Nehad Selaiha is caught in a vortex of thespian energy at Al-Tali'a Theatre A play which sports the title Haflit Abu Aggour (Abu Aggour's Party) cannot be anything but a comedy; and since the name of the eponymous hero, Abu Aggour, refers to a variety of green melon and indicates a person from the lower orders of society, the comedy is likely to be broad, in the popular tradition of the genre, and full of boisterous revelry. So, when I went to Al-Tali'a Theatre to watch it last week I felt quite prepared, or thought I was. What I saw, however, far exceeded my expectations. Such wild zaniness I have not seen in years. It was as if everyone connected with the performance, particularly the actors, and especially Ahmed El-Halawani, Mohamed Ali, Hassan El-Arabi, Yasir El-Tobgi, Hisham El-Sherbini, Galal El-Hagrasi and Ali Abdel-Rehim, had been infected with a strange kind of fever which kept them furiously skipping and cavorting all the time, without so much as a moment's rest. The size of the cast was quite overwhelming (12 main actors and 8 supporting ones, plus a leading singer, Ahmed Ismail, with a chorus of four and a 9-strong live oriental band), and their comic inventiveness and powers of mimicry seemed inexhaustible. Their impish agility, physical abandon and unbridled, reckless humour vividly invoked the mischievous spirit of Shakespeare's Puck, or those old, Greek, mythical satyrs who followed the god of theatre and wine. I had not realised that, on the fringe, away from the limelight and neglected by the media, we had such a wealth of comic talent in Egypt. It was a thrilling discovery. That director Emil Shawqi could dig such actors out from under the rubble of years of critical indifference and near anonymity and find the right vehicle to showcase their comic energy and gifts for imaginative physical and verbal improvisation seemed like a clever conjuring trick performed by a master magician. The vehicle Shawqi found for this priceless band of irrepressible clowns and gifted buffoons was an old play (based on an even older one) which he had successfully directed with local actors at the cultural palace in Assiut 10 years ago. The text, by Darwish El-Assiuti, a gifted poet and zealous actor who had helped found the Assiut Cultural Palace theatre troupe, had been conceived with a large cast in mind in order to accommodate as many of the army of amateur actors eager to tread the boards as possible. And since the play targeted local, unsophisticated audiences (though very sharp and quick on the uptake), comedy was indicated, with some musical numbers thrown in as an added attraction. In this kind of form where improvisation is given leeway and ad-libbing is expected, indeed required, and where theatricality is openly embraced and no attempt at complete illusionism is made, the moral is usually clear and topically relevant, the characters are recognisable types rather than complex individuals and the plot, though usually centering on an intrigue and full of delightful surprises and comical twists and turns, is easy to follow and relies on stock situations and conventional routines. Though a veteran actor, albeit in a provincial company, and an eloquent poet, El-Assiuti had next to no experience in writing for the stage and badly needed a model. In hunting for one, he hit upon Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman's 1978 Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq (Party atop an Impaling Pole) -- a well- known, pungent political satire-cum-slapstick farce which takes its material and inspiration from two old, popular sources: a tale from The Arabian Nights called "Al-Garia wal Wuzaraa Al-Sab'aa" (The Slave-girl and Seven Viziers), and an anonymous 19th century play, historically reported to have been performed by a troupe of wandering actors (or Muhabazeen, as such troupes were then called) at the court of Mohamed Ali to entertain his guests during a party held on the occasion of his son's circumcision. Unlike The Arabian Nights tale, the text of this play is not extant; descriptions of the performance, however, were recorded in the memoirs and letters of some of the foreign guests who watched it, including Edward Lane who mentions it in his Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. According to these reports, the play, about a poor peasant woman trying to free her unjustly imprisoned husband and asked for bribes (cash or sexual favours) at every point up the official ladder, was a social satire exposing the rampant corruption in government circles and the savage exploitation of the people at the hands of the Pasha's executives. Neither Lane nor the others care to mention how this critical piece of theatre was received at court. One can be sure, however, that on the streets, it must have made a strong impact. Criticising their rulers and poking fun at them has long been a favourite Egyptian pastime and a recognised cathartic indulgence. In Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq, Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman, as many others have done before and after him, capitalises on this deeply ingrained and long entrenched Egyptian predilection; he follows the same narrative line and episodic structure of the earlier Al-Muhabazeen play, but instead of a peasant who fails to pay the exorbitant taxes levied on him, he calls his hero Hassan (a name which invokes the character of El-Shatir Hassan, or Hassan the clever, from traditional folk narratives) and makes him into a visionary and political prisoner. When Hassan tries to access the Wali (or Sultan's viceroy) to warn him after a dream in which he saw swarms of locusts infesting the country, he is captured by the security forces and charged with plotting to overthrow the regime. Abdel-Rahman also upgrades the peasant heroine of the old play, both socially and intellectually, making her into a beautiful, educated, well-to-do woman who is as intelligent, crafty and resourceful as The Arabian Nights ' slave-girl. To save her beloved Hassan from torture and certain death, the new heroine, Hind, treads a similar path as her predecessor in the anonymous play, appealing first to the prison-governor, a lustful, sadistic knave who is also the equivalent of a modern chief of intelligence, then to the public tax-collector, a hypocritical, philandering Sheikh, given to marrying the women he desires to legitimise his pleasure in the eyes of God and society, then divorcing them the following morning, then to the equally libidinous vizier. To all she pretends she is the prisoner's sister and each in turn offers to release him in exchange for her sexual favours. Pitting her wits against theirs, she thinks up a stratagem similar to the one used by the slave-girl to trap the seven viziers in The Arabian Nights. Pretending to go along, she gives them all appointments to visit her in succession on the same night. As each arrives, bringing a written order to release Hassan, and makes ready to indulge his lust, a violent knocking is suddenly heard at the door and a gruff male voice (produced by Hind's female servant) menacingly declares it is her lawfully wedded husband just returned from the Wali 's wars. In desperation, all three dignitaries separately agree to hide inside the man-size boxes their hostess had prepared for them. When all are safely trapped, she rushes to the prison with the three release orders and frees Hassan and both repair to the Palace and persuade the Wali to join them at Hind's house to see with his own eyes how corrupt and despicably ridiculous his officials are. Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq ends ironically, with the Wali sacking all three men and replacing them with their far worse and more vicious assistants. The message, though metaphorically and hilariously coded, is quite clear and spells out the absurdity of expecting real political reform or change from autocratic rulers who preside over police states. Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman's message, with its implicit call for a popular revolution at the grassroots as the only way to lift the weight of oppression from the people and attain freedom, was in accord with Darwish El-Assiuti's deepest political convictions and, indeed, echoes the convictions of a large contingent of playwrights, actors and directors who keep theatre alive in the provinces and without whose dedication and selfless labour the elephantine governmental structure called the Cultural Palaces would instantly collapse. In writing Haflit Abu Aggour, El-Assiuti kept most of Abdel-Rahman's text, presenting it as a play-within-a play, with the new frame-play taking the form of a hilarious competition between two troupes of actors, one academically-trained in the Western tradition and led by a pretentious, garrulous Ph.D. in theatre called Dr. Rushdi, the other offering rough, spontaneous acting in the popular tradition and led by the strutting, vainglorious Abu Aggour. The two parties take turns at performing Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq, first playing the opening scenes twice, in different keys and styles, once by each party, then alternating the rest of the scenes between them till the end. Framed in this way, Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq, itself very funny and theatrical, gains in theatricality and acquires an added comic dimension; as El-Assiuti's warring mock- performers fight over it, it becomes a vehicle for an almost giddying display of comic styles and routines, ranging from punning, repartee and naughty innuendo, through slinging matches, slapstick farce, grotesque mimicry and exaggeration and the tricks of disguise and mistaken identity, to telling parody and pointed caricature. In the current Al-Tali'a production, though the actors seemed to revel in the play's rich comic potential and did it full justice, the overriding mode was farcical burlesque, with each of the two competing troupes intent on parodying the acting tradition they publicly champion. While Abu Aggour's team mimicked the accents of folk actors, particularly in the south, aped their sometimes clumsy, artificial movements, coarse humour and endearing naivete, in a manner quite reminiscent of Shakespeare's 'mechanicals' in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and made a feast of the convention of using males in drag to impersonate female characters, giving the staggeringly uninhibited Hassan El-Arabi (who took on the same role as the actress playing Hind in the other team's play, modifying the name to Hanadi) two enormous balloons for breasts and a huge cushion for buttocks, Dr. Rushdi's outwardly sedate and black-clad troupe displayed a tendency to stilted overacting, relying on stock poses and gestures; but despite their stultified, dignified façade, they had a disconcerting habit of fitfully introducing snatches from popular songs or commercials at the most untimely moments or suddenly taking off a famous character in a popular old movie; and though they used female performers, namely Walaa Farid in the role of Hind and Sawsan Taha as her maid, they seemed determined to disrupt any illusion of realism or any mood of seriousness; towards this end, they would often call upon the live band, sitting in the avant-scene, on one side, to provide comic musical accompaniment to serious scenes and dialogue. As the play proceeds, punctuated by El-Assiuti's humorous and politically barbed lyrics, set to light, frothy music by Mohamed Farghali and beautifully, elegantly and bitingly rendered by singer Ahmed Ismail, the acting contest is visually replicated in Hoda El-Segeini's vividly contrasting costumes and Nasser Abdel-Hafiz's design which splits the stage into two opposite sides: a rural, homely set, with rough, wooden sofas and benches, lots of straw mats and hanging baskets, facing a pillared hall with gilded, red-velvet armchairs. In between, a raised platform, hung over with looped green curtains and lattice screens, symbolising the two theatrical traditions at loggerheads, represents the stage taken over alternately by the two contestants. In view of the pervasive parodic, ironic tendency of the show, however, the acting contest itself appears as a parody and cannot, therefore, be resolved artistically. Rather, it is settled ideologically. While the academically-trained actors stick to Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman's ironical end, with its implicit political message, Abu Aggour and his company decide to change it, spell out and boldly blazon its call for popular revolution. Since no real political change can ever come from above, as Hafla 'Ala Al-Khazouq had indirectly indicated, Haflit Abu Aggour ends with the sturdy popular hero, El-Shatir Hassan, taking up arms against the Wali and his men and triggering an uprising. As I was leaving the theatre, still laughing under my breath at some scenes in the performance I had just watched and humming the catchy tune at the finale, I suddenly remembered that the selfsame Emil Shawqi had also directed the Egyptian premiere of Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage at Al-Hanager in 2002. The thought made me catch my breath. Such technical versatility and breadth of sensibility are truly marvellous.
