Nehad Selaiha is sucked into a vortex of macabre visions Watching a play by Nadia El-Banhawi is never what many would normally call a "pleasant" experience. However finely spun or delicately directed, her plays seem to steal upon you unawares, grab you by the neck and turn your head forcibly to gaze at the murky depths of a tortured mind -- a mind wracked by impossible questions and haunted by anguished memories. As you take the plunge, your most cherished certainties and conventional props are challenged and shaken. Traditional concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, the real and imaginary, the true and false, of madness and sanity and, indeed, of life and death undergo a gruelling poetic revision which leaves them, if they manage to survive, quite battered or extensively qualified. If "meaning" -- the sense you make of any phenomenon or occurrence and the value judgements that go with it -- is quintessentially rooted in such binary oppositions, as the proponents of modern "Theory" would have us believe, then one could describe El-Banhawi's work as a relentless, poetic inquiry into the difference between the way we concretely experience the world and the way we are taught to interpret it -- as a nostalgic, tragic quest for some ultimate signified, a transcendental truth that could resolve all conflicts, synthesise all oppositions and explain away all sorrow and pain. That such a fountainhead of meaning still eludes her, like a tantalising mirage, explains why Nadia goes on writing. In Ru'a (Visions), her fourth play, currently at Al-Tali'a, the same obsessive questioning of "meaning" persists, and the feverish spiritual quest shows no sign of letting up -- if anything, it has grown more intense, more densely shadowed, with the few faltering lights that faintly glimmered in the earlier plays growing scarcer and ominously dimmer. "Grasping at shadows" was how I once described the content of Nadia's three earlier pieces: Al-Wahag (The Glow) which bristles with Biblical allusions and features a lost soul trapped in an endless maze of dark, circuitous roads and narrow alleys, chased by weird shadows and ghostly figures of the kind Dante encountered on his figurative descent into purgatory, and vainly searching for a guide to lead her out; Sonata Al-Hob wa Al-Mawt (Love and Death Sonata) where the sense of spiritual desolation is pervasive, the themes of loss and bereavement are paramount, and the nearby sea threatens to wash away the unfinished painting of the heroine, throwing back at her, on the shore, scraps of what once she believed was life; and Al-Lahn Al-Mafqoud (The Lost Melody) which centres on the fragility of human relationships, the illusory nature of past experiences and the essential loneliness of human existence (see my "Strangers in the night", Al-Ahram Weekly, 1 May, 2003). In all three plays, as in the present one, the neat divisions of time into hours and days, past and present are sunk in favour of a psychological temporal continuum where shreds of dreams and memories float around, occasionally connecting in a seemingly erratic, haphazard manner to produce startling, but often tragic epiphanies. If so-called "reality" impinges on this fluid, self-enclosed internal world, it is usually as a jumble of distant echoes, a menacing play of light and shadow on the edges, or a vague miasmic presence that has the thickness, heaviness and dim intangibility of Sartre's "Nothingness". Like Strindberg, El-Banhawi writes for her life, as it were, to go on living and guard her "sanity"; her plays are woven out of the very stuff of her being -- her existential questionings, mental anxieties, spiritual crises and personal traumas. At the centre of each play is an existential quest undertaken by a sensitive, reflective, highly cultivated, iconoclastic female character (El-Banhawi's dramatic persona), bedeviled with a crushing sense of spiritual and social alienation. This accounts for the intensely personal quality of her work -- a quality which in less sophisticated hands could turn into a curse rather than an asset; without a good command of stagecraft, a robust sense of form and strict emotional control, plays of this kind could easily slide into sentimentality, coming across as facile, self-indulgent, emotional outpourings. El-Banhawi's don't. Though daringly experimental, embracing a variety of techniques and themes, eclectically drawn from many sources (including world drama, from the Greeks to the writers of the Absurd literature, from ancient mythical narratives to Virginia Woolf and the stream-of- consciousness novelists; music in all its formal varieties; holy narratives and mystical writings of various religious denominations), the plays never lose sight of the driving spirit behind such wild technical migrations. Ultimately, every thing is harnessed to achieve the genuine purpose behind the writing: to bring to life on stage and poetically communicate the agony of the spiritual search of the authoress. This would explain why the plays (though none of them is a monodrama and the shortest cast list includes no less than four characters) are predominantly monologic in terms of drive and perspective and why they seem to have such an intriguing kind of unity that they strike you as an extended dramatic composition, like an intricate musical quartet made up of exquisitely embroidered and richly textured variations. In terms of artistic genealogy, they seem hybrid, claiming among their ancestry the Greek tragedians, August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, Franz Kafka, the surrealists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett. But though the plays carry traces of other writers, bristle with musical echoes and literary allusions, they are never derivative or imitative. Despite her long, scholarly immersion in world drama (she studied Greek and Latin literature at university, translated several of Beckett's plays into Arabic, and wrote her PhD on the influence of the theatre of the Absurd on modern Egyptian drama), El-Banhawi has managed to carve for herself a special niche and cultivate a distinctive lyrical/ dramatic style all her own. Though the maze in which Ruwa, the heroine of her first play, The Glow, is trapped is vividly reminiscent of Kafka's sinister, enigmatic world in both The Trial and The Castle (whether in their original narrative form or stage adaptations), and though the heroine of Sonata seems to be modelled on the female painter in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, and the half-dead/half-alive figure of the father in the recent Ru'a -- a man who twice lived and was twice buried -- irresistibly conjures, by way of ironic contrast, the enormous corpse in Ionesco's Amedee, ou comment s'en debarasser (Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It) which suffers from "geometrical progression, the incurable disease of the dead", in Amedee's words, these and other echoes and images, having made their initial tantalising, and rather comforting effect ("Oh, yes. Another of those absurd plays", one would say), are soon subsumed in the general drift of the play, becoming something other and more disorienting. Theatre has always trafficked in metaphors, projecting a whole world in action to convey an insight that could be contained in a brief, sentient proverb, a nutshell or grain of sand. Realism, however, with all its weird sisters, naturalism, social satire, melodrama and the well-made play, put a stop to this transaction, banishing metaphors from the stage and replacing them with boring, discursive expositions, discussions and elucidations. It was left to the theatre rebels of the early 20th Century and onwards to restore the magic of poetry to the stage. That Nadia, rather than exhaust and bore us with interminable verbal ruminations over the meaning of life and death, could recreate her thoughts and feelings into poignant stage metaphors that move you to terror and tears, and could make her personal suffering and religious anxiety a public concern that touches us all, is a credit to all those wonderful artists who fought to liberate us from our settled, hackneyed conceptions. To translate verbal metaphors and abstract ideas into concrete presences on stage and subject them to close scrutiny was one of the great achievements of 20th Century theatre, particularly where the Absurd theatre is concerned. It was from the Absurdists that Nadia learnt how to transmute the tragic events of her life, all her pain and losses into something cathartically beautiful and profoundly moving. Unlike Ionesco, however, though she is quite fond of his theatre, and very much in spiritual tune with Beckett, her images, though often horribly grotesque, are never funny; rather, they are startling, unsettling, and richly suggestive. Was it mere coincidence that the name Ru'a', the eponymous heroine of the play currently at Al-Tali'a, seemed to echo the name of "Ruwa", or "Rawa", depending on how you pronounce it, the heroine of Nadia's first play. The writer herself will give you no clue, leaving you to your own resources. But yes, the two names connect symbolically: whereas the first derives from the Arabic verb "to water", leaving at the same time sufficient space for other acceptable pronunciations that could make it mean "ru'a", or "visions", the latter is definitively spelt to mean visions. What is the connection between water and one's dreams and elusive visions? When you are born on the waves, not knowing whether you will sink or float, what visions do you have? How to shore up one's existence against the attrition of the waves of time, find a stable point in a sea of change is a recurrent question in the plays. Being the last ring of a soul-searching quartet, Ru'a finally brings us face to face, literally, physically, with the only certainty we, as humans, have ever known, or are likely to know: death. Faced with the corpse of her father, a man who has never really lived, Ru'a, who already feels a stranger in the world, a captive in her country, is still suffering the trauma of a broken marriage which was her last link with reality, and is constantly haunted by the question of what it means to be "really" alive, to be truly one's self, begins a gradual slide towards (what is traditionally called) insanity. When the corpse seems to come alive and begins to talk to her, though she is certain he is dead, indeed had died long before and been buried, her sense of reality, already very hazy, breaks down completely and the meanings of life and death become confused in her head. From then on she is obsessed with what to do with this living corpse which should be interned because it is a corpse, as she is certain, but should also be saved since it is still half alive. That her father had wasted away his life thanklessly slaving for his family and ended up a half- paralysed, speechless person outrages her sense of justice. That he has found no comfort "there", in the other world, as he tells her, hurls her into the depths of despair. The play which begins with Ru'a branded as a heretic because she dared question the truth of God and the nature of his justice, ends with the impossible demand of the father that he be cast on the waves rather than buried to be eaten by worms. We last see Ru'a dragging this half-dead, half-alive corpse across a bridge, like the doomed Sisyphus lugging his rock up the mountain, and desperately calling upon God for release. A play of this kind is guaranteed to give you plenty of gruesome nightmares, and it has done so in my case, preventing me from writing about it the Weekly 's last issue. But what about the people who had to patiently thread their way through its dark corridors for months, lighting one after the other so we, the audience, could see them. It is no wonder that Nadia insisted that no one but Amr Qabil, who had successfully teamed up with her in the previous (equally theatrically intractable) Lost Melody, should undertake the task of brining Ru'a to light. An affinity of feeling and companionship in sorrow brought both author and director together: he lost his beloved mother in his teens, and she lost her only son, in a senseless car accident, when he was barely seven. Sorrow can be a wonderful bond, as both Nadia and Amr have discovered, and marvelously creative. I do not think any one but Amr could have come up with the wonderful idea of staging the play across an old, decaying, wooden bridge that extends from one end of the hall of Salah Abdel-Sabour, at At-Tali'a Theatre, to the other. We, the audience, sat on both sides of the bridge, the symbolic passage between two areas: Life and death? Past and present? Memory and hope? I don't know. Since all the familiar, quotidian barriers were sunk, or, a least, terribly blurred in the text, the bridge became a freewheeling symbol open to multiple interpretations. Around Amr's bridge, scenographer Subhi Abdel-Gawad created an eerie environment out of bits of white tulle, tattered sheets of black plastic, a battered wicker chair and a lonely lamppost. The set made the hall feel really claustrophobic, and I mean this as a compliment. Hisham El-Meligui's alternately dramatic and atmospheric music was an extra bonus. But Amr Qabil's real achievement was his choice of cast. Now that I have seen Hanan Soliman as Ru'a, I cannot think of any other actress who could have taken on this part and invested it with so much spiritual energy, passion and conviction. Thin and frail, in jeans and a loose linen shirt, completely unmade-up, with her soft, brown hair tightly bound in a simple horse tail at the back of her head, she seemed almost transparent, like a homeless spirit suspended between heaven and earth; her performance was simply mesmeric, one of the very best I have seen in recent years, and she made a tremendous impact on the audience, bringing home to everyone the reality of Ru'a's tragic dilemmas. On the two occasions I saw the play, she seemed to melt into Ru'a so totally that I really feared for her. That she manages to come out safe at the end every night, drained but glowing, proves what a wonderful, truly solid actress she is. As her father, the living/dead corpse, Tareq Isma'il was alternately warmly human and coldly distant, coming across at all times as a mysterious, mystical presence. Nageh Na'im as the ex-lover, Sa'id Soliman as the preacher, and Yasser Abul-Enein, Israr Al-Sharif, Hadeer and Ali-Rushdi, though they played minor parts, were as important in realising the meaning and impact of the performance, just like the tenuous, sinister silhouettes that flicker on the borders of Nadia's, and Ru'a's world.
