Teasing ambivalences
Nehad Selaiha welcomes a revival of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author at the AUC
It is amazing that despite the wide popularity of Pirandello among Egyptian theatre scholars, critics, playwrights and directors and the far-reaching influence on theatre makers of his formal experiments, particularly his meta-theatrical dramatic triptych, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Each in His Own Way, and Tonight We Improvise, only two of his plays were staged in Egypt before the current production of Six Characters in Search of an Author at the AUC. Director Mahmoud El-Sabba' (1911-1989), who had studied theatre in London and Dublin in the late 1930s at his own expense and come under the influence of the new trends in European theatre, met with violent opposition when he proposed introducing unconventional plays, such as Pirandello's, to the Egyptian public. It was not until 1962, after the arrival of Brecht's epic theatre and absurd drama on the scene and the founding of the Pocket Theatre by Saad Ardash as a launching pad for avant-garde experiments, that he was able to stage Six Characters, and even then, he couldn't whip up enough enthusiasm to have it sponsored by any of the state theatre companies. The production was finally mounted by Gam'eyyat Ansar Al-Tamthil (Acting Champions Society) under his direction, with amateur and semi- professional actors.
It would be interesting to know how the 1962 production of Six Characters fared with the audience and critics. Unfortunately, I could find no written record of this, and of the many people I talked to, few could remember it, and only vaguely; it seems to have had a very short run and excited little interest. For the next Egyptian production of a Pirandello play we have to wait for 36 years. In 1998, Huda Wasfi, then head of the National Theatre, decided it was time to air Pirandello once more and opted for his uncontroversial masterpiece, Henry IV. For a director, she contracted the Italian Walter Manfre who cast veteran actor Ahsraf Abdel-Ghafour in the title role and TV star Nadia Rashad as Countess Matilda Spina, his old mistress. It was a good production, austere, moving and intermittently funny in a subtle vein. Nevertheless, it was sparsely attended, critically denounced and barely survived three weeks. It was generally thought to be cold and lacking in immediacy and relevance. One is tempted to think that in the hands of an Egyptian director, in a more adulterated form that played down the intellectual questioning of reality and illusion and foregrounded the comic potential of the situation, it might have gone down better with the public.
In the introduction to his English translation of Six Characters, Frederick May has described the play as "the dramatic analogue of The Waste Land ...a high poetic record of the disillusionment and spiritual desolation of its time". It is here perhaps that one should seek an explanation for the ambivalent attitude towards Pirandello that has persisted in Egypt since the 1960s: the avid admiration and zestful imitation of his formal innovations and the shying away from the vision which impelled the form. As in the case of absurd drama, the philosophical underpinnings of which ran counter to the underlying assumptions of Islamic culture as well as to the revolutionary mood of that era and its highly politicised theatre, Pirandello's profound scepticism, his unsettling reflections on the nature of reality and identity -- the elusiveness, relativity and illusoriness of the former and the multiplicity and fluidity of the latter -- must have proved hard to swallow and viewed as reactionary and politically subversive. Though dramatists like Mahmoud Diab, in Layali Al-Hasaad (Harvest Nights), and Youssef Idris, in Al-Mahzala Al-Ardiya (Global Farce), have exploited the theme of the mystery of identity to generate suspense and demonstrate the unknowability of the truth, what attracted most writers and directors to Pirandello was his dismantling of the conventions of realism and his openly theatrical investigation of the many conflicting planes of reality and illusion which go into the making of theatre. While Pirandello's texts were safely kept off the boards, the meta- theatrical form he launched in his famous trilogy of the theatre (shorn of any philosophical implications) was repeatedly drawn on, particularly in plays which sought to revive the popular theatrical heritage. Though Youssef Idris claimed in 1965 to have found the inspiration for his groundbreaking Al-Farafir (The Underlings) in Al-Samer Al-Sha'bi (an old, indigenous form of communal entertainment), as did Mahmoud Diab in connection with Harvest Nights, the influence of Pirandello was quite palpable in both plays, as the critics were quick to note.
Soon after the National's Henry IV, a foreign company (Ukrainian I think it was) brought Six Characters to the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre and did it in toto; it failed dismally. Despite powerful acting and a seductive, thinly clad Stepdaughter (an unfailing attraction for festival audiences), on the two successive nights it performed at the Puppet Theatre, the audience started fidgeting halfway through the first part, and after the interval only a quarter of them returned to their seats. Where did the fault lie? I wondered: with the audience? the production? or the play itself? I went back to the text and tried to read it away from the influence of all the glowing critical assessments and passionate encomiums I had swallowed over the years. It wasn't easy; but at the end, and quite reluctantly, I had to admit that a lot of what must have seemed shocking and revolutionary in 1921, the year the play was written -- the meta-theatrical form, the collapsing of the barriers between life and art, the relativity of truth, the idea that reality as well as subjectivity were consensual fictional constructions, as well as the fragmentary, multifaceted nature of awareness whether of the self or the other -- has become familiar and even mundane. In Zerox and Infinity, Jean Baudrillard writes: "We used to live in the imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and alienation." Was that the world Pirandello tried to capture in Six Characters in 1921? "Today," Baudrillard continues, "we live in the imaginary world of the screen ... All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens." In his analysis of contemporary culture, Baudrillard identifies our world, in the words of Richard Catlett Wilkerson, as "a hyperreal world where models of reality dominate and reality itself has given way to simulations of the real, and eventually to simulations of simulations that have no anchor, nor interest in the real whatsoever." This is a far cry from Pirandello's world of merging illusions and shifting planes of reality.
I reread the play again before going to see it in Frank Bradley's production at the Falaki Centre and once more, like the jaded critic I seem to have become, I felt it was somewhat verbose and overwritten and found the discussion of the nature of theatrical illusion, mimesis, and impersonation a bit laboured, intrusive and patronising. Worse still, I failed to sympathise with any of the six characters deserted by their author and deprived of a text, and the story of a young woman driven to prostitution by poverty and saved at the 11th hour from sleeping with her stepfather struck me as too embarrassingly melodramatic. The fact that all Pirandello's interesting musings on the impossibility of human communication and on reality and the unified self as mere illusions, are earnestly voiced through the selfish, loquacious "Father", without the slightest hint of irony, in an effort to exonerate himself, make them sound forced and obtrusive. This may sound blasphemous and I don't know whether, or how far, Bradley shares my feelings about the text. In his production, however, he managed a subtle change of perspective which tipped the balance of dramatic power and sympathy in favour of The Director and The Actors rather than The Father and his family. This seemed to put things right for me and remove a major source of irritation.
Rather than a commercial theatre, a smug, ridiculous director and a bunch of shallow, vain and cliché-ridden professional actors such as we find in the original text, Bradley presented us with a group of young AUC students assisting a fellow theatre student with her graduation project. The proposed play is Beckett's End-game rather than "The Game As He Played It ...by Pirandello" the text mentions and which Pirandello, in a conscious, ironical gesture of self-vindication, makes the obtuse Director grumble about and describe as tedious and ridiculous. The substitution of the AUC for Pirandello's imaginary theatre and of fresh, eager, real students for blasé, complacent, fictional professionals, with the alterations in the dialogue this entailed, gave the initial, hilarious rehearsal scene an unmistakable ring of truth and established a firm baseline of reality, a warm bond of sympathy and a definite perspective. Whatever followed we viewed from the point of view of the young female Director and her assistants, and at every step we shared their bewilderment, anxiety, frustrations and gradual dawning of awareness. I experienced the play in this production as a learning process I shared with the Director and her Actors, as a disturbing but illuminating collective dream, or dip into the unconscious (not unlike the lovers' in A Midsummer Night's Dream), as a painful, inevitable rite of passage from the blissful ignorance of innocence to the sadness of knowledge and experience.
As The Director in Bradley's new interpretation, Mariam Ali Mahmoud, whom I have admired in many previous AUC productions, had the difficult task of providing the emotional focus and gravitational point of the show, and she amply fulfilled it. Her obvious urge to do what she thought was best both for the Six Characters artistically speaking became the human face of the play. Her Director was a practical, energetic young woman, with a forceful, commanding personality but gentle, sensitive and innately courteous underneath, with a warm, affectionate nature and a generous capacity for sympathetic understanding. With her jeans, flat shoes, bottle of water, green jacket and socks and pony tail, she looked touchingly young -- a person one cared what happened to and wanted to shield. Though she had her back to us most of the time, one could read her feelings in her posture and tension of her muscles, and the look of genuine shock and helpless bewilderment on her face at the beginning, on first seeing the characters, and the pose of gentle, philosophical sadness and pensive reflection at the end, as she sat alone on the empty stage, framed the meaning of this production of Six Characters as a journey towards a more profound understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of human existence as well as of the art of theatre.
Mariam's performance was bolstered by Dalliah El-Badry, Maha El- Swais and Laila Soliman who gave her valuable, unobtrusive support and the rest of the cast, though some of them seemed at a loss sometimes as to what the play was all about or in which direction it was ultimately moving, did a fair job on the whole within the scope allotted each. The one really jarring note in this respect was Jasmine Sobhi's performance as The Stepdaughter which, in turn, negatively affected that of Luke Lehner as The Father. Moving lightly, with studied grace, like a ballet dancer, with her toes touching the ground first, a manner of walking hardly suited to the character of a brazen prostitute, she barked her lines inarticulately at everybody in a monotonous high pitch that became intolerably irritating after a while. She was much better in the silent scenes, particularly her meeting with The Father in Madame Pace's parlour, when her body language came into play and held the stage. So all is not past remedy. What Jasmine urgently needs is plenty of voice training enunciation lessons.
Stancil Campbell's geometrically austere, all black set of a bare stage, with a catwalk and service ladders, which at certain significant points was plunged into total darkness or burst into breathtaking fiery red or sky blue (he also designed the lighting) was at once beautiful and functional and created many physical levels which corresponded to the multiple planes of reality and illusion in the play. Especially unforgettable was the lighting of the six characters at the beginning and end when suddenly one side of the dark back wall became transparent and the figures appeared in silhouette, against a black background, as if in a void, with a bright light from the back providing their outlines. At the beginning, the combination of black, gray and dusty beige in the set and characters' costumes gave the stage an oppressively drab look. But as the characters began to enact their story, with the help of The Director, and bits of furniture and props were brought in, the stage seemed to spring to life and acquire a more cheerful, lively aspect. This is not in Pirandello's stage directions and I took it as an indirect tribute by Bradley and Campbell to the power and beauty of theatrical illusions. In other respects, too, Bradley did not follow the text's meticulously detailed directions. The most significant divergences occur at the end where, unlike Pirandello, Bradley brings all six characters on stage, including The Boy and The Little Girls, both of whom we have just seen dead, taking his cue from The Father's earlier words that as fictional characters, they could never change or die. Bradley also instructed The Stepdaughter to take off her mask before stepping off the stage into the auditorium. It made sense: without relinquishing her immortal status as artistic fabrication, symbolised by the mask, she could not logically break free. But the most significant detail which clinches Bradley's fresh reading of the play was, as I mentioned before, the sight of the young director, sitting pensively on the empty stage, when everybody had gone, then finding the Characters, all Six of them, materialising once more.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 13 - 19 November 2003 (Issue No. 664)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/664/cu1.htm