Nehad Selaiha cheers the Arab premiere of Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny at the National To make imaginative leaps, establish connections between old texts and current situations, and fully engage with the spirit of each, betraying neither, so that both past and present are suddenly fused in a moment of true revelation, with the former gaining in clarity and relevance and the latter acquiring a larger historical perspective and a fresh sense of urgency has always been the mark of great theatrical revivals of the classics. An experience of this kind is sure to happen whenever Saad Aradash decides to take on Brecht in a friendly artistic tussle; the performance comes across as an exciting wrestling match, with Ardash holding Brecht in a vibrant, dialogic embrace so intense that it seems to melt the years that separate the two great hommes de theatre, reveal their ideological affinities and bridge the gap between the two cultures. In our sordidly commercial times, however, for such encounters to take place, energy is needed, stamina, patience, and a lot of unrelenting faith in the concept of the 'committed artist' and the value of art as a form of resistance. That Ardash has managed to maintain this kind of faith and energy, and that sense of commitment for over 50 years of working in the theatre, is a horrendous achievement -- a sign of true greatness, or, if you opt for cynicism, of dogged, quixotic persistence. Nearly 80, still tall, straight and firm of flesh, with a soft halo of silver wisps framing his finely chiselled, wonderfully unwrinkled handsome face, and a booming, unfaltering baritone voice, as firmly commanding, hypnotically persuasive as ever -- the voice of a benevolent autocrat or humane 'cardinal' (his nickname in the profession) -- Ardash has managed to maintain his belief in theatre as a force for political awareness, social empowerment and change. A fervent socialist like Brecht, and diligently following in his footsteps since he discovered him during his studies in Rome, in the early 1960s, Ardash came to believe that theatre should be more than just 'entertainment', at the same time astutely realising that without being essentially pleasurable, theatre could not hope to perform its instructive task. Though he has so far only staged four of Brecht's plays (including the current Mahagonny at the National -- the other three being The Good Soul of Setzuan, 1966, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1968, and The Three Penny Opera, in a new version set in the Cairo of the 1920s by Alfred Farag, 1993), all his productions of local and foreign texts, old and new, carry the imprint of Brecht and are shadowed and informed by his 'epic theatre' theory; his work has inspired generations of theatre-makers, playwrights and metteurs-en-scène, particularly in the provinces, and it is thanks to him that Brecht became a vital, rejuvenating force in the Egyptian theatre. More than any other foreign writer, and due to Ardash's ministrations, Brecht has been a seminal influence on the development of Egyptian drama and methods of staging since the 1960s, and, barring Shakespeare, the most frequently adapted, imitated and performed European author (See my 'Brecht in Egypt', Al-Ahram Weekly, Culture section, 11 June, 1998). But, in a country where English and French have long been the sole corridors to Western culture, and where German is rarely studied and has long been, still is, considered something of an outlandish linguistic oddity, for Brecht to work and reach Egyptian audiences, a contingent of competent German/ Arabic Egyptian translators was an essential need, and, in this respect, the contributions of Abdel-Rahman Badawi, Abdel-Ghaffar Mekkawi, and Yusri Khamis have been invaluable. Indeed, but for their sensitive and painstaking linguistic mediations, Brecht would not have had this vast, influential presence on the Egyptian theatrical scene and the efforts of Ardash and his generation of fervent socialists would have come to naught. That such cultural mediators never get the proper appreciation that is their due is a sore point with me, being an occasional literary translator myself. Ardash, however, has the virtue of treating the translator as a creative partner and dramaturgical collaborator. In the case of Mahagonny, a work that was composed piecemeal over three years and exists in several versions, Yusri Khamis had a more difficult task than usual, having to decide, in the light of Ardash's directorial conception, which of the different available scripts to translate: -- the embryonic, mock-American Songspiel or Little Mahagonny, prepared by Kurt Weill and staged, with the participation of Brecht, in a boxing ring, against back projections by Caspar Neher at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1927? The typescript and piano score version used in the Auden-Kallaman popular English rendering (edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim and published by Eyre Methuen, London)? The full text of the libretto sent by Kurt Weill, together with the score, to his Viennese publishers, Universal Edition, in April 1929? The extensively reduced, predominantly theatrical (rather than orthodoxly operatic) Aufrich production version, directed by Brecht and Neher and staged at the specially rented Theater am Kurfurstendamm in Berlin at the end of 1931, with Alexander Zemlinsky (Schonberg's brother in law) as conductor? Or Brecht's 1930-31 unilaterally published text, which carried a number of variations from the one earlier published by Weill? That Yusri Khamis opted for Brecht's unilateral version which maintained the operatic form and replaced the original, starkly American names of the quartet of lumberjacks with solidly German, allusively Biblical names -- Paul, Heinrich, Jakob and Josef (possibly "a gibe at the Baden-Baden festival organisers, Paul Hindemith, Heinrich Burkhard, and Jakob Haas, together with a possible allusion to one of the heads of Hindemith's music publishers, Schott," as Willett and Manhein suggest) -- strikes me as an unfortunate miscalculation. In staging Mahagonny, Aradash did not have an opera in mind and only meant to attack the new ethos of pleasure rampant in the Arab world -- an ethos compounded of avid material acquisitiveness, insatiable, gluttonous consumerism, sado-masochistic forms of weird, soulless violence, and the commercialisation of art and pleasure celebrated by the new, global world order which most people in the Third World associate with and believe to be led by the USA. As much of a theatre-moralist as Brecht, Ardash wanted to deliver a Jeremiah-like warning against the progressive Americanisation of every aspect of life in the Arab world (what was called in Germany, in Brecht's time, 'Amerikanismus') and to project Brecht's "mythical pioneer city of Mahagonny -- a jerry-built jumble of brothels and saloons somewhere between the California of the forty-niners and the Alaska of the Klondike gold-rush, where everything is to be had for money and the only capital crime is lack of cash,"..."a seething cauldron of lust, greed and corruption," in Martin Esslin's vivid description -- as a symbol for all the new, modern Arab megalopolises, or concrete jungles, that our old cities are turning into. Such a vision which ousted the Weill score (don't read 'vile', I beg you), together with the operatic conception, without completely sacrificing the musical element, in this case provided by Gamal Bekheit (lyrics) and Ziad El-Tawil (music), would have been better accommodated in the Aufrich production's theatrically conceived version. As it turned out, there was frustration galore, on every side. Khamis, himself a poet, with many published collections, resented having the job of rephrasing Brecht's lyrics into colloquial Arabic and giving them a topical edge so he handed it over to another poet; Ziad El-Tawil was faced with the impossible challenge of beating Weill at his own front, delivering in the end a pallid, non-dramatic score; the actors seemed quite at a loss as they made impossible leaps between whatever leftovers of the original, versified lyrics, with their embarrassing sing-song repetitions which they had to artificially deliver, and the newly-inlaid, recorded musical dimension, erratically bursting as a voice-over every now and then; and stage-designer, Samir Ahmed, who had sought his initial inspiration in the old, romantic, wild-west movies, exchanging Brecht's 'lorry', or 'truck', for a wooden, horse-drawn carriage that opens at the back, suggesting a cavernous void, with the sharp, neat steps looking like the fangs of a ferocious crocodile, as he told me on the phone, and had meant to visually echo that metaphor in the movement of the slated, swinging wooden doors of the As-You- Like-It tavern, ruefully declares that his conception had been completely laid to waste, as far as its signifying function was concerned. His backdrop which featured a cityscape, not unlike New York, onto which the silhouettes of towering oil-drills were grimly superimposed, suggesting the cities of the Arabian Gulf, seemed to ferociously clash with the speciously comforting, soothingly romantic, old-world atmosphere communicated by the wood set in front. What about Ardash then? Was it part of his plan to put all his collaborators on edge and at loggerheads, to make them thoroughly uncomfortable and pronouncedly artificial to achieve what Brecht called, in his 'Notes to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny ', in John Willett's translation of Brecht on Theatre (Eyre Methuen, London, 1974), "a radical separation of elements"? Brecht believed that "The great struggle for supremacy between words, music and production ...can simply be by-passed by radically separating the elements." "So long as the expression 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (or 'integrated work of art') means that the integration is a muddle," he explained, "so long as the arts are supposed to be 'fused' together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere 'feed' to the rest." The audience also get caught in this process of fusion and "get thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art." That " Words, music and setting must become more independent of one another," in Brecht's words, seems to have been the guiding principle for Aradash in his management of Mahagonny, or so I like (magnanimously) to think. Of course, Brecht was speaking about 'Opera -- With Innovations!' -- innovations which would turn it from 'dramatic' into 'epic' opera; but given that he had sanctioned the extensively modified Aufrich theatrical version, I do not think he would have deeply frowned on the current, thoroughly non-operatic endeavour at the National. Where content is concerned, Ardash stuck meticulously to Brecht's intentions. The content of Mahagonny, as Brecht declares, " is pleasure. Fun, in other words, not only as form but as subject matter. At least enjoyment was meant to be the object of the inquiry," he goes on to say, "even if the inquiry was intended to be an object of enjoyment." That "enjoyment here (in Mahagonny ) appears in its current historical role as merchandise," was a Brechtian precept fastidiously followed by Aradash, even to excess. The production unfolds as a series of self-contained moral tableaux, with the solemn moral carefully wrapped each time in a pungently satirical, shockingly flippant package, and the city of Mahagonny growing, with each tableau, into a universal symbol, a modern travesty of the old, Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. Like all his previous productions, Ardash's Mahagonny, or Suckerville, billed in Arabic as Al-Shabaka (Snare or Net), is typically clean, cool, compact, elegant, uncluttered and thoroughly disciplined. Everything is perfectly in place and every member of the cast slots neatly into their allotted roles. Samiha Ayoub as Leocadia (or Ladybird) Begbick, the founder of Suckerville (a carry- over from Brecht's earlier Mann Ist Mann where the character figures as the canteen landlady in the military barracks of Kilkoa in the year 1925, a part of a 'fantasticated India based on Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads ' according to Esslin), was a perfect cast in terms of looks, age and mode of delivery. She had starred in two of Aradash's previous Brechtian ventures, as Grusha, in The Caucasian Chalk Circle and doubling as Shen Te/Shui Ta in The Good Soul of Setzuan, and knew exactly what was expected of her. She did her best to meet it, and so did the rest of the cast: Mahmoud Hemeida as Paul Ackermann, Ahmed Fouad Selim, Sa'id El-Saleh and Wa'el Safwat, as Joseph, Heinrich and Jakob, consecutively, Asim Nagati as Trinity Moses, Mohsen Mansour as book-keeper Billy, and Riham Sa'id as Jenny. But to expect the actors to meet the provisions of the original concept of the staging, as recorded in the 'prompt-book', whose forward by Weill appeared tow months before the Leipzig premiere in 1930 -- provisions which stipulated that "neither emotion, stylisation nor any kind of irony or caricature" should be added "to the bald, almost concert-like delivery of the material with its carefully built-in gests", was a very tall order indeed which no 'sane' Egyptian performer could credit. Since illusionism, make- believe and emotional identification with the stage character were taboos, the performers, armed with Brecht's 'alienation effect' sanction, selectively roped in many of the traditional routines of vaudeville and farce, treating the audience to a delightful variety of mock-acting styles and routines. The inconsistency between the original concept of the staging and the actual results in performance was a consistent source of worry for Brecht, not only in Mahagonny, but in other, more solid texts, like Mother Courage, for instance. In his brilliant book, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, Martin Esslin astutely observes that while Brecht intended his theatre to be popular and address the masses and the working classes, he ironically ended up as the pet of the elite theatrical circles and "the daily coinage of dramatic critics". Brecht's Mahagonny at the National, with Samiha Ayoub and Mahmoud Hemeida leading the cast, is one such ironical paradox. photos: Sherif Sonbol
