Nehad Selaiha discovers a gifted playwright at Al-Tali'a What a pleasant surprise it was to walk into the big hall of Al-Tali'a theatre last week and be rewarded with a robust, full- blooded Egyptian revenge tragedy, with lots of gore and piles of corpses. I have a weakness for the genre and think it a great pity that Egyptian dramatists have neglected it for so long. Though the retribution motif runs through many of the tragedies and melodramas presented in Egypt in the first half of the 20th century, only Intiqam Al-Maharaja (The Maharaja's Revenge), written and performed by Youssef Wahbi in the heyday of his Ramses company (1923-34), qualifies as a proper specimen of the genre. But Wahbi' play, probably an adaptation of some foreign text, had been, by all reports, crude, melodramatic and completely divorced from Egyptian reality. Osama Abdel Fattah Nureddin's Ekleel Al-Ghar (Laurels), on the other hand, is an intelligent, highly imaginative reworking of the genre which exploits its vast potential for theatricality to dramatise a serious theme with a topically relevant political message. The setting is an imaginary city of antiquity called "Ono", which sounds very much like the name of the ancient Egyptian city of "O'n" ("Ain Shams", or "Eye of the Sun", present day "Heliopolis"), suggesting a metaphoric link between the two, with the glorious history of the real "O'n", which keeps infringing on one's consciousness every time the name "Ono" is mentioned, providing a kind of ironic mental backdrop that sharply offsets the dismal state of affairs portrayed on stage. Whereas "O'n" had been a seat of wisdom and learning, especially in astronomy, engineering and medicine, boasting the oldest university in the world and priests of the calibre of Imhotep, the architect of Zoser's Step Pyramid, the fictional "Ono" is a stagnant pool of ignorance and poverty, ruled over by ruthless, tyrannical kings who come to power by the will and through the machinations of Harmen, a wicked, lecherous charlatan masquerading as a sage who pretends to carry out the orders of the stars and numbs the people with superstitions and rituals. Of these, the most grotesque and brutal are the rites of passage which mark the change of power and involve cutting out the tongue of the dying king; a rigorous test of physical endurance for the pretenders to the title which entails standing up motionless for days and nights on end, without sleep, food or drink, hurling insults and curses at one another to while away the time until all but one collapse; the winner's consumption of the dead king's (by now rotted) tongue; his slaughtering of all the failed contestants; and cleansing himself with the blood of a freshly slain virgin. But to expand the metaphor of "Ono" beyond Egypt to embrace the whole of the middle east, the author foregrounds the Sabaean religion, or star-worship, which probably originated in "Saba'" (Sheba), in Southern Arabia, and gives his characters names which vaguely suggest other old civilizations in the region. In this respect, Fayza Nawwar's costumes and Mohamed Saad's multiple set (representing a river side, a market place, a cemetery, the inside of two poor homes, and a massive temple in the background dominating every thing) were a great help. While the costumes suggested an old, unspecified era, the structure of the set and its decorative engravings pointed in the direction of Assyria and Saba. In this intriguing setting, Nureddin's convoluted tale of savage passions, morbid obsessions, and gruesome acts unfolds. For twenty years, Banda, a widow and mother of three grown sons, has harboured a murderous hatred for Tsigor, the current king. He not only killed her father to usurp his throne, indirectly causing her mother's death of grief, but also dishonoured and betrayed her when he promised to spare her husband's life if she gave in to his lust then killed him after she did. Moreover, the shameful encounter resulted in a child which she secretly delivered in the temple and begged the high priest, Harmen, to rid her of it. Realizing the power the child gives him over both its parents, Harmen entrusted it to old, childless Hepano, the city's undertaker, to bring up, telling Banda and Tsigor it had died. When the play opens, twenty years later, the bastard child has blossomed into beautiful Swaida, the loveliest and purest damsel in the whole of Ono and the lover of Ibor, Banda's eldest son. During those twenty years, Banda, despite her poverty, managed to have Ibor educated by the temple priests and trained in all the martial arts, as befits a future king and avenger, and has offered daily oblations to the temple to curry favour with Harmen and get him to use his power with the stars to bring about the downfall of Tsigor and the restoration of her family's former glory. But it is not the stars that Banda has to thank for her defiler's downfall and slow, painful death. Incensed by the Tsigore's attempt on his life and his growing insolence and vanity, Harmen kills him on stage, in a somewhat lurid manner, by burning some deadly plants and making him inhale the poisonous fumes. To torture him further, he reveals to him as he dies the secret of his bastard child, the only one he ever had thanks to the debilitating potions Harmen has secretly plied him with for years to render him impotent. When Banda walks in to gloat over the prostrate figure of her partner in sin, he deals her a last, vengeful blow by telling her that his death will not blot out the past since it lives on in Sweida. Though shattered by the revelation, Banda will not allow anything, not even her motherly feelings, to stand in the way of her ambitions and accepts to become Harmen's mistress when he offers to manipulate the deadly competition for the throne in favour of Ibor and rid her finally of the past by picking Sweida as the sacrificial virgin. The only problem seems to be Ibor himself. An idealist and dreamer like Hamlet, plagued with a terrible feeling of ennui, and thoroughly disgusted with Ono, its cowardly, spineless people and all the mumbo jumbo which passes for religion, he takes refuge in alcohol and becomes a notorious drunkard. Would he accept to have a go at the crown? Surprisingly he does, seeing it as a chance to possess the power to shock his people out of their long stupor and awaken them to the necessity of rebelling by carrying tyranny to unprecedented monstrous extremes. His logic is that only when people have been pushed to the outermost limits of human endurance will they rebel, and he applies it with grim determination. When his younger brother Mario and a few comrades rebel against him, and ask him to step down or die, he demonstrates to them the futility of their endeavour by challenging the masses to join the rebels; when the masses run away to safety, leaving their champions to their fate, Ibor declares that "a revolt mounted by a few brave men on behalf of a lot of fools and cowards is doomed to fail". Only when all the people rise against him will he accept death, knowing he has achieved his goal. No coup d'état can bring about real change or do away with tyranny, the play seems to argue in the light of modern Egyptian history; only a popular revolution in which everyone takes responsibility for their freedom can do it. As ruler, Ibor vividly recalls Albert Camus' Caligula and the differences between the two characters are as interesting as the parallelisms. Both are sensitive people turned tyrants in a quest for freedom which alienates them from all mankind and finally destroys them. But while Caligula sought freedom from the human condition which he saw as absurd, Ibor had in mind freedom from religious and political oppression. Both force the hands of their assassins, making their death a kind of "superior suicide", in Camus phrase; nevertheless, while Caligula dies defeated, Ibor emerges at the end of the play (in print though not in the performance) as a sacrificial figure whose death redeems his people. Both order the execution of friends and innocent people and kill loved ones; but while Ibor mourns his brother Mario and his friend Dosheer, Caligula is unmoved by Caesonia's death. And, finally, both harbour incestuous passions for sisters who die young; but while Caligula's Drusilla dies of natural causes before the play begins, Ibor's Ophelia-like Sweida commits suicide towards the end of the play. Nureddin, who studied English literature at the university of Al-Mansoura, has a postgraduate diploma from the English department at Cairo university and is about to embark on an M.A. thesis on the representation of ordinary people in Shakespeare's plays, freely admits the influence of Hamlet and Caligula on his play, adding: "It is not what you take from plays that matters; it is what you do with it." He wanted to know if, as Shakespeare did in Hamlet, he could plant a complex character with a serious mission, like Caligula, inside a popular, plot-oriented form, like the revenge tragedy, without the whole structure collapsing. Well, it didn't; in fact, much more than Hamlet, the Caligula- like Ibor seemed to fit well in a form preoccupied with violence, obsessive passions and morbid psychology, and his energy and complexity seemed to flow into the other characters, allowing them to break out of the usual stereotypes to provide the actors with real juicy parts. In performance, under Shadi Sorour's direction, Ekleel Al-Ghar was a bustling pageant, a colourful, engrossing spectacle which seemed to hark back to Elizabethan times as we know them from books. Though Sorour's policy of cutting out most of the commoners' scenes and editing the whole text to compress its four acts and 23 scenes into a compact two and a half hours performance, without breaks, was a great idea, his changing of the end remains debatable. While Nureddin wanted to be optimistic and leave his audience with a ray of hope, however uncertain, showing the people rising up in arms against the tyrant at the end, thus fulfilling his mission, Sorour opted for a defeated end, very much like Camus' Caligula, in which we see Harmen (whom Nureddin killed in the original text) descending from the top of the temple, in the wake of Ibor's coffin to order the bereaved Hepano, who still mourns the death of Sweida, to take good care of the royal corpse. Sorour, a member of a disillusioned generation, thought it better, perhaps, to send his audience home with irking thoughts rather than false hopes and comforting promises of imminent salvation. Nevertheless, by choosing Nureddin's text, which has been lying on the shelves since 1992 when it won first prize in a prestigious contest for young writers, and lavishing on it so much care and imaginative energy, he gave me, personally plenty of hope and sent me home glowing. How can the world be such a miserable place as they would have us believe if it can still produce such wonderful performances as Shadi Sorour's Ibor, Mona Hussein's Banda, Khalil Mursi's Harmen, Maher Selim,'s Hepano and Iman Raga'i's Sweida. Their talents, energy and passionate dedication combined are enough to salvage continents, if people only knew. One last thought, however, dogged me on the way home: Am I going to live to see the time when texts of the caliber of Ekleel Al-Ghar do not have to wait for more than ten years before they are allowed to fully come to life on stage?
