as the deranged/ vicious/pathetic artist and his long- suffering wife -- the handy scapegoat on whom he vents his rage against the world -- gave good, solid performances... quite credible and realistically convincing as in television drama: but nothing that could give you a sleepless night pondering their relevance.
Coming out of the Hanager, I suddenly wondered why this particular play seems to haunt places under threat and how long the current truce between Al-Hanager and its enemies will last.
Taht El-Tahdeed (Under Threat), by Abu El-Ela El-Salamouni, directed by Mohamed Metwalli, November, 2008.
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