Last week, in my roundup of the theatrical scene in Egypt in 2012, I said: ‘It was the independent theatre that held the theatrical fort when the state theatre organization seemed to give it up and, hopefully, it will continue to resist religious bigotry, social intimidation and intellectual repression and to swim against the tides of darkness that threaten to engulf this country.' Happily for me, the first production I watched in 2013 was by an independent troupe and it augured well for the continuance and persistence of such theatrical resistance and activism. The production was a new, compressed and concentrated stage-version of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (alternatively translated in English as A Public Enemy) in colloquial Arabic, based on a new classical Arabic translation of the full text by Randa Hakim and Shereen Abdel-Wahhab, put together, designed and directed by Nora Amin for her La Musica troupe, and jointly sponsored by the Norwegian Embassy in Cairo and the Ibsen Studies Centre in Norway. Viewed against the backdrop of recent political events in Egypt (the current president's declaration to an American newspaper that he was ‘democratically' elected and had the ‘majority' of the Egyptian people on his side, the row over the presidential decree by which he gave himself unprecedented sweeping powers and exempted all his decisions from legal challenge, the rushed referendum over a half-baked, deeply flawed draft constitution, hastily knocked together overnight by an objectionable constitutional assembly of doubtful legitimacy and legal standing, the besieging by militant Islamists supporting the president of the supreme constitutional court and the City of Media Production to intimidate the judiciary and opposing TV channels and obstruct the work of both, not to mention the violent, brutal assaults on peaceful protesters by the president's supporters outside the presidential palace, all in the name of ‘democracy), Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which warns of the pitfalls of democracy, demonstrates the tyranny of the majority and warns of the danger of an uninformed public that can be easily manipulated by politicians, seems of serious political relevance in post-revolutionary Egypt and urgently topical in view of the upcoming parliamentary elections within 2 months. Enemy, which was published in 1883, within only a year of Ghosts, and is believed to have been written in response to the angry uproar that earlier play created and the virulent attacks on Ibsen it occasioned, was based on 2 true incidents. The first concerns the father of the German poet Alfred Meissner, who, when a health officer at a health resort at Teplitz in Bohemia in 1830, had warned the guests and inhabitants of a cholera breakout and was rewarded by having his house stoned by the angry townspeople. The second involved a Christiania chemist, Harald Thaulow, who had a resounding quarrel the year before the play was written with a local steam kitchen in which the whole capital took sides and a public meeting, very like the one in act 4 of the play, took place (see Peter Watts's introduction to Ibsen: Ghosts and Other Plays, Penguin Classics). Like the heroes in both incidents, Dr. Stockmann, the health officer in a small Norwegian coastal town, discovers a certain health hazard to the community and its visitors (the waters of the town's mineral baths are polluted), but when he tries to reveal and remove it he is met with fierce opposition on account of the costs of the operation and its damaging effect to the town's reputation as a health spa and, consequently, its prosperity. Sacked, mobbed, vilified and ostracized, he first thinks of emigrating but finally decides to stay, resist and do the little he can to communicate his enlightened ideas, fearless integrity, broadmindedness (which he describes as ‘almost exactly the same thing as morality' in Act 4) and belief in the value of culture to the younger generation. The tentatively optimistic note of hope in future generations on which the original play ends becomes in Nora Amin's production an urgent rallying cry to stay in Egypt and resist. It felt as if Nora and her cast and crew were speaking for the Copts, the liberals, the secularists and the revolutionaries of Egypt and sending a clear, defiant message to the likes of Sheikh Mohamed Hussein Ya'qoub, a leading Salafi preacher, who, in a Friday sermon in March 2011, called the sorry referendum on the constitutional amendments put to the vote that month Ghazwat Al-Sanadeeq (the battle of the ballot boxes), interpreting its result as a clear majority vote and popular mandate for the institution of an Islamic theocracy. Addressing ‘those who say they cannot live in such a country and under such a rule,' he said: ‘As you like … God speed … What's that to us? You can seek visas to America and Canada… We (meaning the Islamists) have won the battle of the ‘boxes' … this country is ours and anyone who does not like it is most welcome to emigrate' (as reported in Al-Badil, 21 March, 2011, and on the 6th of April Youth Movement's site – http://www.facebook.com/shabab6april). Indeed, the whole conception of Nora's production seemed to centre on a conflict very much like the one at the heart of the current political scene in Egypt – a conflict between knowledge and ignorance, open-mindedness and bigotry, disinterested honesty and selfish moral hypocrisy, frank openness and tortuous, self-seeking wiliness, the free individual mind and the herd mentality, respect for reason and enlightened thinking and a slavish following of tradition and adherence to inherited common notions. This explains why Nora went right to the heart of the play, to the public meeting which takes up the whole of Act 4, staging it almost in full and making it the focus of her stage version, with only a few snatches from Acts 2 and 3 in preparation, all featuring Stockman in conversation or confrontation with Hovstad, the editor of The People's Herald, and Billing, his colleague on the paper, with Aslaksen, the printer and head of the householders Association, and Morten Kiil, the owner of the tannery that contaminates the town's water supplies and Mrs. Stockman's foster-father, and, most importantly, with his brother Peter, the Mayor. After the public meeting, a few fragments of Act 5 – namely: Stockman's meetings with his brother, then Morten, then Hovstad and Aslaksen (who all try to bend his will with bribes and threats), plus a few words with Captain Horster and a brief conversation with his wife and 2 sons (Nora omits the daughter) pave the way to Stockman's final defiant cry that he will stay and fight back, even though victory, as both the original play and Nora's version somberly imply, may lie in the very distant future, or, even, may never be achieved. This conception dictated all aspects of the staging. Nora created a semblance of the hall in Captain Horster's house, where the public meeting takes place, by placing her actors and audience in a curtained off space on the stage of the Hosapere theatre, containing 70 seats for the audience and the actors planted among them, with an aisle between the 7, 5-seat rows on either side, which is constantly claimed by the actors. This aisle led to a narrow, raised platform, extending from one end of the room to the other, facing the audience, with a few armchairs on it for the speaker and the distinguished guests and some microphones, and was flanked at the other end, at the back of the audience, near the only entrance/exit of the space, with 2 smaller platforms where some scenes took place and the 4 members of the band, who accompanied the show with stirring live music throughout (Nadir Samy, Tamer Isam, Salim Asar and Ahmed Muntasir), sat. In this set up, the performance and audience spaces were merged, casting the spectators in the role of the townspeople in the play and bringing the action nearer home. To enhance this effect, the space was evenly lighted throughout, with only an added spotlight on the actors in the scenes preceding the public meeting, and the acting was uniformly realistic, creating a strong illusion of reality. This was a very odd and quite original combination indeed. Usually, when an auditorium is kept lighted, this is meant as a Brechtian alienation effect to break the dramatic illusion and bar empathy and emotional involvement with the actors. Here, however, combined with the very convincing realistic acting of the whole cast, it worked in the opposite direction, deepening the impression of the reality of the action and dragging us into it as participants. Curiously too, the visibility of the band, conventionally another alienation effect, rather than interfere with the powerful illusion of reality, seemed to intensify the mounting tension, transforming the final part of the meeting, with the aid of Tareq El-Dweiri's frenzied screaming of his lines into the mike he takes off its stand, the rhythmical movement of his body and the uproarious shouting of the actors among the audience, into the nearest thing to a riotous rock concert that has got out of hand. The illusion of the audience as real participants and, perhaps, colluders in the infamous proceedings, gained a sharper edge at the point in the meeting when it is suggested that a formal vote be taken on whether Dr. Stockman is or is not a public enemy and Aslaksen, the printer, descends among the audience with bits of differently coloured paper and instead of offering us a choice of ‘White for Aye, blue for Nay', as he says in the original play (in Peter Watts's English translation), offers us ‘green paper' (a euphemism for money, particularly American dollars, in the Egyptian slang) for yes and white for no. This small alteration, accompanied by a wink from Billing who supplies the paper, vividly brought to mind the notorious practice of buying the votes of the poor and ignorant among the electorate in the elections held since the revolution, thus further identifying the plight of Dr. Stockman with that of the Copts, liberals and secularists of Egypt. The illusion of reality, however, could hardly have been maintained with such force for over an hour and a half were it not for the superb performance of the whole cast. As Dr. Stockman, Tareq El-Dweiri, a brilliant director in his first acting experience here, gave a stunning, finely shaded and heart-felt performance that reflected his deep, personal sympathy with the character's views, moral stand and the values he represents. At one point in his tirade in the meeting, Stockmann says: ‘It's a lucky thing that this notion that culture corrupts is only an old wives' tale. No, it's stupidity, poverty, and ugly surroundings that do the devil's work. In a house that isn't swept and aired daily … in that sort of house, I tell you, after two or three years people lose the power to think or behave decently. Lack of oxygen weakens the conscience … and it looks as if there's a terrible shortage of oxygen in all sorts of houses here in this town, when the solid majority can be unscrupulous enough to want to found the town's prosperity on a quagmire of lies and fraud.' As El-Dweiri fired those words at us I was convinced he was speaking of his own country and thought that no other actor could have spoken them with such passion, or made them have such an impact. The role covered a wide range of emotions which he handled with masterful ease, tuning his voice and body language to fit each. From a small, timid, hesitant and slightly nervous man at the beginning, he seemed to grow in stature as the play progressed, moving smoothly from good-natured gullibility and eager excitement to shocked incredulousness and pent up anger at the attitude of his brother and betrayal of friends, and finally, when he gives vent to his fury and lashes out at all, appearing like a fearless giant, with the overpowering presence, aggressive energy and irresistible charisma of a rock star. One could easily believe him when he declared after the meeting that, defeated and standing alone as he was, he felt he was the strongest man in the world. Ahmed El-Salakawi played Hovstad with the debonair charm of a man of the world, hiding his opportunism, moral cowardice and lack of principles under a mask of urbane geniality and candour. By contrast, Imad Hassan's Billing, a character as hypocritical and unprincipled as Hovstad, was rendered as vulgar, gauche, ridiculously pretentious, slightly stupid and very easy to see through. Imad El-Raheb's Aslaksen was dangerously smooth and slippery. Assuming the appearance of virtue and humbleness and a sanctimonious, obsequious, submissive manner, El-Raheb managed to betray by the look in his eyes, his tone of voice and body language the real baseness and moral unscrupulousness of the character. Ibrahim Gharib, who designed the haunting set for La Musica's widely acclaimed Al-Dafirah (The Braid) many years ago, makes his debut as an actor in this production. Nora cast him as the Mayor, Dr. Stockmann's brother, and he performed the part with fitting stolidness, stodginess and pompous self-importance, showing no emotion and hiding behind his stern appearance the pettiness of his soul. Gharib's Mayor was a typical specimen of Eliot's hollow men, with a headpiece filled with Straw. The part of Morten Kiil was decently performed by Mostafa Darwish, and his age, white hair and physique were valuable assets in this respect. The last of the main male parts, that of Captain Horster, already a small part in the play in terms of spoken dialogue, though not in the plot, was further reduced in Nora's version, becoming almost a silent one. If I am correct, Samir Foad played it and, as the host of the public meeting, was physically present almost throughout, gravely looking on and protecting Dr. Stockmann when the crowd mobbed him and leading him and his family safely out. With Petra, Dr. Stockmann's daughter, removed, Mrs. Stockmann's was the only female part in this version, and since it was reduced to a few sentences and 2 appearances, Nora knew that no decent actress would accept it and so played it herself. It was a lucky decision; with her talent and experience, she could make the silent presence of the character during the public meeting movingly felt and her face and posture clearly reflected the character's fear, anxiety and growing agitation. In Enemy, as in all her previous productions, Nora Amin displays her sure mastery of the craft of theatre and that daring urge to experiment and mix styles and forms which makes every production of hers a new and exciting venture, unlike any of her previous ones. Enemy was a wonderful new year's gift from the Norwegian nation to the Egyptian people and I feel deeply grateful for it, as I am sure the audiences who will see it in Alexandria, at Sayed Darwish theatre where it will soon play, will feel. Indeed, it is a production that deserves to tour all over Egypt and beyond.
