That the personal is political is an article of faith with radio, television and theatre writer Fatheya El-Assal. Her experience as a woman growing up in a repressive patriarchal culture that denied her all but the most elementary education – an experience she meticulously detailed in a 4-volume autobiography called Hodn Al-‘Umr (The Embrace of a Lifetime) – together with her political beliefs as an active member of the Egyptian Left since the 1950s have shaped her consciousness both as woman and writer. Though definitely a feminist, El-Assal's brand of feminism is part of a wider political vision that views women's oppression of as part of a complex web of interrelated socio-political, economic and ideological forces. In such a context, which takes heed of the concrete particularities of historical and political reality and tacitly links female oppression to the rise of capitalism and totalitarian systems, not only women, but also men emerge as victims. In both cases the sources of oppression are the same: the unrelenting exploitation of human labour, which breeds need, poverty and helpless submission, and the dominance of a backward, patriarchal ideology that valorizes blind obedience within the family, the tribe and the state, thus eroding individual will and integrity, and often resorts to moral hypocrisy, manipulating religion to enforce and maintain its power. Women, however, she acknowledges, have a rougher deal. When men become oppressed, they usually vent their frustration and anger on the weaker parties, abusing their wives and children both mentally and physically. In response, the women either rebel, risking public condemnation and social ostracism, meekly swallow their grievances, taking refuge in silence and becoming robot-like, resort to deceit and subterfuges, becoming cheats, or get thoroughly brainwashed into accepting, even defending their degraded status as both natural and right and bequeathing this conviction to their offspring. In the latter case they could easily turn into cruel travesties of their male oppressors, often exercising harsher forms of subjection on their daughters while warping the characters of their sons by turning them into budding dictators. As for the children, they mostly take to the streets, eventually becoming tramps, beggars, gangsters, drug addicts, pimps or prostitutes, or stay at home imbibing lessons in violence that turn them into social and psychological misfits for life. This vision informs not only El-Assal's writing, but also her private life, personal relationships and political activities. For in her case, writing is an organic extension of the self, of her female identity, her experience as a woman and her political convictions, and is constantly reshaped and expanded by them. Self-educated, with no experience of the written word in her early, formative years, she impulsively steered clear of fiction, a genre favoured by her female contemporaries, embracing dramatic writing in the Egyptian vernacular as a more congenial, more immediate, and more dialogic mode of self-expression and political action. She wrote as she spoke and heard other people speak, particularly women, gradually evolving an intimate, racy style that unashamedly embraces the fanciful, sensational, declamatory and melodramatic. As she matured, she turned her back on the traditional formula of the well-made play where she did not feel at home and sought inspiration in the oral narratives and folk tales which formed her earliest acquaintance with literature in childhood. The popular mode of narration in which a core story branches off in different directions, yielding new stories, then reasserts itself, developing a little before branching off again caught her fancy and she decided to try it in writing for the stage. The result was a confessional form in multiple voices, all female and all oppressed – a form that refracts the dramatic focus among many characters, presenting their stories as different manifestations of female oppression, played in a variety of emotional keys, ranging from the hilariously sarcastic to the tragically poignant. Instead of a single, linearly developing plot, she used a basic situation that generates a succession of confessional monologues, each representing a life history in miniature. Together, the monologues form a theme and variation pattern that yields painful revelations and questions the social system and cultural heritage. She experimented with this form in Nisaa bila Aqni'ah (Women without Masks) – a play written in 1975 but not performed till the mid-1980s, and even then the word ‘women' had to be removed from the title on the censor's orders – and refined it in Sign Al-Nisaa (Women's Prison), written in 1982 after a spell in prison as a political detainee and first staged in 1991 at the National. The writer's prison experience is strongly and directly reflected in the latter play, not only in the prison setting but also in the choice of characters. While all the female characters in Without Masks belong to the middle classes and are presented in the intimate setting of the home, the majority of the women in Prison are social outcasts who come from among the dispossessed and downtrodden at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. In both, however, the stories of the women are held together by 2 devices: a central character acting as the writer's persona and mouthpiece and changing for the better by her exposure to those stories, and a dominant, extended metaphor: the mask in one and the prison in the other. The freshness of form in both plays is more than matched by the novelty of content. For the first time in the history of Egyptian theatre the physical needs and appetites of the female body were aired and openly discussed, the marriage institution was critically scrutinized and reevaluated, and hitherto taboo subjects, such as domestic violence, legitimized rape within marriage and female genital mutilation, found their way to the stage. This is not to say that the plays are flawless; even at her best, El-Assal sometimes gets carried away, slipping into verbosity and sloganeering and missing important dramatic links. For this reason, her plays are seen to best advantage when an intelligent director/dramaturge is at hand. Dina Amin is one such director/dramaturge. Her stage-version of Women's Prison, performed by students and graduates of the Cairo University English department at the modest University Hostel Theatre on 23 April, was an impressive dramaturgical feat. Preserving all the essential components of the play – the basic characters, monologues, crucial interactive scenes and core message of freedom, as well as a lot of the humour and pathos – she condensed all, slashing off needless repetitions and redundant scenes and whittling down the often all-knowing, occasionally smug and largely irrelevant political comments, explanations and didactic tirades of the author's persona. Besides tightening the text, speeding up the tempo, and enhancing the dramatic tension, Amin's intervention effected a happy shift of dramatic focus from the strong, politically active Salwa, the writer's mouthpiece, to her friend, the weak, submissive and politically disengaged Leila who gets arrested by mistake while taking refuge in Salwa's house after a savage battering by her husband. In the original text, both friends experience a revelation, with Salwa discovering her moral hypocrisy and Leila her cowardice and marital slavery. The revelations, however, and the changes they bring about in both characters have little to do with the characters' exposure to the harrowing stories of the other prison inmates or their interaction with them. In both cases, they are solely the work of middleclass agents: the young university student in Salwa's case, and Salwa herself in Laila's. Moreover, the revelation and subsequent change in Salwa's character is of limited consequence to her life as a whole and only affects her relationship with her daughter in a positive way, promising to make it more egalitarian. Salwa's dramatic authority, therefore, is never really shaken, and she remains a towering figure throughout, constantly overshadowing Leila, acting as her mentor and guide, and finally prodding her to rebel and save her soul. This robs the prisoners' stories of their supposed dramatic function as agents of change and reduces them to mere displays of female oppression in Egypt – quite important and very interesting indeed, but dramatically ineffectual all the same. By cutting Salwa down to the size of the other characters, reducing her verbal output quite drastically and displacing her as the central authorial consciousness, Dina Amin allowed Laila to fulfill her dramatic potential as a character that undergoes a profound change through the prison experience and paradoxically achieves her liberation behind bars, thus enacting the play's redefinition of liberty and imprisonment as existential states rather than physical ones. Leila's coming into her own as a character automatically reinstates the prison inmates as agents of change, restoring their dramatic function. Dina Amin's direction complemented her dramaturgical work, producing a performance in which the other languages of theatre – of movement, gesture, facial expression and eye contact, of pose and posture and the positioning of bodies in space and in relation to each other, and of light, colour and music – spoke to the audience as eloquently as the verbal text. The persistent stage image was of women austerely dressed in simple, long, white garments and white headscarves and harshly lighted, standing in an empty space, against a dark, shadowy background, with a set of metal bars on one side, 3 plain beds spread with white sheets on the other, and a grey metal bucket at the back. It was a cheerless image, bespeaking the utter desolation of these women, the drabness of their lives and the dreariness of their future. It also suggested their basic innocence despite the harsh judgment of the Law. Except for a blood-red head bandana, worn by the woman who killed her deceitful lover, the only killer among the inmates, gay, bright colours were prominent by their absence; the dominant colour-scheme was black and white, with intermittent intrusions of grey, brown, khaki, or faded dark blue as the only variations. Like a good director, Amin used this colour scheme not only to create the general mood and atmosphere, but also to visually mark the dramatic shifts in the feelings and mental attitudes of her middle-class characters, thus making it dramatically functional. When the 3 newcomers to the prison first appear, Salwa is dressed in a white shirt and black trousers, a sign of her belonging equally to the worlds inside and outside the prison, and easily changes them in her third scene for the white prison uniform; Laila wears brown trousers and a dusty-yellow striped shirt and does not change them until much later, when the prison experience begins to work on her and she gets closer to the other inmates; and Mona, the young and lively university student, is dressed in a printed blouse and jeans and keeps them on until near the end of the play, when her lighthearted optimism and defiance give way to a grim realization of the power of the forces she opposed. To crystallize her reading of the play, Amin punctuated the performance with 4 songs: one from the repertoire of Sheikh Imam, and 3 new ones, specially written for the show by Alaa Amer, Ahmed Abdalla, and collectively by the cast. Iman Salah El-Din put the new ones to music and, dressed as one of the prisoners, sang them live, accompanying herself on the lute. While 2 of the songs, both cheerful, even hilarious, were designed to mark festive occasions in the play, the other 2 lyrically underscored basic ideas, imbuing them with emotive power. Guwana Zinzanah (We all Have a Cell Inside Us), which introduced the performance, acting as an overture, focused on the burden of double imprisonment suffered by women under patriarchy – namely, having their movements, actions and personal freedom constricted by the rules, traditions and taboos of society and the cultural heritage, and subsequently internalizing those socio-ideological constraints in the form of mental inhibitions that restrict individual freedom even in the absence external restraints. The other one, Baree' (Innocent) poignantly described the tragedy of the innocent when judged guilty by the unfair laws of society. The backbone of any performance, however, is the performers, and, more than most plays, Women's Prison requires a lot of them, and not just any performers; they have to be not only good, but also brave, broad-minded and uninhibited, with a good grasp of the idea that once on stage you do what the character requires and not what you, as a person, would or wouldn't normally do in real life – an idea that some professional female performers cannot yet comprehend. Women's Prison deals with the seamy side of life, projects characters that mostly lie outside the social sphere of most university students, particularly women students, and particularly those of the English department. Those characters – prostitutes, dope-dealers, down-at-heal charwomen, tramps, low-class dancers and murderesses – have a different vocabulary and different body language that has to be reproduced by the actresses. It was a big challenge and Amin's well-picked cast embraced it with valour and enthusiasm. But it could not have been easy. They had to do a lot of homework before the rehearsals stage, watching endless documentaries that feature the real counterparts of their characters. And the result was amply rewarding. The 9 young women who impersonated the old inmates, their leader and the latest comer to the prison – Aya El-Shafi, Marina Gorgy, Hind Magdi, Taqwa Almesawi, Diana Magdi, Omnia Ashraf, Reem Hatem, Zeinab Magdi, and Reem Samir – acted as a harmonious ensemble, giving lively, credible performances that cleverly avoided the vulgar clichés and hackneyed stereotypes that mar the representation of those characters in commercial cinema, theatre and television. For the other characters, Dalia Hafiz, as Salwa, fitted well the gentler, less assuming and more sympathetic version of the character as conceived by Amin. Shahenda Ahmed was every inch El-Assal's Ilham, the greedy, brassy businesswoman who would do anything for money, including adultery, and brazen it out if confronted. Diaa El-Din Mohamed as Laila's husband, Selim, was a typical male-chauvinist pig, wife-batterer and hardened gangster and was altogether thoroughly repulsive (and I mean this as a compliment). Laila, however, was the most demanding part and the most crucial in the success or failure of the performance. In Dina Amin's version, Laila not only becomes the dramatic focus of the play, changing under our very eyes from a weak, shallow, self-centered, slightly hysterical and generally irritating and contemptible child-woman, into a sadder and wiser one, with a mind of her own, a capacity for reflection and a lot of human sympathy and warmth. It was a big task for Dawlat Magi who undertook the part and she pulled it off magnificently, acting with fineness and sensitivity, and reflecting in her face and body language the inner workings of the character's mind, the trauma and emotional turmoil she is passing through and her gradual rebirth as a genuine, free human being. That, with next to no budget and only amateur actors, Amin could put on a performance of this caliber is exhilarating and proves that talent, energy, courage, dedication and hard work can make real, good theatre even when money is scarce. That this performance was of Women's Prison, of all plays, and was shown at such a sedate academic establishment as Cairo University without causing a scandal, or sending angry audiences out in droves is equally exhilarating. But most exhilarating of all is the fact that, at a time when a repressive ideology, with a backward view of women and an ingrained hatred of the arts, particularly the performance arts, is fast spreading like a plague, supported by the ruling establishment, Amin's choice of Women's Prison was at once approved by both the English department cultural society, led by Nadia El-Guindi, and all the department staff and head, Loubna Abdel Tawwab Yusef. It tells you how truly liberal, enlightened, progressive and brave these people are. And when you think that a certain private university (that shall remain unnamed) spends hundreds of thousands of pounds annually on vapid, paltry performances for which it rents the big hall of the Opera House and hires an expensive professional artistic crew (director, stage, lighting, costume and sound-track designers) to create a spectacular, lavish show that invariably dwarfs the expensively dolled up student actors, making them nearly inaudible and invisible and reducing them to little better than extras in an event for which they provide the pretext, and all for no other objective than publicity, you realize the cultural worth and integrity of the staff of the Cairo University English Department and the value of the kind of education they offer their students – an education that extends beyond the classroom and English literature into society, culture and the arts in general and seeks to awaken, enlighten and develop not just the students' intellect, but also their social conscience and consciousness, and their political awareness and humanity. To these wonderful people we owe love and gratitude. May they always remain ‘a beacon to lesson ages.'
