Nehad Selaiha is bewitched and enriched by Tony Kushner's adaptation of Corneille's L'Illusion Comique in an AUC production by Frank Bradley at the Falaki Main stage Corneille in the classroom is a pain in the neck, especially if you read him in translation. Plodding through his Medee at a tender age was enough to make me decide I never wanted to meet him again in my life or ever to hear of the conflict between love and duty. What could this alternately wooden/wimpy, stiff/soppy Medea know of either love or duty; not to mention the abhorrent, self- important Jason -- an early specimen of the proverbial male chauvinist pig of later feminist writing. Not even Hollywood and the spectacular splendour it lavished on its production of Le Cid, with the delectable Sophia Loren in the lead, could reconcile me to Corneille. It was not until last week that I discovered there was another, more attractive side to this writer. And it was all thanks to Frank Bradley who, ever since he took over the directorship of the Department of Performing Arts at the American University in Cairo, has pursued a passionate, dedicated policy of bringing to the attention of his students and the Egyptian public at large the best on the international drama scene, both old and new, regardless of ideologies, cultural or ethnic specificities, and making it vitally relevant. I have in mind as I speak such memorable productions as his Antigone. I had studied and taught Sophocles's play for years and thought there was nothing in it I could discover any more; and yet, Bradley's production, a few years ago, which transposed it to present-day Palestine, was a cataclysmic revelation that brought home to me, in the visceral way that only theatre can, the tragic consequences of the negation of dialogue between 'true believers' and led me to rethink the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a new perspective. It is easy to hold forth on the perennial relevance of the classics in the classroom or to think you know what you are talking about in the cloistered quietness of the study. Such words gain meaning and credibility only in truly dialectical productions that sink the boundaries of place and time and make plays urgently relate to the present. Bradley's recent staging of Tony Kushner's The Illusion, at once sunny and somber, wistful and effervescent, with a studiedly artificial, evocatively lighted design by veteran scenographer Stancil Campbell, and eloquent, vaguely romantic, multi- period costumes by Kegham Djeghalian, was another revelation that led me back to Corneille after years of total estrangement, making me revise my earlier impressions and old-seated prejudices. On the dusty upper shelves of my private library -- shelves I hadn't visited for years -- I found Maurice Rat's Theatre Choisi De Corneille, a thick yellow volume that bears no date and identifies itself in red letters as part of the Classiques Garnier series. It looked so old that I couldn't remember where or when I had bought it. I wanted to read the original L'Ilusion Comique and compare it to the Kushner free adaptation Bradley had graciously given me after watching the production. It was not an easy job, I had neglected my French for so long; but with the help of Harrap's and the Grande Dictionnaire Hachette, I managed to retrace a long-forgotten path and glean a wealth of new insights. For three whole days and nights I was lost to the world, totally immersed in Corneille, reading the text, Rat's introduction to the whole collection and the play, and his extensive notes, alternately thanking and cursing Bradley, and always feeling guilty for neglecting other pressing duties. In the seclusion of my study, the reverberations of Farouk Hosni's battle over the Hijab with our People's Assembly and the manipulators of the tidal wave of religious fundamentalism in the local media seemed to echo Corneille's fight with Cardinal Richelieu and the Academie Française over the all- hallowed neoclassical "regles". Poor Corneille, beleaguered at 30 with so many conservative bigots. To belong to the establishment, he, like our Farouk Hosni, a gifted artist with a liberal mind, cosmopolitan leanings and an easy-going, tolerant temperament, had to make many serious sacrifices. Farouk Hosni mortgaged his artistic liberty when he agreed to become Egypt's minister of culture, and Corneille, who was twice refused membership of the Academie Française, had to finally embrace what went against his artistic grain in order to get a foothold in a creaking, conservative establishment fighting for survival against the winds of change. As the past merged with the present, things started to make sense and for the first time, again thanks to Bradley, I began to grasp Corneille's dilemma. In his dedication of L'Illusion Comique, to a certain "Mademoiselle M.F.D.R.", a dedication cast in an epistolary form which continued to be printed with the text from 1639, when the first edition appeared, until 1660 when it was dropped, together with the word "Comique" in the title -- Corneille describes the play as "un étrange monstre" -- both "bizarre" and "capricious". It has the value of "novelty", however, he hastens to add -- something the French always appreciate. The same defensive, somewhat apologetic tone and self-reassuring boasts of the play's gratifying stage success and enduring popularity (at least in his lifetime) resurface in Examens (Scrutinies, 1660), the work in which, together with his three discourses on dramatic poetry -- Discours, also 1660 -- he reflected on drama and commented on his plays. L'Illusion, he defensively declares, may be a "galanterie extravagante" full of irregularities -- a once- in-a-lifetime self-indulgent "caprice"; but its stage success does not make him repent the time he spent on it. The first act he describes as no more than a prologue; the next three form a piece which he does not know what to call (he had previously called it in the dedication a kind of "unfinished comedy") and the fifth, though tragic in content -- Adraste is killed and Clindor in danger of losing his life -- belongs totally to the realm of comedy in terms of style and characterisation. "Stitched together", however, as he had stressed in his dedication, these wildly varied, seemingly contradictory fragments ultimately form one unit, "a comedy", with the prologue beautifully dovetailing into the epilogue to form the outer framework within which each element acquires a new and different meaning. In his adaptation, Kushner preserves the structure and the storyline, dividing it into two parts instead of the unwieldy five-act format, and adds a new ironic variation on the theme of romantic love in the form of yet another magical "illusion". In it Corneille's quasi- Byronic hero, Clindor/Theogenes (delightfully played here by Karim Kassim with suitable, tongue-in-cheek panache and a touch of ingratiating innocence) takes on yet another name and identity as Calisto; his romantic heroine (here the splendid Amina M Khalil) has to add to her Isabelle/Hippolyta masks that of passionate, petulant Melibea; the worldly-wise, sharp- witted, intriguing confidante-cum-maidservant, Lyse/ Clarina (Kara Szczepanski), becomes also Elicia; the eternal rival, Adraste/Prince Florilame, who finally puts an end to the hero's philandering career (Hussein Marei), further masquerades as Pleribo, while Isabelle's irate, unrelenting father, Geronte (Ahmed Omar), doubles as The Amanuensis, Alcandre's servant or, rather, assistant director or stage-manager. In Kushner's adaptation too, the hilarious yet lovable vainglorious Matamore (superbly rendered with irrepressible zest and ebullience by Sami Selim) is made to reappear at the end as a "lunatic" who, disenchanted with this world and seeking new horizons, farcically, yet pathetically floats up to a cutout cardboard moon. Kushner also whittles down the long monologues and speeches, making them crispier, and updates the language, peppering it with colloquialisms, and making it more fanciful and hilarious in the process; in short, this adaptation, flippant and cynical, brings out the latent parody and seditious humour which had remained muted when cloaked in the classical verse of Corneille. Bradley's production builds on this, squeezing every inch of humour out of the father's bewilderment and stressing the underlying subversiveness of the piece and its postmodern mood. The most startling contribution in this direction was cross- casting Sarah Youssef, a darkly attractive young woman, arch, sophisticated and seductively attired in a modern, teasingly revealing getup, as the ancient Alcandre. Another brilliant touch was the sudden movement towards our times and nearer home, visually marked by the sets and costumes, as the characters became older and sadder, the tone more somber and subdued and the action drew nearer the end. Bradley sets the last tragic "illusion" in what seems a desert, oil- rich country where the costumes are decidedly modern and the heroine has to wear a headscarf. Rather than Matamore, a braggart warrior, the stage image suggests, the hero now serves an oil tycoon; in the sad passage from innocence to experience, the world of romance has given way to the world of finance. One wonders what Richelieu and his ilk would have thought of this. Read in the light of Kushner's inspired adaptation and Bradley's imaginative staging, Corneille's L'Illusion strikes one with the novelty of its "concentric" structure -- so deliciously quizzical that Auguste Dorchain compared it in 1918 to a set of "small Japanese boxes" fitting nicely into each other -- and the freshness of its tone. It seems so playfully parodic, so intriguingly modern that one cannot help regretting that after the notorious Le Cid public row in 1637, Corneille was critically intimidated into obsequiously observing the neoclassical rules the Academie subscribed to with religious diligence. With such imaginative bravado, power of invention and experimental impulses as are palpable in this play, think of what that man could have gone on to write. In his subsequent plays, Corneille wrote, as it were, with the shadows of Aristotle and Cardinal Richelieu looking over his shoulder. Indeed, in his Examen de la Piece, he drags in Aristotle, insisting that though he had flouted "l'unité du jour", he had at least observed the unity of place. In fact, he had observed both unities, and in very much the same fashion: just as the sorcerer's cave acts as a main location which encompasses many imaginary places, the duration of Pridamant's encounter with the sorcerer, though it involves many temporal leaps and imaginatively spans many years, tallies perfectly with representation time -- the aspect Aristotle had so admired in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and which had persuaded him to come up with the notorious one-day temporal injunction. To compress many years, places and lifetimes into a couple of hours (the AUC production started at 8 and ended at 10.30) through leaps of the imagination is of the essence of theatre, something beyond the comprehension of stuffy old Richelieu and his retinue. Corneille, however, knew how to achieve this essence and create unity out of diversity. By opting for a multiple, concentric structure in L'Illusion, he was able to use two time-scales simultaneously, one historical, the other psychological. While the former regulates the frame-action, or outer "Japanese box", locating it in 17th century France and clearly defining its duration, the latter provides a freer element into which the other actions flow. The episode which triggers and embraces all the others features the visit of Pridamant, an old bourgeois lawyer of Avignon (Robert Beshara, a suitably fussy and officious pettifogger with a limited imagination) to the cave of Alcandre, a sorcerer, well-versed in pre- Christian magical arts. Impelled by remorse, Pridamant's purpose is to discover the whereabouts of a son, Clindor (Karim Kassem), who fled home in his teens, many years ago, in search of adventure and to escape the mental rigours of a strict, stuffy home-life. The whole play consists of that brief visit of the father to the wizard's cave (you cannot hope for a stricter unity of place); but between the beginning and end, Alcandre treats the father to fragmented, incomplete visions of his son's life -- visions which cover many years and places and involve disorienting changes of names. The imaginary trip staged by Alcandre, which variously amuses, startles, dismays and frightens the father, ultimately leads to a shattering, ironic revelation -- a twist that reverses Prospero's "Those our actors were only spirits", in Shakespeare's The Tempest, into "these our actors, their masks, costumes and pretended actions, are the only reality that exists." This is visually expressed in Bradley's ingenious production, where the whole auditorium becomes the sorcerer's "cave", while the actual stage -- divided here into different performing areas by means of a central, circular, raised platform flanked by two similar lower ones and topped by a red, cylindrical curtain which descends from the flies to reveal or conceal people and locations -- serves in a dual capacity as both a real stage and the fictional site of Alcandre's conjured visions. Does this remind you of the allegorical Platonic Cave in The Republic where so-called reality is reduced to an eerie procession of ghosts, to an insubstantial vision -- a mere play of light and shadow? Robin Chaplik has suggested that "Corneille's use of a cave as Alcandre's place of enchantment draws on a European tradition in which caves were regarded as mystical entities -- metaphors for the cosmos -- places where magic and a sense of the divine dwelled. During the Baroque period, in which Corneille was writing," she goes on to explain, "caves had become a popular theatrical setting where the triumph of art over nature was demonstrated...This Baroque ideal is reflected in Alcandre's ability to create illusion as splendor and refinement within the rough and primitive environment of the cave." But whether Alcandre's cave is a place of Platonic deception or Baroque revelation -- and both the original text and Bradley's production of the Kushner version leave us enticingly dangling between the two possibilities -- to survive as humans, Corneille seems to suggest, we have to make room in our little, ordered lives for such dangerous flights of fancy, stormy passions, and disorienting role and identity shifts as theatre offers. For here, as is the case in Shakespeare, Calderon and De Vega, "All the world is a stage"; outside Alcandre's cave -- the theatre -- L'Illusion and its adaptation seem to argue, there is nothing and no world. This is part of the appeal of this production, transforming the auditorium -- the whole semi-circular Al-Falaki theatre -- into the play's fictional "world" and echoing the play's concentric structure in its appearance. To see the world in a grain of sand, William Blake's words, has been long my motto, and Alcandre's "cave" in this production strikes me as one such rare grain of sand -- a crystal ball that potentially contains the whole of life -- all times, places and human narratives. Such an explication of the text would have been beyond Richelieu; but Corneille could have credibly argued that he had observed the "Unities", albeit in a completely original interpretation. Ultimately, the play struck me as a celebration of and homage to theatre and, also, with the benefit of hindsight, as a tragic record of imaginative coercion and a testimony to the tyranny of small-minded intellectual conservatives over creative inventiveness. Viewed in historical context, L'Illusion seems a maverick work, a last fling at liberty and imaginative indulgence borne out of a pressing sense of foreboding of the narrow artistic straitjacket into which Corneille was soon to step.
