Alfred Farag's Quixotic Ali Janah El-Tabrizi and his servant Quffah, surface at the AUC. Nehad Selaiha was there to welcome them In real life playwright Alfred Farag is never so delightful as when he gets het up about the current condition of the Egyptian theatre -- which frequently happens in the meetings of the theatre committee of the Supreme Council for Culture. On such occasions he scowls ominously, bends forward, resting one elbow on the table, and shaking a warning forefinger at his audience embarks on a long, impassioned harangue that most members have come to know by heart. Unfailingly, the tirade ends with a comparison with the London stage, and it is at this moment that Farag, who has a flat in London where he spends a few months every year regaling himself with the choicest shows on offer, treats us to a tantalising description of the last London theatre season. If you interrupt him, reminding him of the unfairness of the comparison and that we are merely a consultative committee with no executive power and, therefore, utterly helpless, Farag pauses for a second, in seeming bewilderment, then flashes you his famous Naguib El-Rihani grin, and breaks into soft, quiet laughter. In these routine tirades a recurrent theme is the absence of the repertory system and its disastrous consequences. "It's inconceivable," he endlessly protests, "that a play should be laid to rest after only one production; the dramatic heritage of the golden 1960s," he moans, "is being shamefully neglected and is practically unknown to the younger generation." When a commercial theatre company decided a few years ago to go respectable and revive his 1960s hit, Ali Janah El- Tabrizi and his Servant Quffah, the first thing they wanted was to change the dialogue into the Egyptian dialect on the plea that their prospective audiences had no stomach for classical Arabic. Farag had not minded that they wanted to add songs, since they intended to make it into a musical; he had never conceded the artificial division of drama into high and low, popular and elitist, and always believed that, like Shakespeare (the writer who, with Brecht and the classical Greeks, most influenced his work), great dramatists should be able to address the most sophisticated, as well as the ignorant and illiterate among the audience. If turning the play into a musical would draw more spectators, all the better -- so long as he himself penned the lyrics. But changing the dialogue was a different matter and bitterly galling. Before he was driven by political harassment into voluntary exile for nearly 15 years, Farag's reputation as a brilliant innovator had rested not only on his technical virtuosity, original wit, or imaginative use of history, folk literature, and other traditional sources, but also on his ingenious mating of Egyptian and classical Arabic. Like Tawfiq El- Hakim, whose influence he gratefully acknowledges, he aimed for a third language that would combine the best of both, keep a formal distance from the language of daily life, avoiding its banalities and hackneyed clichés, and yet preserve its lively rhythms and vivid idiom. More than anything, such a language was essential for his dramatic project which, in his own words, aimed at "reshaping life via the reshaping of tradition". With few exceptions his major plays are all set in the past, whether historical or imaginary. But however distant the fictional or actual temporal context, they never sound alien, and never seem to date. What links them firmly to the present, keeps them fresh and gives them perennial relevance and appeal, is this curious, effervescent linguistic blend which makes vivid characterisation and lively situations possible and works to displace both the present and the past, allowing you to stand back a little from the one to reflect upon it and see it in a different perspective, and drawing you close enough to the other to enable you to see through the aura of nostalgia and reverence and read it more accurately. After his first known play, The Voice of Egypt -- a loud, topical, patriotic piece which won him a state prize from the Supreme Arts Council in 1956 -- he tried his hand at tragedy with a play in classical Arabic on the rise and fall of Akhenaton. But, already, in The Fall of a Pharaoh (directed for the National by Hamdi Gheith in 1957), one feels Farag struggling to forge his own dramatic and linguistic idiom. In this respect his five-year term as a political prisoner (from 1959 to 1964) was a blessing in disguise. He had time to reflect on matters of dramatic structure and dialogue and dive deep into the rich store of the folk and popular heritage, discovering the enduring charm and wisdom of such narratives as The Arabian Nights, the love stories in Al- Mahasin wa Al-Addad (Pros and Cons) by the great Abbasid writer, Al-Jahiz, and the popular epic of Al-Zir Salem, among others. The outcome of those years of forced solitude was his first masterpiece, The Barber of Baghdad. Consisting of two separate love stories, one from The Arabian Nights and the other from Al- Mahasin, with the inquisitive barber, the setting in Baghdad and, of course, the theme of love as links, and written in that wonderful blend of classical and colloquial Arabic, with plenty of wit and humour, it was original in almost every respect. Within months of his release from prison it was staged at the National, with popular comedian Abdel-Mon'im Ibrahim in the title-role -- a curious fact, it would seem, unless you knew that it was the policy of the regime then to reinstate writers in a big way as soon as they were deemed sufficiently chastised. The production was a roaring success and won the highest critical acclaim. Once and for all Farag was established as one of the master-builders of modern Egyptian drama. Farag was bewitched by Ibrahim's comic talent and his lovable, ebullient stage-presence and wanted to do another play for him. It was largely under the spell of that great comedian that he revisited Baghdad and The Nights, coming back a few years later with Ali Janah El-Tabrizi and his Servant Quffah. For material, he used three tales from The Nights with a common theme: the power of illusion. "The Imaginary Table" is about a rich man playing a practical joke on an importunate guest, inviting him to an imaginary table which he insists he takes for real; "The Sack", features two deranged men fighting over the ownership of a sack which they believe contains the whole world, whereas in fact it holds nothing but an olive and a crust of bread; and in "Ma'roof the Cobbler" the destitute hero, who is about to starve in a strange city, masquerades as a man of immense wealth waiting for his caravan to arrive, and manages to live luxuriously for a while on the gifts and money showered on him by the greedy merchants who covet his wealth and favour, and even to marry the king's daughter. Baghdad and The Nights, however, were not the only sources. For the characters of Ali and Quffah, Farag drew on a long stage tradition of crafty, clownish, down-to-earth and worldly wise servants and foolish, dreamy or harebrained masters -- a tradition which stretches back to the Romans, progressing through Shakespeare and Cervantes, down to Brecht's Mr Puntila and his Hired Man, Matti and Youssef Idris's 1964 ground-breaking Al-Farafeer (The Underlings). Like a picaresque novel, or, indeed, all folk narratives, including The Nights, or Brecht's episodic epic structure, the play has no plot in the traditional sense of spiralling events joined together by the logic of cause and effect. Rather, it consists of a series of self-contained episodes, linked together only by the two main characters who embody a central idea or quest, and achieves its effect through variation, diversion and accumulation rather than logical progression. The power of illusion was the link Farag detected between the three stories; he, therefore, made it the thematic axis of the drama, using the story of the table, in the first act, to explore the negative, escapist, compensatory aspects of the theme, and the story of the cobbler, in the second act, to display its positive side as a reformer's or visionary's dream of utopia, or the artist's creative, prophetic imagination. This basic design provided the two eponymous heroes linking the stories with room to grow as characters. The development of Ali from a languid, whimsical, lackadaisical wastrel, who dissipates his fortune and takes refuge in illusions, into a frugal person, a social reformer, and a kind of Robin Hood who cheats the rich out of their money to share it out among the poor, is anticipated in the story of the sack which serves as an interlude between the two acts. The olive and crust of bread which the sack holds, and which are taken by the two men in their delusions to represent the whole world, surface prominently in the second act, in Ali's meals and his talk. Farag cultivates them as symbols of what is most essential and constructive in life and uses them to underline the change in Ali's character. Quffah, on the other hand, the poor and thrifty itinerant cobbler or shoemaker, who comes begging at Ali's door and in a mad moment surrenders to his charm, accepts a change of name and profession and follows him as his servant on a long journey to China, remains essentially the same throughout -- a cowardly, earth-bound rogue, greedy and occasionally mean-spirited. He, therefore, fails to grasp the change in his master and how the fictitious story of the caravan loaded with splendid treasures -- a lie they cooked up together -- has turned in his mind into a symbol of deliverance, a cherished dream of some future utopia. Despite the strong emotional tie that grows between them, master and servant seem always to be talking at cross-purposes. Quffa's mounting frustration arouses both sympathy and affectionate laughter and the consistent counterpointing of the two characters, through which the meaning of the play evolves, is a constant source of hilarious comedy. To get this delightful gem of a play back on stage Farag was willing to make painful compromises. He is one of those writers who believe that plays are written to be performed, not perused in the quiet of the study; and with so many years away from the stage he was sorely missing the enchanting game of theatre, the bustle of rehearsals, the flamboyant presence of players and the applause of audiences. Reluctantly, he changed the dialogue into colloquial Arabic and gave the play a happy end, making the imaginary caravan miraculously materialise to reinstate Ali and Quffa in the favour of the city. Ironically, the new production was a flop and closed down after only two weeks to cut losses. Unfortunately I did not catch it and cannot tell you what went wrong; but something certainly did. Licking his wounds, Farag sought out director Hana' Abdel-Fattah, whose talent he deeply respects, and took him with the new version, retitled Etnein fi Quffah (Two in a Basket), to the National -- nowadays, even the National shies away from anything remotely resembling classical Arabic. For some mysterious reason though, they didn't want Abdel-Fattah and suggested another director. Farag refused and stuck to his guns. No more concessions this time. After two years of wrangling and fruitless intercessions, the project was finally dropped. Fortunately for Farag, the play and its lovers, Abdel-Fattah found a more congenial place to stage it -- AUC's new Falaki Chambre Theatre -- and a wonderful cast of young, gifted, keen performers from among the students and graduates of the Performing Arts Department there. (Once more the AUC was to prove more solicitous of our dramatic treasures than the state theatre companies.) I had watched the original production which starred Abdel-Mon'im Ibrahim as Quffa and Abu-Bakr Izzat as Ali and did not think any other duo could match their performance or come within a mile of it. However, half way through the first act, I began to wonder if I could be wrong and within 15 minutes of the second I was sure those two young men could proudly hold their own in any comparison with the old masters. Under the direction of Abdel- Fattah, who is known to bring out the best in actors, Tamer Mahdi (also a promising playwright and director) as Ali and Yehya El-Diqin as Quffa gave taut, finely detailed and subtly shadowed performances, always keeping the tempo in line with the mood and using physical posture, gesture, movement and facial expression, as well as vocal tone, pitch and inflection to spell out the richly paradoxical tie that binds master and servant and to play up their contrasting mental and psychological aspects. The rest of the acting, including the chorus of beggars, was deliberately simplified and exaggerated, in the manner of caricature, to suggest the stock figures of fairytale and off-set the reality of Ali and Quffah. In some instances, however, notably Magdi El-Dessouqi's king, Amna Farahat as the princess and Sherif Farahat as the vizier, the actors managed to sidestep the stereotypes they were cast in and come alive as vivid, individualised characters. Abdel-Fattah's directorial conception obviously took its inspiration from the puppet show, the shadow play, the art of clowns and street mimes, as well as children's illustrated books of fairytales. The sets (by Hazem Shebl) were brightly coloured and childishly simple, made up of painted, cutout cardboard trees, a bead curtain and two white cloth ones, framing an arabesque panel, satin-covered boxes for seats, a few cushions, two simple traders counters and a small cupboard in which the king and vizier hide while the princess sounds Ali about his caravan. The actors were artificially made-up (by Dina El-Sheikh) and costumed (by Samir Shaheen) to look like marionettes, with lots of frills and puffs, pointed shoes and hats and big, baggy trousers, made of rubber-like material, in which they seemed to swim. But there were real puppets too (designed by Wisam Adel): the performance is announced and introduced to the audience by a flat puppet on a stick from behind a screen, in the manner of a shadow play, and when Quffah becomes drunk in the second act, he airs his anger and frustration through a glove puppet in the shape of the traditional Egyptian Qaraqoz. The open theatrical design of the performance, the semi-circular shape of the acting space, and the seating of the audience close, on three sides, together with the presence of a live oriental band throughout, allowed for a lively interaction between performers, audience and musicians. This generated a sense of community and the relaxed, festive atmosphere typical of communal celebrations and some of the old, traditional forms of popular entertainment. Mohamed Zanati's lyrics, Hatem Izzat's music, Mustafa Mu'nis's choreography, and the clever mime scenes performed by one of the beggars in the market-place were an added bonus; they effected a startling, hilarious change in the chorus of beggars, breaking the traditional, sentimental image, and projecting them, despite their tattered, patchwork gowns, as vigorous, variegated and comically aggressive. Another bonus was the scene in which Quffah goes to the king to betray Ali; here, Abdel-Fattah superimposed on the straightforward dialogue an alien mode of physical and vocal delivery, masterfully performed by the actors, which made the scene into a grotesque travesty of a tough political interrogation in a police-state. The hysterical laughter this scene triggered was a sure sign that the performance had reached over from the world of fantasy into the world of reality and touched a sore point there. This is the reason, perhaps, why the arrival of the caravan (and symbolically of Ali's craved utopia) at the end, signalled by clouds of smoke billowing into the hall through the door, struck a false note and seemed, at best, ironical. Utopia remains far ahead and out of sight and Farag still cannot get the original, 1969 version of the play performed at any professional theatre.
