Nehad Selaiha finds Wilad El-Lazinah, the latest play by celebrated television writer, Osama Anwar Okasha, a little too preachy In his fourth play, Wilad El-Lazinah (idiomatically, a term of abuse which could translate as 'crafty devils'), Osama Anwar Okasha continues his dramatic dissection of contemporary Egyptian reality, laying the blame for its moral bankruptcy and thorough corruption at the door of the 1960s' generation whom he accuses of nurturing the rule of dictatorship through their cowardice and submission and betraying the socialist dream. As in the three earlier plays, El-Nas Elli fil Talit (The People on the Third Floor, 2001), Fi Izz El-Dohr (At High Noon, 2003) -- both staged at the National -- and Qamar Arba'tashar (Full Moon) which appeared at Al-Hanager in 2005, family relationships in the middle classes occupy the centre of the play and are used to build a depressing image of a rotten society which reaches beyond the personal to the political. Here, however, as the choice of setting implies -- a luxury love nest rather than a family home -- such relationships have completely disintegrated, and the figure of the mother which, however morally battered, could still hold the family together in the earlier plays is prominent by its absence. The play also adopts more or less the same formula successfully tried in the earlier dramas: an unexpected event interrupts the ordinary course of daily life, generating a lot of tension and suspense and triggering a series of harrowing, often melodramatic revelations. As in the case of many modern dramas, these revelations of the past, rather than any deeds in the present, constitute the dramatic action, intimating, in its very form, the complete impotence of the characters. In The People on the Third Floor, the unexpected event was the sudden arrival at Widad's flat, during a wedding celebration, of a mysterious police investigator, quite reminiscent of inspector Goole in J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls ; in At High Noon, it was the mysterious wholesale disappearance of young bathers at a holiday resort; in Full Moon, his shortest and most experimental theatrical piece where realism gives way to fantasy and expressionism, the revelation process is set in motion by the physical materialisation of a mermaid on stage. (For full descriptions and critiques of the plays, see Culture section, Al-Ahram Weekly, Nos. 533, 640 and 732.) In the current play (produced by the National and hosted at Miami theatre), the unsettling occurrence is the invasion of a secluded villa by a burglar which coincides with the arrival of two sets of characters, both intent on mischievous deeds and not supposed to meet each other at all in such circumstances. Unlike the other plays, the basic situation here, which involves illicit sex and a lot of hiding and dodging, has the makings of a roaring farce: a naughty old man on an amorous escapade is surprised by his equally profligate son who arrives at the same place in the company of two male friends and three females, one of them unconscious, while a burglar in hiding amuses himself by acting like a ghost and playing tricks on all present. Right into the middle of this essentially farcical situation, Okasha plants a highly melodramatic story about a virtuous would-be ballet dancer who resists temptation and dies finally of an ailing heart. She tells her story in pathetic monologues amid fits of fainting and the author projects her, somewhat sentimentally, all dressed in white, as a symbol of purity and innocence and a helpless victim of the thoroughly wicked world around her. But she is not the only victim of need and poverty. The burglar too, though quite unrepentant, comparing himself at one point to the legendary Robin Hood, is revealed as another, and so are (eventually) the two female companions of the dancer; even the three reckless young men, all sons of wealthy, influential men and women are shown as victims of broken families or negligent, uncaring parents -- as lost souls whom no one cared to guide to the right path. As the revelations keep tumbling, what had looked initially as a project for a farce speedily develops into the nearest thing to a full-blown verbal melodrama with the characters neatly divided into black and white. Okasha, however, stops short of giving his play the conventional happy end characteristic of melodrama. Wilad El-Lazinah ends on a cynical note, with the good guys defeated and the bad ones on top. While the young people are frightened into keeping silent about the death of the dancer of a heart attack and are sent off home, and the heroic burglar is allowed to get away, the real culprits -- the philandering, greedy, unconscionable father, who is not above offering his mistress to business partners to clinch deals, his perfidious, unscrupulous assistant and a multinational businessman (all representatives of the 1960s' generation who sold out to consumerist capitalism and economic globalisation in Okasha's view) -- prepare to go off to a house boat on the Nile, accompanied by the father's mistress -- a budding video-clip singer who is the complete opposite of the dead dancer -- to have their wild party as originally planned, and as if nothing has happened. Using a situation which belongs firmly in the realm of farce to write a serious play, bordering on the tragic, with many melodramatic overtones is a risky business. While what actually happens on stage here is very flimsy, consisting mostly of unexpected arrivals (including that of a crazy surgeon who rushes farcically round the stage, frantically screaming and looking for the swooning lady who keeps performing a disappearing act through the machination of the burglar) and the characters' efforts to dodge and get rid of each other, the verbal texture seems quite heavy and repetitive, weighted down at every step with long tirades and sentimental monologues which tend to go on and on long after they have made their point. But this is perhaps a fault of the rigidly classical structure Okasha seems to favour -- a structure where the play opens after everything important has already happened and consists mostly of narration, rumination and confessions. In his first two plays, however, this kind of structure was enlivened by the "investigation device" which convincingly prompted and propelled the revelations, investing them with feelings of anxiety and sinister threats. Here the revelations seemed gratuitous, unjustified, and artificially strung together. That Okasha is principally a theatre moralist is evidenced by his willingness to sacrifice thrilling stage effects in the interest of putting across his moral loud and clear. An obvious example of this in Wilad El-Lazinah was his handling of the hiding burglar; rather than keep his identity a secret and spring it on us at the end, having squeezed every thrill and ounce of comedy out of it, Okasha made him open the play, casting him in the role of a narrator- commentator, very much like a Brechtian chorus. While this device guaranteed that not a single member of the audience would miss Okasha's message, it kept uncomfortably clashing with the essentially farcical situation and the generous helpings of melodrama (including gunshots) he kept cramming down our throats. It could be that Okasha who, I am assured, had to rewrite sections of the play to fit the new cast, wanted to expand the role of the burglar to get a star like Mahmoud El-Guindi to play it. After all, not many actors would accept to remain invisible for the best part of a play even if they have a master scene at the end. In directing him, Mohamed Omar (who also staged Okasha's three previous plays) allowed him space to improvise, engage the audience in conversation and demonstrate his mellifluous voice and singing ability. And yet, it all fell flat and seemed embarrassingly laboured. Mahmoud El-Hedeini was obviously ill at ease playing a scoundrel and a pimp -- characters which neither his gentle, saintly features nor sad, romantic mien qualify him for. He had been impressive as the artist in Full Moon ; but here, as the crooked father, he was an obvious miscast. As the three young delinquents, Tamer Abdel-Mon'im, Mohamed Isma'il Abdel-Hafiz and Yasser Farag made a convincing, carefully shaded trio, especially in the recrimination scenes, while Mohamed Abdel-Mo'ti and Youssef Dawood, as the mad doctor and the millionaire's stolid assistant, managed to spark off some welcome flashes of humour into many a dull moment. The four female actresses, however, were completely ham and, barring the one who played the mistress, atrociously costumed. Indeed the garishness of the acting of this quartet (Yasmine Gamal, Azza Sa'id, Rasha Hassan and Sahar Hussein) was only comparable to the sickening vulgarity of the set (a veritable eyesore by Adel Youssef) and the stodgy sentimentality of Atiyya Mahmoud's music. But perhaps all of this was meant, as part of Okasha's grim message.
