Nehad Selaiha joins Al-Warsha in an evening of remembrance Going down the long staircase leading from the street to the sunken garden of Mahmoud Mukhtar museum, then down some more stone steps and through a large door into an underground, white and windowless hall felt like descending into the underworld or an ancient sacred tomb. It was quiet in the garden, with the traffic din barely audible in the distance, like soft humming. Was it just a coincidence or was the choice of space symbolic? Was the descent into the garden and that hall meant as a preparation for the event? A kind of ritualistic, physical enactment of what we were about to engage in mentally and emotionally? For we had met that evening on 15 August to remember, to reach beyond the grave and recover, through the power of art and memory, our beloved , if only in spirit. Going down and down in the hushed twilight, looking like shadows in the gathering dusk, were we, the people who knew, loved and missed her, who yearned for her sunny smile, inspiring energy and vast, warm compassion, unconsciously, metaphorically enacting the descent of Orpheus into Hades to recover his beloved Eurydice? Standing before a low platform in front of the intimate audience ranged opposite him on chairs and speaking to us of , cheerfully, affectionately, in a soft, muted voice awash with tears held back and well-controlled emotions, Hassan El-Gretly reminded me of Orpheus and his lyre. Orpheus had trusted to the power of his song, his art, to recover Eurydice and had only failed because he could not intuit her unseen presence behind him and looked back. Unlike him, El-Gretly did not need the evidence of his senses to know that was around and the song that was sung that evening was hers -- Dananir, an old, sad Armenian folk song she had unearthed and indelibly etched into our hearts and memories when she sang it in Tides of Night. Dananir, however, was only the central stanza in a bigger song, lovingly put together, carefully orchestrated and sung in harmony by the whole Al-Warsha troupe. No soppy emotional outpourings here. A tribute to , a multi-talented artist with acute feeling for form, had to have more than emotion; it had to be carefully scripted, to have tonal variety, rhythmical modulations and structural integrity. had a lively, robust sense of humour and, in life, simple emotional wallowing would have bored her to tears; Al-Warsha saw no reason to subject her to it in death when she could do nothing about it, except perhaps depart forever in disgust. Everyone felt that somehow would be with us that evening and wanted to give her pleasure as if she were physically there. It would have pleased her immensely that the evening began on a light, humorous note with a funny tale from the popular heritage of Al-Daqahliya governorate which was part of her repertoire. The story was narrated by Tamer El-Qadi whom she had trained in a workshop in Alexandria and who had followed her into Al- Warsha, becoming the youngest member of the troupe. His performance was a credit to her teaching and seemed to extend her influence and power of inspiration into the future. The second item, "the queen's dream" scene from Dayeren Dayer (Round and Round), in which Mu'taza Abdel-Sabour took 's place as the queen opposite Ahmed Mukhtar, swung us years back to the beginning of 's association with Al-Warsha and career as actress and storyteller. That zany adaptation of Alfred Jarry's cycle of Ubu plays had marked a watershed in the artistic development of the group and gave them their first real popular hit. The evocation of gained force with A Drop of Honey, an Armenian folktale she had adapted, resetting it in Egypt, and was fond of narrating. How a simple drop of honey can generate so many poisonous feuds was told to us that evening by Ramadan Khatir. By the end of the story, buildup for 's presence had reached a sufficient imaginative pitch and the time for her famous Dananir song was ripe. To keep this song alive, this part of the small but precious heritage left behind, El-Gretly had sought out Gacia, the pianist of the Armenian choir in Egypt where he had met for the first time. Gacia found a singer with a voice similar in timbre and range to 's and coached her until she mastered the song. It was no simple task since Lena Mushtaq, a young Iraqi living in Alexandria, knows no word of Armenian. Accompanied on the flute by Ali Abul-Fadl and under the eyes of Cacia who watched her solicitously, Lena soared with us over the hills and valleys of Armenia and into enchanted, mysterious regions. Her song reached out for , striving for a communion beyond physical barriers, defying time, distance and death. At one moment I thought I could hear 's voice quite distinctly as an echo filling the hall. It was a moment of holiness, of unbearable lightness and unbearable beauty. The tears that flowed as she sang (Lena or , I was no longer sure) were sweet, warm and comforting; not tears of loss but the kind of tears one sheds upon suddenly meeting a long missed and longed for friend. The scene in Tides of Night where sang Dananir followed and was recreated by Hanan Youssef and Sayed Ragab. Hanan had played a different part in this production but as she repeated 's words as the bereaved Armenian mother, reliving the memory of her son's massacre at the hands of the Turks and seeking solace in the idea that he had enjoyed himself, eating, drinking and singing with his friends that night before he was killed, she recaptured 's presence with an eerie vividness and intensity. The following item bounced the mood back to comedy; but before introducing it El-Gretly reminisced a bit about , how she had had confidence in everyone's talent but her own, how she slowly gained assurance as an actress and artist and found her way. He mentioned a speech by Nina, the young actress in Chekhov's The Seagull, and how he and used to read it as it seemed to them to epitomise 's progress from complete self- doubt, always asking whether she was really an actress, to total artistic commitment. This is why the evening was called , A Seagull, he explained. In the passage he quoted, Nina says: "Now I am a real actress, I act with intense enjoyment, with enthusiasm; on the stage I am intoxicated and I feel that I am beautiful... I keep thinking and feeling that I am growing stronger in spirit with every day that passes.... I think I now know...that what matters in our work -- whether you act on the stage or write stories -- what really matters is not fame, or glamour, not the things I used to dream about -- but knowing how to endure things. How to bear one's cross and have faith. I have faith now and I'm not suffering quite so much and when I think of my vocation I'm not afraid of life." I was grateful to know that had felt that way about her art before she died. Indeed, her last performance as Fifi in Tawfiq El-Hakim's A Bullet in the Heart evidences this growing confidence and faith in her art. It seemed to herald a new phase in her career as actress and led one to hope and expect to see her in more subtle, complex and demanding parts. Her next performance, as El-Gretly said, was to have grown out of a delightful short story called 'Awalem El-Farah (wedding female singers and dancers) which Tawfiq El-Hakim wrote in 1927. The text which Ahmed Kamal read features a group of passengers on a train journey during the month of Ramadan. The men, though fasting and supposed to abstain from all worldly pleasures, cannot resist the temptation of whiling away the time and arduous trip with a song from the 'Alma who happens to occupy the same compartment with her female assistants and chorus. The coquettish 'Alma, Hamida El-Mahalawiya, who repeatedly uses a match stick to line her eyebrows and keeps bungling the job, her clucking, protective entourage, who zealously trumpet her achievements while jealously watching the veil that keeps slipping off her head to reveal her dyed golden hair, and her drooling admirers who alternately beseech and dare her to better the famous Badriya El-Sayed in delivering their favourite song, "I have spent my life in love" -- are all graphically portrayed in delicious comic details and the story ends with Hamida bursting into song. Hamida was the kind of part would have revelled in and caricatured with zestful humour. But it was not to be. Instead of listening to her in Badriya El-Sayed's 1920s song, as El-Gretly had hoped we would, Zein Mahmoud performed a popular song from her repertoire. 'Aleel ya Tamargiyya (I'm Sick, Oh Nurses) is a funny ditty and was real fun singing it. From figurative sickness in 'Aleel we moved to mock-death in the opening scene of A Bullet in the Heart which followed. At the end of the dialogue between Ahmed Kamal and Botros Raouf, however, at the moment is supposed to enter, the lights slowly dimmed and as we waited and no actress stepped in to take her place, as happened in the earlier scenes, the reality of her physical absence and our irretrievable loss hit us home with a shattering force. When held in Alexandria, at the Jesuit Centre, , A Seagull had ended with a short feature film, a student-project, in which starred as a woman who embraces life and its pleasures to the full, wholeheartedly, then drives one day in her car deep into the sea to die in her prime, just as did. On that occasion the image of on the screen after the dimming of the stage lights was meant to temper the sense of loss with a reassurance that she will live on in her art. In the underground hall in Mahmoud Mukhtar museum, no film was shown and the fragility and transience of theatre and life were starkly revealed. But genuine theatre lives on in our memories just as genuine people do and it can repeatedly evoke for us, perhaps more vividly than cinema, the absent artists who once gave its airy, insubstantial visions body and form. And this was my experience on August 15: lived again for me through Al-Warsha as her spirit shaped and guided their performance . A more effective eulogy for lovely one cannot conceive.
