Nehad Selaiha is at a loss how to describe Nisaa' Al-Sa'adaa (Women of Bliss) at Al-Salam Theatre When I saw Wafaa Amer in April 2003, in a revival of Alfred Farag's 1973 masterpiece Gawaz 'ala Waraqit Talaq (Marriage on a Divorce Paper), I was pleasantly surprised. Tall, slim and graceful, with strong Egyptian features, a warm, powerful voice, clear enunciation and an appealing stage presence, she proved she could also act and faintly reminded me of veteran actress Sohair El-Murshidi in her youth. She was all the more impressive since Gawaz was her stage debut and the part she undertook was relatively complex by Egyptian dramatic standards. Though she had been around for quite some time, playing supporting roles in films and television serials, I had hardly noticed her before; either the parts she had acted in both media did not do justice to her talent, or she was one of those actresses who can only blossom and come into their own on the boards, I thought. As Zeinab in Farag's classic, the poor but proud working-class girl who secretly marries her rich, aristocratic, neurotically class-conscious boyfriend and deeply resents her position in the relationship throughout, she was alternately hard and fragile, tender and aggressive, sensationally glamorous and pathetically humble. Unfortunately Amer's second stage appearance, in the current Nisaa' Al-Sa'aada (an intriguing title which could mean 'women of bliss or good fortune' as well as 'the women of His Grace'), has proved a galling disappointment; rather than consolidate her former success, it has all but completely obliterated it. But for her physique and features, one would not believe she was the same actress who starred in Farag's play three years ago. Indeed, what she does on stage every night in this shabby undertaking masquerading as a play is an insult to the acting profession, a crass betrayal of the art of performance, and bears no relation to theatre whatsoever. There are basically two types of theatrical performance, I have always thought: one dramatic (i.e., representational), the other non-dramatic (or, presentational). In the former, the performer dons a visible or invisible mask, pretending to be someone else -- a character in an enacted real or fictional story; in the latter, he/she appears under their real name to treat the audience to a pleasurable display of some artistic physical or vocal skill, be it dancing, singing, clowning, rope-walking, or trapeze-swinging. Fifi Abdou's masterful belly-dancing performances or Nevine Allouba's exhilarating concerts are the examples I often use with my students to illustrate this other kind of theatrical experience. Aspects of both types of performance are often combined in certain measures to create a wide variety of performance modes. Now, when a so-called performer neither "presents" nor "represents" anything, but simply prances around in one glittering costume after another, all designed to detail and accentuate her physical charms, frequently wiggling her hips and swaying about in a sexually titillating manner, I feel quite at a loss how to describe such behaviour. When this is coupled with incessant inane giggling, interspersed with bits of personal gossip and chatty, confidential remarks, thrown at fellow actors or the audience, such behaviour strikes me as not only criminally unprofessional, but also positively insulting. I bet one could find more technical care and artistic discipline in a sleazy, third rate nightclub show. Don't think I am too stuffy; I do appreciate beauty as much as the next person and like the sight of dainty models, female and male, displaying gorgeous clothes in fashion shows. In theatre, however, I expect something more, or, at least that the actors conduct themselves with the grace and elegance of fashion models and, like them, if they insist on being nothing more, observe the virtue of silence. If actors cannot learn their lines and have to resort to slovenly improvisation and fall back on uncouth, scruffy jokes and gestures to cover up their tracks, they have no business being on stage. And don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with adlibbing or playing up to the audience per se, and I can enjoy a bit of it every now and then, provided it is witty, funny or pungently relevant. Being told which football team Wafaa Amer's hubby favours, or how she feels about the imminent replacement of the male lead in the show, or what problems she suffers for being a tall female do not, however, qualify as such. As she awkwardly, haltingly limped and rambled through her addle-brained improvisations (how an 80-year old director with widely acknowledged expertise and long experience like Hassan Abdel-Salam could have allowed her to do it beats me), it felt as if one was watching a live chat show (and one quite dull and hackneyed) rather than a piece of theatre. But I would have forgiven even that were it not for the frequent breakdowns of memory on the actors' part, their clumsy, haphazard, often senseless movement (purportedly choreographed by Harbi El-Ta'ir), their generally sloppy and offhand conduct, their strident vulgarity and total lack of any sense of finesse, let alone of rhythm or tempo and, to top it all, the harrowing garishness of the sets and costumes (unbelievably by the redoubtable Hussein El-Ezabi). As for the text, a slipshod concoction by an upstart playwright (Mohamed Hassan El-Alfi) whose only qualification is being a prominent member of the ruling National Democratic Party, it is loosely (and one might add, atrociously) based on Aristophanes' Ecclesiazousae, or Women in Parliament, and centres on a woman taking over the running of a country. The subject has tremendous potential and evokes many literary and historical memories. Think of all the women who tamed rulers and ruled nations. Think of Queen Hatshepsut, Scheherazade, Cleopatra, Shagarat Al-Durr, or even Mrs. Thatcher. Here, Wafaa Amer, as queen Gawhara (Jewel) -- a cruel mockery of the original Greek Praxagora -- manages to charm her husband, a ruler in some unspecified time and country, out of his power, using her feminine wiles, and persuades him to give her the throne for a week. Once in power, she is loath to relinquish it, and with the help of two sturdy female friends, Azza Gamal as minister of interior and Falak Noor as parliamentary speaker, she banishes the husband she loves. The author (I persuade myself to charitably think) seems to have meant to make this -- the conflict between love and political ambition or ideological commitment -- the central conflict; and towards this end, he provides a didactic, verse- mouthing, moronic chorus of six (supposedly wise but thoroughly puerile) monkeys to comment on the action in Brechtian fashion. In the writing, however, the character of Gawhara (assuming it had originally been coherently conceived) got so hopelessly, ideologically and psychologically, muddled and came out at the end in tatters -- as a tedious series of tawdry, political/ melodramatic clichés that end up in her sorely regretting her deeds and searching for another male saviour. No matter how hard one tried, one could not reconcile the speciously feminist beginning of the play (a ridiculous, coarsely visualised scene in which a group of thoroughly unprepossessing, leather-clad men are whipping their equally off-putting, albeit white-clad wives) with its final submissive, reconciliatory bow down to patriarchal culture. Indeed, initially, the absolute lack of logic, even dialectical logic, whether artistic, psychological, or ideological, was quite startling as the play hurtled along and we moved, or, rather, were unmercifully jolted, from one scene to the next. Given the unprofessional conduct of the actors, the nauseating riot of sounds and constant intrusion of unrelated, often fulsomely gaudy elements, one needed stupendous leaps of the imagination to make sense of what was going on. After a while I felt completely numbed and found myself laughing hysterically, uncontrollably, whenever anything supposedly serious was said or done. The serious monkeys got most of my laughs. The game of theatre was hopelessly spoilt for me. Oh, the terrible dissipation of so much energy and potential talent and the wanton sad waste of so much money.
