The sooner the new Othello at Hanager is extinguished the better, writes Nehad Selaiha Recently the head of the State Theatre Organisation, Hani Mutaweh, announced that in view of the phenomenal success of the National Theatre's current revival of King Lear, he has decided that at least one Shakespearean classic should be staged every season. The Merchant of Venice is already in the pipeline, with intensive negotiations afoot to persuade Syrian comedian Dreid Lahham to hop over to Cairo to undertake Shylock. Good news, you might say, and long overdue. But having seen the sloppy, sentimental mishmash that passed for King Lear -- which came across as a Christmas pantomime, complete with tinsel, glitter and nimble-footed dancers -- I dread to think of what fate awaits the poor Merchant. At present, with Arab anti-Israeli feeling at its highest, it is conceivable that we may end up with a farcical, grotesque figure, more loathsome (if that were possible) than even Marlowe's Barabas, otherwise known as The Jew of Malta, masquerading as Shakespeare's Jew. Shylock could even be treated to the same gruesome fate as Barabas and tricked into falling through a trapdoor in a balcony into a "fiery pit" below. But whatever mangling the proposed Merchant may undergo, it could not conceivably compare to that which Othello is currently subject to at the hands of director Mohamed El-Kholi at Al-Hanager. His choice of Khalil Mutran's unwieldy, bombastic translation was unfortunate to begin with; but his efforts to improve it by updating certain archaic words and rephrasing some of the heavily rhetorical passages in commonplace, often banal language made it worse, landing the audience with a disconcerting verbal patchwork. One was constantly being jolted from the spuriously sublime and turgidly grandiloquent to the pompously ridiculous and flatly mundane. He could have spared us the misery, and himself the embarrassment, had he chosen a more recent, smoother translation, like Hussein Ahmed Amin's, done in the mid 1990's and published by Dar Al-Ma'aref. El-Kholi's messing about with Mutran's language extended to Shakespeare's text; it was recklessly hacked and mauledened, but for the opening scene, grimly expurgated, then flung onto the stage, a maimed, lifeless body dressed up in gaudy tatters. Whole scenes were excised and others ruthlessly adumbrated, which put paid to all the subtleties of characterisation as well as to the text's religious nuances, recurrent images and intricate thematic interplay. Bianca was axed, probably in the interest of chastity, and what was left of Desdemona's part could make her wish she had been lopped off too. But Iago got the worst of this dramatic carnage. With all his satanic soliloquies and confiding asides to the audience removed, he became a flat paper cutout, more boring than even the dullest stereotype of the villain in 19th-century melodrama. Watching this spiritless, lacklustre travesty of Iago made me long for the wit and vitality of Ahmed Salama's rendering of that other fascinating Shakespearean villain, Edmund, in the National's King Lear. But then Ahmed Salama had a more experienced director with a sense of what works in theatre. Whatever the faults of Ahmed Abdel- Halim's production of Lear, at least he always kept the audience in mind and would not sacrifice a good line or a thrilling theatrical moment in the name of some glibly trotted-out new reading or newfangled directorial conception. In an epigraph to his novel, Nostromo, Joseph Conrad confessed that history had taught him to distrust all causes; "the worst atrocities," he said, "are always committed in the name of good causes." Likewise, the butchery that Othello suffered at the hands of Mr El-Kholi was purportedly done in a good cause -- namely, in the director's own words, "to rehabilitate the negative image of the Arab male" he takes the Moor to represent by removing anything that mars this image from the play, while, at the same time, "preserving the spirit of Shakespearean tragedy and presenting a classical performance in the true sense of the word, with all the grandeur and sanctity it implies". What exactly he means by "grandeur and sanctity" is anybody's guess. With quite breathtaking arrogance, ("Begging your pardon, Shakespeare") El-Kholi goes on to defend his ham-fisted actions by making Shakespeare out to be a racist, who portrays Othello as "a Bedouin who has never known civilisation". Following El-Kholi's logic, if a European were to subject the play to the same ideological reading, s/he would find Iago a most offensive representative of European culture. However difficult Othello may be as a play, and it is, in fact, quite problematic when it comes to directing, often suggesting the image of Iago as a master puppeteer manipulating the fates of all as if they were marionettes, it takes a singular blindness to see in it a racist attack on Arabs rather than an exploration of cultural alienation and subliminal racial discrimination. To blindly rush in without the slightest awareness of these issues is simply absurd. El-Kholi's pretentious claim to improving on Shakespeare's portrayal of Othello is impelled by a self-defensive, jingoistic urge to idealise what he calls the Arab character and stems from a deplorably simplistic and reductive reading (or, rather, misreading) of Othello's character and, indeed, of the whole play. While this may explain (though not excuse) his extensive slashing of the text in the interest of building up the Moor into a flawless Arab hero, it is difficult to square his pompous claim to classical grandeur and sublimity with the pulpy sentimentality of the performance. Take the opening scene: against a loud chorus of twittering birds, in a soft blue haze, Othello prances in, in thigh-high-tan boots, with painted face and wig, followed by Desdemona, heavily made up, in golden high heels and flowing white robes edged with fur (like the heroine of a soppy Hollywood musical); for a while, they chase each other playfully (and somewhat clumsily) around two white fluttering sheets, stretched across the stage, and manipulated by mysterious hands in the wings, before they finally embrace and set to waltzing. Throughout, Desdemona (Dina Abdallah) displayed an embarrassing tendency to gush and flush by turns, then coyly flit away, while Othello (Ahmed Maher), in striving after grandeur and sublimity, avoided the usual ranting and raving associated in Egypt with so-called classical plays; instead, he chose to hiss and grunt and occasionally growl. It was painful to watch him, arms resolutely akimbo and legs firmly apart, struggling to deliver his lines while maintaining this unnaturally deep and lugubrious tone. I wished sometimes his voice would fail him -- to give us a break, and him too; but he heroically persevered and maintained it, relentlessly, without a moment's relief, till the very end. The less said about the other actors, the better; El-Kholi's 'adaptation' never gave them a chance. Hisham Abdallah, as Iago, was pathetic, and his frantic efforts to make something out of what was left of his part were heart-rending, and so were Galal El-Hagrasi's antics as Roderigo. About the only one who managed to keep afloat was Amani El-Bahtiti as Emilia, and this only because her part was the least affected by the director's mania for cutting. The costumes, you will already have guessed from my description of the opening scene, were atrocious in colour, design and fit and Magdi El-Zaqaziqi's choreography was haphazard and clumsy. As for the sets, they consisted mostly of gaudily-painted flats and made one often wonder if Othello had not wandered by mistake into a children's picture book. However, they had the virtue of appearing and disappearing quickly, which made the blackouts needed for set changes brief. The only really decent thing in the show was Mursi El-Khattab's music (whether composed or compiled the programme does not say, but one gets the impression that it might be the latter), particularly the short prelude of pattering, light notes on the piano and deep strains on the violin. The director would have done well to inject more of it into the show, to sedate the audience, if nothing else. Having seen Hamdi Ghayth declaim Othello in Mutran's hallowed translation from the boards of the National in the early 1960s, two versions of the play in colloquial Arabic in the provinces in the 1980s, then, last year, a farcical parody of it based on No'man Ashour's colloquial translation and staged by the Youth Theatre as a kind of jeu d'esprit, I had thought I had seen the worst Egyptian Othellos. El- Kholi, however, managed to surprise me.
