Nehad Selaiha hails the premieres of Ibsen's A Doll's House and The Wild Duck and wonders why they did not happen sooner Before the 1950s Henrik Ibsen was virtually unknown in Egypt; very few had heard of him and even fewer had read him. For close on a century, the major influences on Egyptian theatre had been English, French and Italian and the most popular genres were melodrama, comedy, vaudeville and gory classical tragedies. Though many comedies and melodramas used realistic settings and character types and strove to tackle some glaring social injustices and prejudices, realistic social drama of the kind Ibsen attempted in the second phase of his career did not exist. The tradition of consigning the critical debating of serious social issues to the comic genre was so deeply entrenched that even No'man Ashour, who has been consensually nominated the father of realistic social drama in Egypt, could not escape its sway. Ashour was a Marxist who studied English literature at Cairo University and initially admired the works of George Bernard Shaw. From Shaw, it was a short step to Ibsen and, being a diligent, avid reader, with an insatiable curiosity where drama was concerned and having a good command of English, Ashour soon discovered Chekov and Gogol in English translations. Nevertheless, though his early plays, particularly his two chef-d'oeuvres -- Al-Nas Elli Taht (The People Downstairs, 1956) and Al-Nas Elli Fawq (The People Upstairs, 1958) -- evidence a remarkable degree of ideological kinship with Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov and their definite influence on him in matters of characterisation and dramaturgy, Ashour remained a faithful disciple of the long-established Egyptian comic tradition, particularly the brand of hilarious, sweet-and-sour social satire produced by Naguib El-Rihani and Badee' Khayri between 1935 and 1949, the year El-Rihani died. Like that great comedian, Ashour wisely realised that to put across any social or political message effectively, one had to coat it with thick layers of humour. In this respect, Shaw and Chekov served as better models than Ibsen. Ashour was not alone in discovering Ibsen at the time; in the early 1950s, a brilliant crop of English language graduates, led by Abdel-Halim El-Bashlawi, Salah Ezzeddin, and Kamel Youssef, pioneered a movement to introduce Ibsen to Egyptian readers and started producing Arabic versions of the available English translations of his plays. The earliest Arabic translations of Ibsen were mostly published by Maktabit Masr (The Library of Egypt publishing house); and though most of them are now out of print, they are still widely circulated among students of drama in the form of photocopies. The drive to render Ibsen into Arabic gained momentum when the official Egyptian broadcasting service launched a "Second [Cultural] Programme" in 1957. From that date and until 1962, according to El-Sherif Khatir who headed the drama section of this programme for a long time, a new contingent of translators -- including Abdallah Abdel-Hafiz, Aziz Suliman, Abdel-Hamid Saraya, Mohamed Ahmed, Na'im Gaballa, Mohamed Sami and Salah Abdel-Sabour (one of the most brilliant poets of that period) -- worked in close collaboration with a brilliant team of radio drama directors and treated listeners to excellent radio versions of many of Ibsen's best-known plays. Novelist Bahaa Tahir, who worked for that programme for a number of years, directed at least four Ibsen plays ( John Gabriel Borkman, The Lady from the Sea, Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken ) while Salah Ezzeddin did three: The Wild Duck, The Master Builder and Pillars of Society. The list also includes Mahmoud Mursi's A Doll's House ; Salah Mansour's An Enemy of the People ; Mohamed El-Sabbaa's Ghosts ; and Nureddin Mustafa's Rosmersholm. Curiously, however, things were different where the stage was concerned. In the chronicles of the Egyptian theatre you only come across a cursory mention of a production of Ghosts staged by Abdel-Rehim Al-Zurqani in 1954. Hard as I have tried, I could not discover who starred in that production or through which venue it was aired. When earlier this year I got an invitation from Germany to participate in a Berlin conference on Ibsen and was specifically asked to speak about the production of an Ibsen play, which has caused the most controversy in my country, I nearly laughed. In all my years as theatre critic, and up until last month, I had only come across two Ibsen plays: Hedda Gabler in November 1995 and Ghosts in March 2003; furthermore, both were staged in English at the American University in Cairo, and in both cases the director was Mahmoud El-Lozi. To think that such elitist productions which play to scanty audiences for a few nights could produce so much as a slight ripple in Egyptian intellectual circles, let alone in society, would be absolutely ludicrous. Indeed, in both cases, and though the productions were proficiently done, the drama unfolding on stage seemed to go above the heads of the younger members of the audience -- mostly students -- and few of them could grasp what either Hedda or Mrs Alving were making such a big fuss about. Ibsen's dry humour and subtle sarcasm seemed to have been quite lost on them and, to my chagrin, I heard a group of them in the interval between the first and second acts wondering when the ghosts the title sports would start to appear. It was obvious they had not read the play and came to the show expecting a spooky thriller. Nearly 50 years separate the first Egyptian production of Ghosts in Arabic and its second staging in English at the AUC. In January 1992, however, Ghosts briefly surfaced at Al-Tali'a Theatre, in the course of the second Free Theatre Festival, in a drastically altered form which made it quite unrecognisable. Director Abeer Ali and her independent Al-Misaharati troupe had used Ibsen's play as a source of inspiration, a launching pad into an investigation of the kind of ghosts that bedevil Egyptian society and came up with their own collectively written text. Indeed, but for the title, Ashbah Masriyya (Egyptian Ghosts), and Ali's pointed allusion to Ibsen's Ghosts in the printed programme and flyers as a primary source, it would never have occurred to me to link the two plays. (For a detailed description of Ali's production, see my "Chain- stitch" in Al-Ahram Weekly, 20-26 March, 2003) The nearest anyone came to writing what could be called a typically Ibsenite drama was Rashad Rushdi whose 1959 Al-Farasha (Butterfly) portrays the destruction of an artist by a rich, flighty society woman. In the following decade, however, and like Ashour, Saadeddin Wahba and other writers of that generation, Rushdi, who was the first Egyptian to head the English Department at Cairo university, deserted Ibsen in favour of Chekov and Bertolt Brecht. To the experimentally-inclined, highly politicised writers and directors of the 1960s, Ibsen, compared to Brecht, Peter Weiss, Pirandello, the dramatists of the Absurd and even Chekov, seemed somewhat faded and old-fashioned. A play like A Doll's House which in the 1920s, when the women's liberation movement was gathering force and beginning to make a difference, could have whipped up a lot of enthusiasm and been put to political use, seemed pallid and tamely conservative to the women of the 1960s generation who underwent military training in schools, were taught how to use firearms and urged by the new revolutionary regime to "get up and fight side by side with men," in the words of one extremely popular 1960s song by Shadia. Ibsen, it seems, had arrived in Egypt at the wrong time, too late. 2006, however, has been different so far. The worldwide celebration of the centenary of Ibsen's death has produced loud repercussions in Egypt. Earlier in the year, around March, director Mohamed Abul-Su'ood negotiated with Al-Hanager for a quasi-operatic production of When We Dead Awaken. The project came to naught due to lack of funds. A month later, director Ali Khalifa started rehearsals of A Doll's House at the National and the play was due to open in May. It didn't, and the reason was that Khalifa's Nora, film star Poussi, refused to perform at what theatre people call "the dead end of the season." The opening was postponed till October. Meanwhile, actress and director Azza El-Husseini was frantically hunting for funds and a venue to stage The Wild Duck and a talented director from Alexandria, Gamal Yaqout (one of the few survivors of the Beni Sweif fire) was busily directing an abridged version of A Doll's House in Al-Anfoushi Cultural Palace. El-Husseini eventually got financial support from the Ibsen 2006 Fund and two NGOs -- one of them, Shumoo' (Candles), for the care of the disabled, which necessitated incorporating some of the beneficiaries of that society into the performance. For a space, she wheedled Hoda Wasfi into giving her three nights at Al-Hanager and Ashraf Zaki, the head of the state- theatre organisation, into allowing her the use of Al-Salam Theatre for a further three-night run. I watched Yaqout's A Doll's House on 29 June and El-Husseini's Wild Duck on 2 July, and before I could sit down to reflect on both productions I found everybody excitedly talking of a projected grand international production of Peer Gynt to be hosted soon at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina under the auspices of Susanne Mubarak and the Queen of Norway. After a long starvation, it seemed we were having too much Ibsen. Though different in approach and artistic merit, both Yaqout's A Doll's House and El-Husseini's The Wild Duck display, in different degrees, a tendency to soften (romanticise? Sentimentalise?) Ibsen's texts and make them less disturbing than they were meant to be and more palatable to Egyptian audiences. This tendency was more pronounced in El-Husseini's version of the Duck which forcefully foregrounded Hedvig, the adolescent daughter who shoots herself at the end to atone for the sins of her elders, at the expense of all the other characters, punctuating her performance with sentimental dances and songs. El-Husseini also roped in composer Ahmed Khalaf and he successfully managed to drown the play in mournful, lute-based music and chants. Moreover, to justify the funds she obtained from Shumoo', El-Husseini cast a blind person, with thick, dark glasses, in the role of the decadent, corrupt Werle and engineered some mime sequences for five deaf and dumb persons who doubled as servants in Werle's house and customers at Hjalmar's photography studio. Such strategies were pathetic to watch and struck me as offensively exploitative. What helped me get through the evening was the obvious delight these unfortunate people seemed to draw from being in a live show and, despite my misgivings, I do hope that the experience has been of some good to them. The Wild Duck only seemed to click right only when El-Husseini, who played the practical, down- to-earth Gina, was on stage. She is a competent actress with a strong presence and a fine sense of tempo and was, therefore, able to inject some sparks of energy in what would have been otherwise a generally limp and tediously squelchy production. At the end of the play I wanted to tell her to keep only the scenes where she appears and cut out the rest. As her kindly but good-for-nothing husband, Tareq Sa'id was delightful and managed to bring out all the irony and latent humour in his final scene with her and even draw some laughs. Tareq Abdel-Fattah, as the idealistic Gregers who ruins the Ekdal household in his crusade for the truth, could have been a bit more sinister and menacing, and though the set and lighting were generally adequate and aesthetically tolerable, one could detect everywhere clear signs of a strained, over-stretched budget. No such signs marred Gamal Yaqout's intelligent abridgement of A Doll's House. He is reported to have spent over 15 thousand pounds out of his own pocket, on top of the budget allocated to him by the Cultural Palaces, to dress his production in the style he wanted. Indeed, the show was so visually and aurally pleasing (real lace and tails, dainty oak chairs and tables, lots of colourful balloons and gaily wrapped boxes, a Christmas tree and familiar Christmas songs) that it looked at first very romantic, like a cozy fairytale about to unfold in a glittering Christmas pantomime. And yet, Sobhi El-Sayed's bewitchingly childish and simple set, which made the stage into a roofless house, open to a snowy sky, with transparent glass walls, supported by a flimsy wooden structure which revealed the road outside and other houses, communicated a poignant feeling of fragility, of transience, and a vivid sense of eminent disaster. In condensing the text, Yaqout completely removed Dr. Rank and the scourge of syphilis, cut out some of the dialogue and long speeches, softened the desperate brutality of Krogstad, the daunting, almost ruthless honesty of Mrs. Linde and Torvald Helmer's repulsive cockiness. Indeed, at the end, and because Al-Sa'id Qabil renders Helmer from the start as an affectionate, helpless and deeply insecure overgrown child, despite his swagger and outward show of authority and confidence, one cannot but feel a pang of compassion for him as he pleads with Nora. This is perhaps one reason why our first Egyptian Nora (exquisitely performed by the enchanting Iman Imam) does not bang the door behind her. She simply goes out, leaving it open; all is not quite, quite lost and there may be still a chance to bring the family together once more. Besides, banging the outside door would have brought the whole wispy, delicate décor down round the actors' ears. In opting for a subtle, open end, Yaqout was true in spirit to his Mediterranean culture -- a culture where women invariably forgive, or overlook, the silly foibles of men and never take quite seriously what they say. And yet, the point the play makes about the equality of the sexes and the meaning of a true marriage was made quite forcefully in this production. When someone flippantly asked if we needed the Doll's House right now, when women have gained access to ministerial jobs and working and participating in public life has become a daily fact and unquestionable reality, I found myself voicing an affirmative, passionate yes. What really needs altering is not so much the status of women in society, but, rather, the ideas men have about women and how they should be treated. In casting Iman Imam (a graduate of the Theatre Department at Alexandria University) as Nora, Yaqout was truly inspired. Her gaiety was wildly infectious, her tarantula dance was alternately erotically defiant and profoundly pathetic, and she brought to the part so much youthful energy, such spontaneous joy and heartfelt sadness which one can never forget. Yaqout's well orchestrated, emotionally and dramatically sensitive lighting plan, his eloquent and economic movement design and his choice of an excellent supporting cast -- also graduates of the Alexandria University Theatre Department (Ahmed El-Sa'id as Krogstad, Yasmine Sa'id as Mrs. Linde, Heba Mohamed as the Nanny and, alternately, Al-Sa'id Qabil and Mohamed El-Amrousi as Helmer) -- gave Imam the freedom to display her rich talents. Though slightly diluted and a bit romanticised, Yaqout's A Doll's House will long remain in my memory. No wonder it was chosen by the National Egyptian Theatre Festival, due to start on 10 July, to grace the opening. It is a tribute long overdue to Gamal Yaqout and all regional theatre artists.
