Nehad Selaiha gets another surprise at Rawabet Richard x Richard, versus Bayyoumi, by Atelier Al-Masrah, adapted and directed by Mohamed Abdel Khaliq, Rawabet, 30 March-5 April, 2008. Some time between 1593 and 1595, Shakespeare, drawing on Holinshed's Chronicles, wrote Richard II as part of his project to dramatise the history of England for the stage. According to one theory, however, this play, which concentrates on the last two years of this unfortunate king's life, dwelling on his conflict with the powerful nobles of the land, led by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (later Henry IV), and his subsequent dethronement and murder at Pomfret castle where he was kept prisoner, "was deliberately composed as a political allegory, with the purpose of warning Elizabeth I of her possible fate if she encouraged flatterers and permitted unjust taxation and monopolies." If this were true it would mean that Shakespeare was taking a big risk writing on such a sensitive political issue, particularly since a book on the life of Henry IV, published in February, 1599, so incensed the queen that she committed its author, Sir John Hayward, to the tower where he remained until her death. That an analogy was perceived between both royal figures across more than 200 years is corroborated by Elizabeth I herself who, venting her anger against Hayward who had dedicated his little book to the Earl of Essex who, in turn, had led an abortive uprising against her on 8 February 1601 which cost him his life, is reported (in a memorandum by William Lambarde, the antiquary) to have sardonically said to him: "I am Richard II, know you not that?" Whether Shakespeare and his company (the Lord Chamberlain's Men) actually performed the play at the Globe at Essex's request the night before the coup is still debated among scholars. What is certain, however, is that when the first Quarto edition was printed, the deposition scene was omitted from the text and was not restored until after Elizabeth's death. Perhaps this is what saved Shakespeare's neck, or may be at the time the play was published and performed the conspiracies to overthrow the queen had not thickened into a real threat. The interesting thing in all of this, however, is the fact that Shakespeare could write political plays that have urgent, contemporary relevance and touch upon such hot issues as kingship by inheritance and divine right, and constitutional monarchy, that is, kingship by personal efficiency and ability and the approval of parliament. You may very well be wondering now what has sent me on this tack. Why Richard II now? I have been asking myself the same question for five days now, since I saw the sixth production of Al-Hanager's independent theatre season at Rawabet. Richard x Richard, versus Bayyoumi, adapted and directed by Mohamed Abdel Khaliq and performed by his Atelier Al-Masrah (Theatre Atelier) troupe proved an intriguing experience, but also extremely baffling and frustrating. Their choice of Richard II could be defended on grounds of political relevance since the question of presidential succession has been very much in people's mind since President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria succeeded his father, launching a new paradoxical concept of rule by inheritance in supposedly constitutional republics and creating a dangerous precedent. In the production, however, the play, extensively abridged, frugally designed (with only a few bare boards and steps in sight, and not even a throne), and vaguely, poorly costumed (with a lot of long, black coast, boots and paper crowns), seemed to veer sharply in favour of the dethroned king. Though Richard's glaring faults were not omitted in the abridgement, his moving, brilliantly eloquent and beautifully lyrical speeches in his confrontation with the English parliament or in his solitude in prison tipped the emotional balance in his favour. Compressed into 8 short scenes, the fall of Richard II came across as a tragedy, and rather than a warning against the consequences of autocratic misrule, the moral seemed to echo the old Arab proverb which says: Irhamou aziza qawmin zal, that is, "show mercy towards the mighty when they fall from grace." With the last TV serial on the life of king Farouk and the recent television interview with his daughter, the charming ex-princess Ferial still fresh in one's mind, one felt as if the production were nostalgically looking back to the time when Egypt was a monarchy. However, the Theatre Atelier troupe's production seemed unable, or unwilling, to make such a clear, sharp-pointed advocacy. Rather than rework the old play to point out its political implications in the past or make it clearly address any issue of topical relevance in the present, Abdel Khaliq and his troupe seemed to be trying to stage a play they so much admired on a very poor budget and in a very cramped space. I was touched by their palpable love for the text which seemed to have completely engrossed them and bound them in a spell. My guess is that something went wrong along the lines between conception and execution. They had started out intending to do one thing, then, once the work began, the play had the upper hand and would not bend to their intents. The original conception, as the title clearly tells you, was very ambitious: not just to stage Richard II, however drastically truncated, from a contemporary perspective, but also to play it off against a modern dramatic text which features the forced resignation of the elected president of the most powerful republic in the world, namely Richard Nixon and US (hence the Richard x Richard), and, furthermore, to have an ordinary Egyptian citizen, the Bayyoumi in the title, compare both dramas, comment on them, and draw his own conclusion. Russell Lees's Nixon's Nixon was first performed in 1996 and was by no means the only dramatic work that probed the rise and fall of this most controversial of American presidents. In fact, it was but one link in a long chain including: Dan Hedaya's comedy Dick, Bob Gunton's TV movie Elvis Meets Nixon, Oliver Stone's three-hour-plus docudrama movie Nixon, and Robert Altman's 1985 film, Secret Honour, adapted from the one-character play about Nixon by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone. As one American critic says: "At the time Mr Nixon left office, who could have foreseen that he would become a figure of such fascination in fiction?" Another exclaims: "What is it about Richard Nixon, anyway? Book after play after movie, almost 30 years after the big guy's resignation, America's still fascinated with Dick." Set in the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House at 10pm, on 7 August, 1974, the eve of Nixon's resignation speech, Russell Lees's play imaginatively reconstructs the three-hour meeting that actually took place between Nixon and his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Henry A. Kissinger -- a meeting that was not bugged and, therefore, not on any official record. In the play, as the liquor flows, the two men examine their difficult situation, debate ways, some of them quite lurid, of avoiding the inevitable, reminisce about past achievements and failures, enacting historic meetings with Leonid I. Brezhnev, Chairman Mao and Golda Meir. The 1968 uprising in Czechoslovakia, the Vietnam war, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of president Salvador Allende, the killing of students on the campus of Kent State University, and, of course, the White House Tapes, are also resurrected. Grim as the topics conjured up are, the play is generally sourly comic in tone and gains in theatricality as the two men take turns playing themselves and each other and recreating before us their historical encounters with world leaders east and west. This element of theatricality, together with the mirror motif which features prominently in both plays leads one to surmise that Shakespeare's Richard II was not far off Lees's mind when he was writing his Nixon's Nixon. That in Shakespeare's hands Richard II comes across partly as actor and poet has been noted and extensively commented on by many scholars. Lees makes his Richard equally theatrical in his insistence on replaying his past triumphs with Kissinger's help. As for the mirror, in Richard II, the king asks for a mirror in the scene in which he publicly abdicates his throne and hands over his crown to the usurper Bolingbroke (IV, i). His purpose is to see "the very book indeed / Wherein my sins are writ, and that's myself". In Lees's play, Nixon admits that on his way up he often used to "stare in the mirror" and ask: "What's happening behind those eyes?" Though the image that faced him made him "astonished" and "mystified", he liked it: "'You sly dog.' I'd say. And we'd share a secret smile. But then I fell,'" he adds, '"I fell like Satan tossed from heaven.'" Richard II too fell from heaven and his sacred rights as anointed king were woefully shattered. Was the fall from power theme paramount in the minds of the Atelier troupe and they decided to play it in two variations, one royal and one plebeian? Granted the two plays touch lines on some points and, read together, could invite comparisons. Still, an Egyptian spectator may legitimately ask: what's that got to do with us? Are we talking about Nasser/Bolingbroke usurping power from Richard/Farouk and pondering the legitimacy of such an undertaking? If that were the case, why rope in Nixon and Kissinger. If you mention Kissinger to any Egyptian, he or she would automatically tell you that he was the architect of the extremely controversial peace accord with Israel in the late 1970s. President Sadat was fond of him, they would add, and held him in high esteem. But Lees's play does not so much as even hint at his role in the Camp David negotiations. And the production goes along with this, missing out the most crucial connection that could have brought Nixon's Nixon nearer home and gave it local political relevance. In short, Mohamed Abdel Khaliq's project of linking the past with the present, playing off two plays and two political principles against each other, and positing a simple Egyptian citizen as both spectator and adjudicator of this historical theatrical pageant -- an imaginative tour de force and wild, exhilarating conception -- got bogged down somewhere along the lines. May be it needed more time to mature, to simmer and cook well. As it is, all we got was a tantalising, mind-boggling, political potpourri consisting of bits of the two plays -- four scenes from Nixon's Nixon and eight from Richard II -- all reasonably presented, given the severe and imagination-wilting restrictions of space and budget. Though politically prevaricating and frustratingly tantalising, Richard x Richard was a valuable, provocative theatrical experience which deserves a special tribute. Where else, except in the independent theatre movement, would you find such an army of volunteers -- Bayyoumi Foad, Said Mustafa, Shadi El-Dali, Hanadi Moralli, Mohamed Lutfi, Osama Foad, Hamza Salaheddin, Shaaban Abbas, Abdel Rehim Allam, Huda Saad, Amr El-Shatbi, Karim Aouni, Inas Hassan, Adel Mahmoud, Lubna Abdel Aziz, Hani Afifi, Ibrahim Saad, and many others -- willing to give their time, artistic expertise and imaginative energy for almost nothing? Where else could you find a production that gives you many sleepless nights, sending you back to old, forgotten texts and intriguing new ones? Whatever its failures, Richard x Richard was a brave venture and something I shall always feel grateful for.
