Nehad Selaiha doubts the wisdom of identifying the Sphinx with the Boyg in the Norwegian- Egyptian concert- performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt last week by the Pyramids in Giza In the letter which Henrik Ibsen sent Edvard Grieg in 1874 to propose to him composing the music for a stage version of Peer Gynt against a payment of 200 "specie dollars", one is startled to read among his many detailed ideas that "Almost the whole of Act Four" -- the only part of the play Georg Bandes, Ibsen's contemporary and the most distinguished Norwegian critic then, thought worth reading -- "could be cut." "Instead," he thinks "there should be a great musical tone-picture to suggest Peer Gynt's travels all over the world," with "American, English and French airs" thrown in. The chorus of Anitra and the girls, heard from behind a curtain with an orchestral accompaniment, and a distant dream-picture of a middle-aged Solveig, singing in the sun outside her hut, would make up the rest of the act. "After her song the curtain would fall slowly, with the music continuing but changing to a suggestion of the storm at sea that opens Act Five." Fortunately, Ibsen did not get his way, thanks to the sagacious objection of Herr Josephson, the manager of the Christiania Theatre then. Rather than this "massive disemboweling of the text," as Peter Watts mentions in the introduction to his translation of the play (Penguin 1966), he suggested "a great number of discreet small cuts that left practically no scars." Ibsen agreed and the play premiered with Grieg's incidental music in February 1876. Unfortunately, in all my travels, I never got the chance to watch any production of this (reportedly) five-hour version. Until last week, my sole live encounter with Peer Gynt had been a children's performance I stumbled upon in Geneva one summer many years ago. It was a short affair which reduced the play to a fantastic adventure story-cum- fairytale; all I remember of it is a lot of boisterous frolicking, forests of masks and a crazy medley of colours and outlandish costumes. With such a mortifyingly defective background, I felt at a grievous disadvantage watching the recent Peer Gynt in Giza -- the crowning event of the Ibsen Year and "largest cultural cooperation ever between Egypt and Norway," according to Lars Roar Langslet, chairman of the Norwegian National Ibsen Committee. My reception of the Egyptian Peer Gynt was extensively conditioned by this lack of exposure to previous reputable productions I could compare it with. Predictably, I found myself, on both nights, and despite the overwhelming beauty of Grieg's music (extensively plagiarised in old romantic Egyptian movies and thereby rendered sweetly familiar to Egyptian audiences), constantly comparing this new one and a half hour version with the text as I know it from published English translations. I first met Peer in print in my fourth year at university when Fakhri Qustandi, a born actor who missed his true vocation, becoming an academic instead, managed during a modern drama course to infect us with his passion for Ibsen. His vividly theatrical performance in the classroom made the characters jump off the pages and come alive and was enough to fire even the most sluggish imagination and send nimble souls chasing after more Ibsen plays. It was under Qustandi's spell that I fell in love with Peer, with all his faults, and the whole Ibsenite gallery of characters, including even the grim Brand. It was also thanks to him that many of the junior staff he had taught in the English Department went on in later years to become Ibsen scholars. In the elegant and extremely useful booklet distributed to the audience, the principal creators of the Peer Gynt in Giza event, including director Bentein Baardson who conceived the idea after directing the opening ceremony of Bibliotheca Alexandrina, dramaturg Bodil Kvamme and musical director Hakon Berge, repeatedly stress that it was designed for a particular place, with a particular purpose in mind. According to Trond Giske, Norway's minister of culture and church affairs, performing Peer Gynt "in Egypt beneath an open sky and with the Sphinx and pyramids as a backdrop adds a dimension to Ibsen's drama that no other theatre could offer." He describes the production as "a monument to Ibsen's greatness" and adds, somewhat hyperbolically: "It is a milestone in the history of Norwegian theatre that Peer Gynt, as a conclusion to the centennial commemoration of Ibsen's death, is now being presented specifically at Giza." That the choice of location governed the whole design, all artistic decisions and every aspect of the work is proudly confessed at the opening of the booklet in which Lars Roar Langslet proudly declares: "Now, the play's 'Egyptian dimension' (Act 4) is for the first time used as its main axis, in a performance brought forward by Egyptian and Norwegian artists in close collaboration, with the Sphinx and the pyramids as an inspirational setting." In a conversation with Bodil Kvamme, Ellen Svendsen remarks that "two principal ideas...guided...Baardson's and Kvamme's adaptation of the play. The first (was) the choice to perform the play in front of the Sphinx," which "naturally led to a predominance of the fourth act in which Peer meets the Sphinx. The second ...[was] the incorporation and adaptation of Grieg's music." Both choices involve some challenges and many risks, not least of which is pandering to a sense of the exotically foreign, alerting one to Ibsen's occasional unconscious slips into the discourses of traditional orientalism in the play and other poems, and awakening memories of his offensive association of Egyptian culture, particularly in the famous poem Balloon Letter to a Swedish Lady, with death and stasis -- an association that creeps into his representation of Egypt, and the orient in general, in the play. In an uncompromisingly honest and perceptive paper delivered by professor Vigdis Ystad in the second session of the Ibsen Seminar at the Supreme Council for Culture on 28 October (and printed in the event's booklet), she draws attention to Ibsen's "depiction of the 4000 year-old Egyptian culture" in the Balloon poem, "as dead and stagnant...in contrast to the Greek and Nordic culture where life and passion continue to effervesce." When Ibsen attributed the same qualities of death and stagnation to German culture under Bismarck, there was a big hue and cry in Germany and he was forced to publicly apologise. From Egypt, however, there was no reaction, Ystad notes -- "unless we take into account that he was subsequently honoured," she adds ironically. "That occurred in 1871, when the Viceroy of Egypt awarded Ibsen the Turkish order of the Medjidie in appreciation for his participation in the opening of the canal in 1869." One, indeed, has "to search far and wide to find a greater generosity," as she derisively concludes in a bitter gibe. In focusing on Act Four in the interest of highlighting the setting, the creators of this Egyptian Peer Gynt seemed to unwittingly embrace the Great Boyg's principle of going "round about" and act the same way as Peer, evading, or working round challenges and recreating the world, in this case the "text", according to their fancy, regardless of any incongruities that may arise. Cutting out the Anitra sequence, in which Peer masquerades as the Prophet Mohammed and oriental women are lumped together and demeaningly projected through the distorting, stereotyping lens of romantic orientalism as dirty, voluptuous, grasping, predatory and perfidious, was perhaps inevitable so as not to offend Egyptian sensibilities. Cutting out Hussein and the Fellah, and reducing the whole madhouse sequence into a brief encounter with Begriffenfeldt, followed by the lunatics' dance and the crowning of Peer as the emperor of selfishness, could be defended on the grounds that adumbration and amalgamation were essential requirements in a show that wanted to more than halve its original playing time. What can neither be defended nor justified, however, was the identification, right out at the beginning, then at two other points in the production, the second and fourth acts, of the Sphinx with the slimy, amorphous, evil Boyg, the propagator of compromises, circumlocution and prevarication -- the advocator of "roundaboutness". Here the intention of the new Peer Gynt creators was to glorify the Sphinx and turn it into a symbol of profound wisdom, as indeed I think it is, and of the "wholeness of being, of existence," to boot, to a defining principle, a la the Sphinx in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex -- as "a symbol of the enigmatic aspect of Peer Gynt the person, as well as of the many questions posed by the play," and of "the universal and timeless questions with which every human being is confronted," in the words of minister Trond Giske. Such an intention, however, goes against the grain of the play, so to speak; for any spectator familiar with the play, it violently, irreconcilably clashes with its general drift and could at best prove confusing. Baardson and Kvamme give the silent Sphinx who appears in the fourth act of the play the words of the Great Boyg in Act Two; this confronts the spectators with a big challenge: in order for such an intention to be realised, they have to throw Ibsen's enormous, slippery and unpleasant creature of folk tales into the ladle of the Button-moulder, as it were, to be recast and remoulded as the wise, enigmatic and profoundly philosophical Sphinx. It takes a leap of the imagination to do this, and given how the play was tentatively recast in this recent production, it is quite a feat to achieve it. Aggravating the spectator's dilemma was the confidential gesture of delivering the Boyg/Sphinx's lines in Arabic -- in a somewhat evasive translation that neutralised the Boyg's "go round about" advice. In Arabic, it ambiguously said: "go round in the mountains," suggesting further search and quests rather than evasions. Given the deplorable quality of the English rendering of the dialogue, flashed on a small screen up front, at floor lever, for the benefit of the privileged few in the front seats, one cannot decide whether the fault lay with the adaptors or interpreters. Since most of the Egyptian audience could not understand Norwegian and were denied access to the wishy-washy translation, one could not help wondering, in view of the fact that nearly half of the bulk of the audience were Norwegians, "for whom the bells were ringing". The decision to incorporate nearly the whole of Grieg's score, intended to cover a five-hour performance, in one hour and a half was another challenge and risk. It simply meant swamping the whole performance in melodious tunes and working hard to establish a semblance of a performance against such enormous tides. Given that Grieg composed little music for the fourth act, which this production was built around, one found parts of the music placed in different scenes than what was originally planned. And since I have not been to a performance of the play where the music was placed as "originally planned", I cannot gauge the difference. My impression, however, was that the music overtook the whole performance, seducing the audience away from the play. Everything became subservient to the pervasive charm of the music and Ibsen was right when he thought that it "sugared the pill so that the public could swallow it." But Ibsen had in mind a Norwegian audience and a five-hour play. In the case of the Egyptian Peer Gynt, where, according to composer Hakon Berge, "the most radical choice was the abandonment of the episodic, musical room in favour of using Grieg's music as the foundation of the dramatic narrative," the music, exquisitely delivered by a Norwegian- Egyptian orchestra and chorus, sensitively conducted by Christian Eggen, with the enchanting Ann-Helen Moen in the lead as Solveig, became the paramount attraction. Baardson's wonderful cast, some of whom had to sacrifice their hair and shave bald to tune with the director's visual conception -- an unnecessary sacrifice to my mind in such a musically-oriented production -- achieved a stunning rhythmical interaction and tempo-tuning with the singers and musicians, quite successfully deluding me the first night, particularly Bjarte Hjelmeland (as Peer), Lisa Fjeldstad (as Mother Aase), and Silje Reinamo (as Solveig), into believing they were the singers. At moments it was thrilling to see how the chorus on stage interacted with the chorus in the orchestra space without missing a single beat. Artistic proficiency, both physical and vocal, technical expertise, extreme discipline and self-denial, following the old motto: "to find yourself you have first to lose it" -- to sacrifice it for a passionately believed in cause (think of all those lovely actresses who tearfully but stoically agreed to have their heads shaved off in the interest of art), were the things that touched me most in this rendering of the intriguing adventures of the rangy, rapscallion Peer. I think it is also the message that most of the young theatre artists who saw this production walked away with. Other valuable messages, of more enduring value, messages which will perhaps outlast our young artists' momentary, media-driven interest in this Egyptian- Norwegian Peer Gynt, might include the ability to evoke a real scene on bare boards, the sensitive manipulation of grotesquerie and caricature without spilling over into inane farce and the imaginative use of simple costumes to create fields of meanings. Personally, I loved having the button-moulder in his grayish, mouse-brown, long coat on stage all the time as a silent observer and observer of Peer, though I think it was an inspired ploy to hold the performance together. I also loved the sense of timelessness, suggesting eternal cyclic recurrence intimated by the constant, non-aging appearance of Peer and Solveig, and the production's subtle, unobtrusive, almost 'round about' way of neutralising Peer's revulsion of his ill-begotten, Green- woman-mothered child (a revulsion that harks back to Ibsen's unfortunate love affair with a servant girl at an apothecary's house where he was apprenticed in his early youth). The projection of Peer as a lovely child dragging along a heavy mantle, then almost melting into it, dying as it were, then reemerging and descending downstairs, perhaps into oblivion, created a deeply moving scene that went beyond the requirements of plot and suggested Wordsworth's image of the child as "father of the man" as well as enormous possibilities for living in "true piety". With all my ideological/artistic reservations about this latest Peer Gynt, I would not have missed it for the world. I watched it twice and could see it 10 times more without boredom. After all, it is my first "adult" meeting with Ibsen's enchanting rogue, and, like a first romance, it is hard to forget.
