A Faustian end-game

The Alternative Theatre Group in Alexandria metamorphose Goethe's Faust into an absurd drama. Nehad Selaiha watches the rituals
By 7.30, the rain which had continued the whole afternoon, had stopped. The flagstones of the open courtyard outside The Garage, at the Jesuit Cultural Centre in Alexandria, were still wet; but the air was dry and tinglingly fresh, like pure, sparkling wine. Taking deep gulps of it made me a bit heady and caused my rusty Cairene lungs to smart. There was a long table on one side spread with tea and coffee, plenty of dark brown chairs with wicker seats here and there and an old, massive tree right by the entrance to the tin-roofed theatre. The low, white-washed brick wall of the courtyard was fringed on three sides with the thick foliage of trees, hugging it from outside, and bordered on the inside with a plentiful variety of potted plants. Light came from unobtrusive, old-fashioned lanterns, fixed to the wall on all sides at discreet intervals, bathing the whole space in a soft, yellow haze -- a tiny pool of light under the vast dark skies, pathetic, but warmly hospitable and comforting. The elegant rustic simplicity of that courtyard, its cozy, cloistered atmosphere, had an old world charm; it felt vaguely familiar, like a long-forgotten, distant memory, a dimly remembered dream. "Now comes upon me long forgotten yearning" ... "Deep stirs my heart," I remembered Goethe saying in his dedication of Faust.
Goethe's Faust with only seven actors and a violinist, in a tiny theatre, with a tiny stage, did not seem an easy proposition, quite daunting in fact, I thought as I examined the cast list on the back of the black, elegant programme sheet handed to me. No, not exactly Goethe's rambling epic drama, the programme told me as I turned to the front; only a version of it called Faust's Dreams, composed and directed by Mahmoud Abu Doma in collaboration with the members -- performers and technical crew -- of the independent Alternative Theatre Group he founded back in 1988. As sponsors or co-producers, the programme mentioned: The Jesuits Cultural Centre and the Goethe and Swedish Institutes in Alexandria, plus special thanks to The Ford Foundation in Cairo. An impressive list, I grinned; good for the Alternative theatre; they have proved more resourceful than most independent theatre groups in matters of fund-raising. Not that they ended up with a big budget, as I discovered later; only just enough to cover costs and running expenses, including a little pocket money for the actors during the six months of daily rehearsals it took the project to materialise. We walked into the theatre and took our places to the sad, sweet tunes of Mohamed Barakat's violin which went on until everyone was seated. During the performance, his live playing alternated with Ihab Qandil's riveting sound-track, which ingeniously wove together selections from the music of the Japanese composer, Kitaro, the Greek composer, Spanodaiks, and the sound-tracks of The Temptation of Christ, Peal Harbor, and Jesus of Montreal. The scene which faced us was bizarre in an ominous sort of way, at once intriguing and disturbing. A small, cramped yellow room with charred walls (as if it had gone through fire), and a number of small, open windows (four at the back, two on each side), placed in a zigzag line, very high up, quite out of reach of anyone except a giant, and looking out into the darkness beyond, like blind eyes. On a small, low platform at the back, was an empty wheelchair. Next to it, sat a human-size puppet, with a bald head, dressed in a long black coat, and wearing a metal contraption round its head, consisting of a crown-like ring, attached to the empty wire frame of an absent mask. Flanking the wheel chair on the other side was the trunk of a dead tree with a single branch. Next to the tree, on the lower level, were four more life-like puppets, dressed in the same long black coat, with roller skates attached to their shoes. They were equally bald, but their heads and faces had been painted to show the brain inside the skull, a white clown's face, with a smile and tears, or a black half mask. (The puppets and set were designed by the director in collaboration with Hadeel Nazmi and Ayman Abu Doma.) Downstage, close to the audience, the seven actors -- Awatif Ibrahim (nature), Khalid Ra'fat (Faust), Sa'id Qabil (the crippled mock-saviour), Mohamed El-Hagrasi (Mephisto), Doa Abdallah (fitfully Margareta and other females) and Mohamed Abdel-Qadir and Ahmed El-Masri (chorus and, vaguely, other characters) -- all in black suits and gloves and white shirts, except for Awatif who wore a black lace dress, sat behind two coffin-like wooden boxes, completely still, looking at each other with a mixture of horror, sorrow and wonder; they froze in that position, without so much as the bat of an eye, until all the audience had taken their places and the strains of the violin stopped.
A moment of rapt silence ... then the actors sprang to life. They turned to face us, and started pounding the boxes with their fists in a rising crescendo. When it reached its climax, the violence suddenly ebbed, and all was quiet. Then the chant began -- a flagrant parody of the Easter song which stops Faust from killing himself with a poisonous draught in the 'Night' sequence which opens Goethe's text. Instead of Goethe's 'Christ is arisen!/ Joy to mortality,' sung by a chorus of angels, Doma's supplicants chant: 'Our Lord,/ Do not come back./ The voices here have become terrifying,/ So has the stench you had dispelled./ All your green crops were burned on rainy nights,/ And all the stories we told each other, over and over, a hundred times, have fallen silent./ There is nothing left here but the cold, the sand and the boredom,/ Nothing but desolate nights,/ Nothing but vexation and discontent./ Do not trouble about people anymore;/ They will soon forget you,/ Even before the coming of autumn./ So, do not come back,/ Do not come back.' This chant, delivered with profound earnestness, set the tone and pointed clearly in the direction that version of Faust would follow.
In a world lorded over by a dummy and a crippled, skeptical saviour, there can be no salvation. And no tragedy, heroism, a sense of reality, or integral characters either. Hence the use of five human-size puppets as active performers, complementing the human cast, the minimal use of words and the heavy reliance on dance and movement. The world of Doma's Faust is one of 'witchery and dreams' -- the world of the 'Walpurgis Night' sequence in the original text. In this metaphorical setting, the story of humanity's quest for salvation is ritualistically replayed in symbolic movement and dance (choreographed by Awatif Ibrahim), in shorthand as it were, in a highly grotesque manner. The Polish critic Jan Kott has perceptively remarked that "grotesque takes over the themes of tragedy and poses the same fundamental questions. Only it's answers are different." In another place he says: "The grotesque is a criticism of the absolute in the name of frail human experience and offers no consolation."
This is, perhaps, what Doma was trying to achieve in his Faust's Dreams. The life-like dummies and the puppet-like actors, led by Faust and Mephisto, grotesquely reenact, in the form of hallucinations, the stories of the Fall, the Deluge, the coming of Christ and his raising, as well as Faust's insatiable longings and his final degradation to the status of a floppy rag-doll. Their stage metaphorically lies between heaven and earth; but in performance, it is a little space, ironically bounded on one side by a stagey coffin, and on the other, by a raised platform, inhabited by an inert god, who is no longer even a puppet-master, but merely a dummy, and his sad, paralyzed son, who wears his father's wire crown and mask after he "is arisen", and sits slumped in a wheelchair, intermittently asking himself aloud: "Who am I? A mirror or a corpse waiting for a merciful killer? Is it possible I shall never die? Is there a hope this could be a lie?" The spirit of nature (Awatif Ibrahim), though she can move freely between heaven and earth, give momentary solace to Faust with a joyful, ebullient dance, is ultimately helpless and can only look on in dismay. Her symbolic attempt to eradicate the original sin, and abolish the biblical history of humanity, by wrenching the apple of desire from Faust's breast, in a violent, primitive blood-ritual, and placing it back on the tree of knowledge, is futile and laughable. The tree, if it ever existed, has long been dead.
To compound the irony, both heaven and earth, and the writhing, floundering humanity caught between them, are trapped in a grimy, little room, vividly reminiscent of the one inhabited by Hamm and Clov in Beckett's Endgame. What lies beyond that room is very much the same as what Clov, who like Doma's dummies cannot sit, sees out of his high window. Perhaps worse, even. With the help of a chair, Clov can reach his kitchen window, and when he does, there is still enough light outside to allow him to see the emptiness around him. But in Doma's play, it needs a long ladder to get to the windows, and if one does, one will only see a wall of darkness (literally, the dark back wall of the theatre). It was as if the nature Clov has described as dead had crept into Doma's yellow room in the form of the dead tree, reducing Awatif, as the spirit of nature, to a mere illusion, and obliterating the very idea of "outside" or "beyond". There is nothing in Doma's play but that absurd, little yellow box; and the universe enclosed inside it, with its inhabitants and the stories they enact, is no more than a game of charades. One scene, however, redeems the utter bleakness of that vision. At the end, the actors scramble up the platform and repeat the blood ritual they had symbolically performed on Faust, but, this time, on the mock-saviour, wrenching out of his heart -- guess what? A carnation. My heart throbbed violently when they raised it and I started crying. The poor, helpless deity had finally found his merciful killer, and humanity had a dim ray of hope, a fleeting glimpse of beauty. Doma had set out to firmly shut the door in the face of hope; but at the last minute, he left a little crack open.
Those familiar with Doma's work can easily trace the box-of-illusions image, together with the Mephistophelean theme, to his first play. In The Castaways, a mysterious man is thrown up by the sea on the shore of a fishing village and gradually corrupts all its inhabitants with the help of a small box which he calls the magical box of dreams. Except for illusions, the box was as empty then as it is in this play; but in The Castaways, the dreams were clearly those of the villagers. In the current production, the dream is collective, and could be God's or Mephistopheles', as much as Faust's. Over the years, and as his pessimism deepened, Doma has progressively tended to play down the verbal element in favour of the audiovisual. What can be communicated through movement and dance, the use of sets and props, he says, is better left unsaid. In his third play, The Dance of Scorpions, a reworking of Hamlet, he used masks and human-size cut-out paper dolls to represent many characters, including all of Claudius's courtiers. But in the past 10 years, puppets and masks were conspicuously absent from his work. The plays he staged during that time -- including Edward Albee's Who Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Athol Fugard's A Place with the Pigs, Strindberg's The Dance of Death, Peter Weiss's Marasade and Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers -- did not require them. Faust was different. The story has a history as a popular marionette show in the 18th century and it was a puppet Faust that first kindled Goethe's imagination when a boy in Frankfort. Like the Italian-German director, Roberto Ciulli, who staged the prologue of Part I of the play as a puppet show, in his Pinocchio- Faust which visited Cairo a few years ago, Doma thinks the play calls for the use of puppets.
At Atinios, after the show, he told me he had found working with puppets an overwhelming experience. "They tend to take on a life of their own," he said; sometimes he was afraid to be with them alone in the theatre, and the actors felt something of this too. Most of the rehearsal time was spent working with the puppets, developing the illusion they were real, breathing life into them, as it were. "We felt like sorcerers, conjuring up spirits, and this brought us very close to Faust," he added.
The following morning, it was bright and sunny; one forgets in Cairo how blue the sky can be. The air sparkled like crystal, and there was a fresh breeze, carrying a faint smell of the sea. I had two hours before my Cairo bus and decided to walk. Leaving hotel San Giovanni behind, I headed in the direction of Mehatit El-Raml. When I reached Sidi Gaber street, however, I found myself turning into it without thinking, then turning right into Port Sa'id street. I was unconsciously making my way to The Garage. I passed the gray metal gate of the Jesuits Centre without noticing it, perhaps because it was closed; it opens at 10 am, and it was still quite early. I walked a long way, enjoying the tiny, run-down old-fashioned shops, tucked away under the weather-beaten, graceful old buildings, stopping sometimes to peer into their dim insides, and all the time thanking God there was no modern supermarket in sight. I came upon a genial-looking old man, sitting in the sun outside his ancient darning-shop, needle in hand, poring over an exquisite piece of tapestry. I stood watching him for a couple of minutes before he lifted his face to me with a gentle inquiring smile. "I am looking for the Jesuits Cultural Centre," I heard myself saying. "You have already passed it," he said, pointing in the direction I came from. "It's right next to the baladi bakery." I remembered passing a small crowd of people standing outside what looked like a small, dark medieval cavern, and being handed loaves of lovely steaming bread by some invisible being. I retraced my steps; the gate of the centre was wide open this time. I passed through, nodding at the two men sitting outside it. It seemed strange they did not ask me where I was going or what my business was. It occurred to me that a terrorist could easily walk in with a bomb and the idea was worrying. But this was a place of worship, I reassured myself, a holy ground where "prayer," in T S Eliot's lovely phrase, "has been valid;" surely God will protect it. I concluded that all this talk of terrorism had polluted my thoughts. The small wooden door leading to the Garage wasn't locked. I turned the handle and stepped into the courtyard.
It was completely deserted and hushed -- not a soul in sight, and no sound except the rustle of leaves in the wind. It was as if I had stepped into a different world all by myself and this sense of complete solitude was utterly overwhelming. I was flooded with an infinite sense of peace, a strange sense of nullity, of total obliteration, as if I had left my mundane, everyday self by the door. The long wooden table had gone, and all the chairs except for a couple under the tree. I dived into the salon adjoining the theatre -- a large, elegant, multi-purpose room, alternately used as a cultural café, a conference room and an exhibition hall. It was dark and completely silent. I said "hello" aloud and my voice sounded horribly jarring. I drew aside the thick black curtain leading to the theatre and stepped inside. I wanted to have another look at Doma's magical yellow box which had haunted me the night before. Again, not a soul in sight. Stumbling in the dark, I could only see at first the left corner of the dimly lighted stage; the rest was hidden by the tiers of seats, rising from the edge of the stage to the back of the auditorium. As I advanced, the view expanded until suddenly I stopped and gasped: there was someone on stage. I was completely startled by this unexpected, eerily still and silent presence. There was a moment of panic, of real, irrational terror before I realised it was Doma's mock-divine dummy, left in its place since last night. I still felt nervous and vaguely threatened. The dummy sitting on the platform was looking intently at something. Following its gaze, I discovered the four other grotesque dummies lined up against the wall on the left, their heads turned towards it. I could almost swear they were deep in silent conversation, discussing some grave matter or planning some frightful mischief. I had read about the primitive, incomprehensible fear of dolls and their magical powers, shared by all humanity at the level of the collective unconscious; at that moment, I knew I was experiencing it as a frightening reality and understood how Doma could be afraid to be with them alone in the theatre. I turned my back and tiptoed outside, feeling shaken like someone who had seen an apparition, and marveling afresh about the magic of theatre.
In the courtyard, the bright sunlight had dimmed to pearly grey; the fresh breeze had developed into a gale; the trees sheltering the wall swayed furiously in the wind, rising and falling to its frantic rhythm, and reaching up so high sometimes as if they would catch the thick folds of dark clouds rolleing and billowing across the sky. Then rain drops, a light patter at first on the tin roof, growing fast into loud drumming. I sat on one of the chairs under the tree and watched the rain sliding merrily off the glistening roof, soaking the trees, the pots of plants, flagstones, the wall and everything in sight, including myself, while Doma's dummies continued their hushed conversation inside the shadowy, empty theatre. I was wet, cold and numb, but profoundly peaceful inside, as I hadn't felt for a long, long time.
On the bus that carried me to Cairo I remembered that Faust had wagered if ever he found something he wished to endure forever, he would immediately and irrevocably forfeit his life and soul to the devil. At the end of Part II of the play, he has a last vision in which he stands on free land, among free people and enjoys a moment he wishes to endure, and, therefore, dies. Were I to make a similar wager, I thought, my experience at The Garage that morning and the night before would be the thing I would wish to endure forever, whatever the cost.
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