Nehad Selaiha mops up 2006 and looks forward to new treats It is still too early in the year to expect new productions. At the moment, all that is on in Cairo, and, possibly, all over Egypt, whether in state or private venues, in mainstream theatre or on the fringe, is a carry over from last year. For me, it was a good chance to catch up on what I had missed. A week from now and I shall have a brimming schedule, rushing to Al-Hanager to watch Al-Qadiyya (Case) 2007 -- a new version of Yousri El-Guindi's vintage piece Al-Yahoodi Al-Ta'ih (The Lost Jew), staged by Hassan Al-Wazir and starring the delectable Sawsan Badr and comedian Ahmed Halawa, due to open soon -- then off to Attaba Square to see the National's anxiously awaited adaptation of Brecht's musical The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, retitled Al-Shabaka (The Net), by veteran director Sa'd Ardash, with the redoubtable Samiha Ayoub and film star Mahmoud Hemeida leading the cast (scheduled for late this month), not to mention the French Cultural Centre's 5th Festival des Jeunes Createurs from 11 to 18 January, and God knows what else. But until such juicy, succulent times arrive (am I thinking "turkey"?) I, and many theatre lovers like me, will have to make do with the leftovers of 2006, or even earlier -- with yet another revival of Lenin El-Ramli's 1980s' hit Ahlan Ya Bakawat (Welcome Gentlemen) at Masrah Al-Zamalek (newly snatched by the state-theatre organisation from the clutches of the private sector), a further run of the National's 2002 naively simplistic but quite popular production of King Lear (at the recently renovated Miami Theatre, which, by the way, poses an intractable parking problem and has made Sulaiman Pasha Street, where the theatre is located, practically impassable between 9 p.m. and midnight). On 4 January, I decided to brave the cold (both outside and inside my head and bones) and go to see Samir Al-Asfouri's new reworking of Chekov's short story, Ward No. 6, which he had adapted in the late 1970s and rechristened Zinzanet Al-Maganeen (The Mad Cell). This new version, retitled I'tirafat Magnounah (Crazy Confessions), had been running on and off for over two months -- and more "off" than "on". The number of times I planned to go to see it only to be told at the last minute that it was cancelled, postponed, or even, once or twice, terminated! But it seemed to keep coming back, and since I am an inveterate, incorrigible Asfouri fan and ardent lover of Chekov, or anything that is remotely, faintly reminiscent of his mellow, anguished and pungently humorous world, I swaddled myself, dripping nose and all, into a very warm anorak and ventured forth to Ataba Square. Luckily, it was the lull after the season's shopping mania and there were few street vendors spreading their shabby goods in the small square opposite the theatre. Ugly as it grows by the hour, I still have a soft spot for that area. As I crawled in with my car, my mind flew back to happier times, when the world seemed a bit friendlier and more hospitable. It was just before Sadat was assassinated when Al-Asfouri decided to dress his own political views in borrowed Chekovian robes. But Ward No. 6 had been around with us long before that; in the 1960s it was as much of an iconic political-cum-existential symbol as Sartre's L'Etre et Neant, Beauvoir's Le Deuxieme Sexe, or Brecht's Little Organon. Chekov's Nikita, the madhouse warden, sitting on a rubbish dump made up of the soiled refuse of the establishment, was a gruesomely fascinating figure that bewitched the imagination of many intellectuals, including my present husband. I was in my second undergraduate year when he gave me the story to read with a loaded, significant nod. We were dating then, and it was only much later that I realised that my reading, or, rather, imagining the political subtext of the story had been my passport to his heart. In the late 1970s, when most intellectuals were still casting around dizzily, trying to accommodate themselves mentally to the cataclysmic shift over from Nasser's brand of socialism to Sadat's rightwing, religious swing, the Chekovian intellectual psychiatrist who rules over a community of mentally displaced and disoriented people, using a shaggy bull dog called Nikita as a convenient iron grip and disciplinarian, and spending most of his time sipping Vodka, munching pickled herring and ruminating on the meaning of sanity and madness, ending up a patient in his own asylum, seemed an irresistible figure. Its potential for symbolic political interpretation was horrendously vast, and suddenly life was divided into brutal Nikitas and sensitive, well-meaning, but ultimately destructive and doomed doctors. Like some of the most renowned artists, Al-Asfouri turns his productions into vivid records of his own inner existential travails and intellectual turbulences. When he dramatised Chekov's story in the late 1970s, he made it a vehicle for his confused response to Sadat's new policies. And when he was attacked for politicising what some critics thought was a purely "humanistic" reflection on the meaning of mental derangement, he responded with an acrid adaptation of Eugene Ionesco The Critic, in which he ferociously vilified and caustically satirised his critics. To have lived through the terrible ideological upheavals of modern Egyptian history since the 1940s and had to constantly adjust and make sense of an erratically volatile, farcically senseless scene is no joke. And Al-Asfouri has made this his constant theme through a stage career that spans more than 40 years. No wonder he came back in 2006 to Chekov and Ward No. 6. But this time, Nikita (played by Mahmoud Gom'a) has been marginalised, and so has the doctor (poignantly performed by Mahmoud El-Hedeini), while the hospital's administrators, capsulised in the figure of the new female doctor (Nirmeen Za'za'), take centre stage, posing as the US, or new world order. The rest of the denizens (the magnificent, larger-than-life Ahmed 'Aql, the versatile Gamil Barsoum, the ironically satanic Hamada Shousha, the deeply moving Hisham Al-Sherbini and profoundly sensitive Pierre Sioufi, the ethereal Nayrah Arafe, plus the demonic hospital staff -- Adel Khalaf and Ahmed Shams -- represented different generations and all the current ideological shapes and colours ranging from extreme right to hard core left. Ramzi Bayoumi's sets were simple and eloquent, extending the stage into the auditorium, apron-style, filling the front space with bare hospital beds which were echoed in drawings on a gauze screen backstage which doubled with one representing a vertiginous whirlpool against a black drop, and Mohamed Izzat's sound track cheekily purloined the overture of Bizet's Carmen which, apart from its dramatic vivacity, produced many intriguing, illusive ironies. In such a world as Al-Asfouri creates, you cannot expect to find precise counters: is the shadow of Carmen conjured by the music supposed to identify her with the new conqueror, the representative of the new world order? Is the doctor supposed to be her victim? And where does this leave the presumed lunatics? But then it is fruitless to try to ask questions or find any answers in a work which is pronouncedly meant to tell us that nowadays, as Thomas Middleton declared long ago, it is "a mad world my masters".
