Last week I reviewed a recent production by the Youth theatre of Mohsen Misilhi's Elli Bana Masr (He, Who Built Egypt), welcoming it as a long overdue tribute to one of Egypt's most promising contemporary playwrights whose untimely and shockingly horrible death in 2005 abruptly ended what many believe would have been a brilliant career. On the evening I watched Elli Bana Masr, I was delighted to learn from its director, Islam Imam, that another masterpiece by Misilhi,Mannequin, had opened at Salah Jahin Hall, next to the Balloon theatre, the night before, and that he too was the one who staged it for El-Samer Troupe of the Cultural Palaces organisation. At least one of Misilhi's students at the Theatre Institute has loyalty and still cherishes his memory. Like Elli Bana Masr, Mannequin is a socio-political satire in which inanimate objects, clothes dummies in this case rather than stone statues, come to life as dramatic characters. In Mannequin, however, Misilhi uses for the first time in my experience of theatre in Egypt a shop window as a realistic dramatic space, a metaphor for the pageant of history, a marker of social change, and a vehicle for barbed satire. Though the play opens in the late 1990s, the dramatic action temporally encompasses the period from the 1960s onwards, and this long stretch of time is dramatically encapsulated in the space of one hour. The changes that came over Egyptian society quite rapidly indeed are exemplified in the merciless, tragic progress of one female from a blooming young woman, dreaming of love and a secure life in marriage, to a lonely, dispirited spinster, fighting to earn a living to support herself and family without losing the last remnants of human dignity and self respect. Noosa – the half educated daughter of a petty civil servant who belongs socially and economically to the lower rungs of the middle classes but clings to the illusion of having a distinguished social status despite his increasingly straitened means and rapid sinking into poverty – is forced by need to work as a shop-window dresser. Her father, blind to the social changes taking place around him, mulishly rejects her suitors one after the other, seeing them as socially inferior to him, and hopes to marry her to a respectable civil servant, like himself, who should also be suitable to her in years and well-off to boot. Predictably, he dies leaving her unmarried. When the play opens, she is nearing middle age and, to top it all, has lost her job. Her employer, Hajj Ahmed, in whose service she spent all her working life and with whom she shared the vicissitudes of the market as the country passed through the socialist economic policies of the 1960s, to the boom of the laisser-faire 1970s, then to the depression of the 1990s onwards, and witnessed with him the changing fashions from one period to the next, has fired her to save up on the running costs of his store. For old times' sake, however, he agrees at the beginning of the play to employ her for just one hour – nearly the time the play takes to watch. This makes the performance time almost coincidental with the dramatic time, something that would have pleased Aristotle no end. Indeed, the play has a tight classical structure, not unlike that of Oedipus Rex, the play Aristotle commended as a model for all good tragedies, deducing his dramatic rules from it. Like Oedipus Rex, Mannequin opens when events have reached their climax and their consequences cannot be reversed or softened. What remains is for the heroine to realize this by reliving them in her memory. And it is here that Misilhi displays his innovative imagination and penchant for theatricality. As Noosa sets to work, the shop window suddenly takes on a double identity as both realistic and mental space, and the mannequins she dresses spring to life to enact scenes from her previous life, representing her autocratic father, her helpless mother, her younger sister who strays from the path of virtue under the pressure of the materialistic, commercial values of the 1970s' consumerist society, her brother who falls a prey to the rising tide of religious fundamentalism and is consequently estranged from her, and one of her rejected suitors, who refuses to help her when she loses her job. In the relived scenes where her employer and his flighty, crooked salesman figure, these two characters, who appear at the beginning of the play (in the ‘present' of the play, so to speak), impersonate themselves. The flood of painful memories – of frustrated love, thwarted desires, failed hopes and patriarchal oppression – is punctuated with marked shifts in the sartorial fashions displayed by the mannequins, and these changes become visible indicators of changing mores and morals. Indeed, the way Misilhi uses the switch from the mini skirt of the sixties to the veil in the nineties is a brilliant stroke and transforms the display of fashion into a display of history. Like the mannequins, Hajj Ahmed too changes his attire to suit the times, graduating from a sixties' hippy look (flared jeans, flowered shirt and long hair and sideboards), to a caricature of the eighties' nouveau riche businessman (with a paunch, in a garish checkered suit and waving a cigar) and, finally, to the stereotypical image of a nineties' hajj in a galabiya and abaya. Noosa, on the other hand, never changes her simple, faded costume and her practical, neutral appearance acts as a point of stability in the flux of visual change, marking her as a tragic oddity and preparing for her shattering, final opting out. Up until the very end too, the headless mannequin, wearing a wedding dress, and symbolizing the bride she is never to be, and the little girl mannequin, representing the child she is never to have, remain fixed elements at the centre of the scene. At the end of the hour allotted to her, which she spends reliving the past, Noosa is back in the present, sadder but wiser. Her journey to the past leads to a desperate decision. With no hope of marriage, or even another job (in view of the rampant unemployment among young people in general, including even those with university degrees), she is left with only one choice: to surrender her body in a secret form of common-law marriage before it is too late, for even this one asset in her possession will soon be eroded by the ruthless march of time, becoming a valueless, unwanted commodity. Hajj Ahmed had offered her legal marriage in the seventies and she turned him down because he already had two wives; in the eighties, when her hopes of love and a better marriage had faded and she resigned herself to accepting him, he had changed him mind and only offered her then jawaz urfi (a form of secret cohabitation supposedly approved by God but with no legal status or bonds). Now, in the nineties, at the time the play was written, she decides to accept this humiliating compromise. But she is too late by a decade; all Hajj Ahmed is willing to offer her now, and only as a favour, is the position of a kept mistress; if she refuses, he will never allow her into the store even for an hour. After this shattering revelation, the play ends in a metaphoric vein, with a form of suicide. Noosa realises that she too has to move with the times if she is to cease to be a social and moral misfit; and the only way she can do this is to join the world of the dummies. She changes into a revealing, sequined evening dress and, in a desperate gesture vividly reminiscent of the final scene in Elli Bana Masr, mounts the steps to put herself on display. But painful as this is, it is not all. Misilhi, keen on driving his satire ruthlessly home, works the knife deeper into the wound, transforming the mannequin of Noosa into a grotesque embodiment of the moral schizophrenia that, in his view, characterizes Egyptian society today. When the real, human Noosa disappears, Hajj Ahmed walks into the shop window to add the final harrowing touch. He climbs up to where Noosa stands, smacks his lips at the sight of her bare arms and bosom, then covers her head completely with a black veil which, against the dark background, makes her look as headless as the dummy in the wedding dress. In the production staged at Salah Jahin Hall, Islam Imam had to battle against the crippling restraints of a measly, all-inclusive budget of only EL. 38, 000 and a very limited choice of actresses for his leading lady. The lack of money forced him to limit the change of costumes to the very bare minimum: the mannequins kept the same clothes on throughout, and so did Hamada Barakaat, asHajj Ahmed, except for the abaya he wears over his long, loose gown, or galabiya, in the scenes that take place in the nineties. Samar El-Shazli, who starred as Noosa, chose her own costume, which was suitably drab, and was not required by the stage directions in the text to change it except in the final scene, and that was removed by the director for two reasons: first, because El-Shazli, who is veiled in real life and adamantly refused to uncover her hair for the play (which was okay in most of the scenes but mandatory for the final one), would never agree to baring her head, let alone baring her arms and bosom in a revealing dress; and secondly, because even if by some miracle she did agree, she would only look ridiculous – more grotesque than seductive due to her excessive weight. I doubt too that she could have stepped onto one of the mannequins' fragile-looking stands without bringing the whole flimsy set crashing down. El-Shazli is a competent enough actress and has a handsome face; as such, she could do very well for the part, but only minus the veil and 20 kilograms. In place of the removed final scene, in which Hajj Ahmed covers the dummy Noosa becomes with a black veil, Imam ended the play with the nearest thing to it, making Hajj Ahmed drag Noosa away to become his mistress while literally folding her under the spread wings of his long abaya and hiding her from view – an eloquent theatrical gesture that metaphorically implies a form of obliteration, tantamount to death – and placing the thick black veil that was to cover Noosa on the dummy that impersonated the younger sister earlier in the play. It was a brilliant solution to a very unfortunate and quite absurd problem created by one professional actress, acting most unprofessionally. To make up for artistic loss entailed by El-Shazli's lack of discipline and modest stage presence, Imam chose the rest of his actors carefully and tried hard to get the best out of them. Hamada Barakaat played Hajj Ahmed with flair and was an attractive turncoat and time-server; Rami Ramzi, as the crooked salesman and former thief, displayed plenty of comic talent; Ihab Izz El-Din was convincing as the ossified, dictatorial father; and Ahmed Baseem, as the former suitor, Fatma Zaki, as the mother, and Iman Amin as the sister, acted tolerably well, with a touch of caricature. Crucial to the success of the production, however, were Islam Imam's resourceful imagination as director, and his sagacity in choosing his artistic crew. Costume designer Maha Abdel Rahman and set designer Yehia Subeih did wonders with the very little money they were given, producing a lively, colourful stage image to which Abou Bakr El-Sherif's lighting added shades and variations. It is thanks to their combined talents that this beautiful play could still work and come across effectively in the presence of severe handicaps.
