The National's A Doll's House leaves Nehad Selaiha puzzled as to the where and when of the action Finally, after many delays and false starts, the National's A Doll's House opened on 25 August. Had it done so in May, as originally scheduled, or even in mid-June, it would have scooped the honour of premiering this world classic in Egypt. As it is, this honour has gone to the Cultural Palaces' Sidi Gaber Creativity Centre in Alexandria, which sponsored Gamal Yaqoot's production of the play in the spring, and to Al-Anfoushi Cultural Palace (in the same city), which hosted it at its large theatre for a five-day run at the end of June. Though it gave us an abridged, somewhat romanticised version of the play, the production was so successful with the critics and the public, and so technically distinguished, it was chosen to open the 1st National Egyptian Theatre Festival on 10 July and ended up garnering its major scenography award and another two for best rising actress and director. With a much bigger budget, a film star in the lead and the whole arsenal of the National behind it, one expected Ali Khalifa's production to top the earlier one and prove the more professional of the two. This was not the case. Ali Khalifa was once a promising director who seemed fond of tackling difficult, unwieldy texts. I still remember his production of Mikhail Roman's one-acter The Letter at the National in the 1990s. One day, however, he suddenly sank out of view and I was later told he had gone to some oil-rich Arab country to teach, driven, like many of his generation, by the scarcity of work opportunities at home and the need to achieve a measure of financial security. I was pleased to hear he was back, tackling Ibsen, and thought that now he would fulfill his promise. But years of knocking about the theatrical backwaters of the Arab world seem to have taken a heavy toll. Judging by his current production at the National, one cannot but sense a certain loss of imaginative energy and technical fastidiousness. Though he stuck faithfully to the text and did not, unlike Yaqoot, attempt to idealise Nora or soften the somberness of Ibsen's vision, he seemed strangely unable to grapple with the perennial problem of convincingly presenting foreign realistic texts to an Egyptian audience and making them sufficiently relevant and interesting. In such cases, the solutions attempted by directors at different stages in the history of the Egyptian theatre have been few: either to openly acknowledge the foreignness of the text through a vague approximation in the sets and costumes to the original realistic setting of the play (producing a much- diluted, quasi-period-piece) and the use of a linguistic medium sufficiently removed from ordinary speech -- a form of classical Arabic -- to distance the characters from daily Egyptian reality with its different mores and morals; or to go to the other extreme, Egyptianise the setting and characters while preserving the plot, message and most of the verbal texture of the original and translating into colloquial Arabic, making the necessary concessions to verisimilitude in the process; or, finally, to tread a middle path, trying to hold the stick in the middle, as the Egyptian proverb says, attempting to convince the audience that though the play was obviously foreign in locale and characters, the reality it represented was very much a local affair. The third option, which comes in a variety of haphazard, individually inventive ways, is usually the trickiest and most uncertain in its results, particularly if the director, like Khalifa, insists on giving the text in toto. Though it removed the morbid Dr. Rank, with his nauseously shocking venereal disease, and omitted Nora's final, irreversible, and somewhat cliché door bang -- a serious tampering with the text, some would consider -- Yaqoot's production, which went for the first option, achieved a better balance between authenticity and relevance and a sturdier willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. His idealised, romanticised Nora, though palpably foreign in dress and language (delivering her lines in simple, spotless classical Arabic), was closer to the audience and more convincing that Khalifa's colloquial-speaking, voluptuous heroine. Yaqoot put his trust in the acting to bring the problem home to his audience, even though it visually related to another country and another culture. Khalifa, on the other hand (since his production followed close on the heals of Yaqoot's, comparisons are inevitable), preserved Dr. Rank insistently in the background as a metaphor for the invisible moral tumours eating away at the fabric of society and a constant, sardonic reminder of and comment on the hypocrisy and corruption of the dominant male morality in the play. In the third and final act, Ibsen makes Helmer describe him, in devastatingly ironical terms, as "a kind of dark background to the happy sunlight of our marriage". And I would like to think, am almost sure, that this sentence played a crucial part in forming Khalifa's directorial conception and guiding of the actors. This would, perhaps, explain the dismal aspect of the Christmas preparations in the first scene, the stunted, cheap looking, plastic Christmas tree, the general fetid atmosphere and the external, technically elaborate but emotionally hollow rendering of the parts by the cast. I can never justify, however, the choice of cast or the visually carelessly cluttered and pretentious décor. Opting for the third solution in a facile bid for relevance -- a solution which has been tried with success several times before, but notably in comedies and musicals where verisimilitude counts for nothing and the whole thing can pass as an illusionary charade -- Khalifa turned Youssef Kamel's competent, classical Arabic translation of the play into the colloquial medium and mysteriously decided to upgrade most of the dramatis personae to the category of senior citizens and place them in an environment vaguely suggestive of something relatively old and foreign and equally contemporary nouveau riche 1960s Egyptian. Poussie, though a diligent, conscientious actress both in cinema, television or theatre, with a captivating appearance to boot, seemed far too old for Nora, and so did the marvelous technical virtuoso, Ashraf Abdel-Ghafour, as Helmer, and the grotesquely cadaverous-looking Mohamed Rehan as Dr. Rank. The physical appearance of the actors, notwithstanding their impersonation efforts, put paid to any attempt at convincing us of the reality of their situation. Much as I tried, I could not see them as a ten-year old married couple, with three infant children to rear, a dying friend at hand, an old school chum in need of help who fortuitously turns into protective angel (Christine), and her former lover, Krogstad, a blackmailer who suddenly turns into a repentant fallen angel. Would a better set, with not so many purple-lined doors, a nondescript fire-place with an enlarged modern photo of a grey-clad, heavily-spectacled old Helmer on top, or so many artificial columns built into the walls, or a dummy piano, obviously made up of wood and foam, or a 1960's fashionable, panelled window, in this case a smoked dark blue glass one which occupied the whole of the back stage, have made any difference, I do not know. Imagine watching maturely beautiful Poussie, middle-aged but still extremely luscious and seductive, bedecked in a skimpy, leopard-skin dress, with a tambourine in her hand, performing a strange gypsy dance in this visually erratic, deeply confused visual setting, with two aged men watching her with obvious drooling, sensual fascination, and you get the picture. In Poussie's hands, Nora's Tarantella dance turned into a limp, faded affair which needed a leap of the imagination to make it square with the words in which it was described. None of the characters, neither Nora (Poussie), Helmer (Asharaf Abdel-Ghafour, who, by the way, kept his habitual gray wig), the ridiculously tall and emaciated Mohamed Rihani as Dr Rank, Bahaa Tharwat (as Krogstad) and Salma Gharib (as Christine) -- both of whom looked considerably younger and more familiarly dressed than the three main protagonists and, therefore, more at odds with them -- managed to command an ounce of credibility with the audience or draw out a fraction of sympathy. As I looked at Hussein El-Ezabi's superficially and pompously realistic set and the odd assortment of furniture it contained, I remembered with nostalgic affection Sobhi El-Sayed's bewitchingly childish and simple stage design, which made the stage into a roofless house, open to a snowy sky, with transparent glass walls, supported by a flimsy wooden structure which revealed the road outside and other houses. Whereas his set had communicated a poignant feeling of fragility, of transience, and a vivid sense of eminent disaster, El-Ezabie's set and Fatma El-Nasharti's costumes had only represented a false, pretentious bid at being of the here and now. At the end the show, I found myself echoing Viola's opening words in Twelfth Night and asking: "What country friends is this?"
