Nehad Selaiha joins the Angels Team as they ponder the road Towards A Better Life at the Abba Antonios Church in Shubra On 5 September, 1995, a group of friends which included members of different churches as well as a number of Muslims decided to launch themselves as an independent theatre group under the patronage of the Abba Antonios Church in Shubra and christened themselves the Angels Team. The seminal members in this group were director Michel Maher (whose surname denotes cleverness and excellent craftsmanship in Arabic) and the public relations dynamo, Malak Mansi, literally, 'the forgotten angel'. In an article published in Al-Ahram Weekly (22-28 July, 1999 ), I recorded my first encounter with this group, stressing that they looked upon theatre "not as a hobby, a pleasurable indulgence, a self-fulfilling activity, or simply fun, but as part of worship and a service to the community." Indeed, this principle was heavily underlined in the first meeting: for them, theatre, like Christ, was the word made flesh. Their weekly meetings on Wednesday, at 6.30pm, to read, train, meditate, and exchange experiences, have been an almost sacred tryst since. But despite this passionate commitment and ardent dedication, the group have fortunately steered clear of solemn sermonising and sullen preaching, displaying a remarkable degree of intellectual integrity and independent thinking, and nurturing a healthy, often rebellious and tongue-in-cheek sense of the ironical and the absurd. Judging by their 1999 production of Lenin El-Ramly's Inta Hor (You're Free), a thoroughly secular play, I noted (in the same article mentioned above) that their work evidenced an "abundant sense of humour, a pronounced quizzical streak, and a predilection for popular comedy and even slapstick farce." Inta Hor, however, was their third production. Their first, Claquette, Tani Marrah (Claquette, Second Time), performed on 7 November, 1996, was an ambitious musical adaptation by Michel Maher of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Christ Recrucified, with lyrics by Kirollos Abdalla and music by George Gad; and on 16 October the following year, the same team staged Bandah 'Aleiki (I Am Calling You), an original text by Maher. Between 1999 and 2005, the team produced 10 children's plays and four adult productions: Mehawid 'Ala Tool (The Always Compliant), written and directed by Michel Maher, with lyrics by Nermine Loaz and music by George Wahba, and performed at the theatre of the Students Union Centre on 5 December, 1999; Ahlam (Dreams), an adaptation of Lenin El-Ramli's surrealistic, psychological farce I'qal Ya Doctor (Wizen Up Doctor) by Nagui Abdalla and George Gad, directed by Michel Maher, with Nermine Loaz and George Gad providing lyrics and music, and performed at Al-Hanager in 2002; Min Haquhum (It Is Their Right), written and directed by Maher and performed at the Students Union Centre in 2003; and Al-'Asa Al Abanous (The Ebony Stick), an original, ferociously anti-patriarchy script by Midhat Phillip, directed by Maher, which swept the top prizes for best performance, best direction, best script and best actress at the first United Drama Groups Festival in 2005. For their latest production, performed at the Abba Antonios Community Services Centre in Shubra last week (on 27-28 July), the Angels picked a dramatically limp, though witty 1955 one-act play by Tawfiq El-Hakim. Nahwa Hayat Afdal (Towards a Better Life) is more of a dialogic piece, an intellectual exercise than a play, and mainly consists of a debate between the author (thinly disguised as a social reformer) and the Devil, or Lucifer, about what constitutes 'the good life'. Nagui Abdalla and Amal George extensively reworked the text, updating it to reflect present everyday reality in Egypt and developing its latent dramatic potential into a full- fledged hilarious social satire. El-Hakim's stately and rotund classical Arabic dialogue was transposed to the more effervescent medium of the vernacular without losing its general drift; his persona, the sedate and officiously reflective social-reformer dreaming of a better life (played by Amir Rif'at), was boldly taken so many pegs down, turned into an ordinary hen-pecked husband, unable to cope with the water, electricity and gas bills, and his authorial pomposity was flagrantly deflated to bring out the inherent absurdity of his dream in today's world, without completely negating its legitimacy; the docile, obedient, all-forgiving and all-understanding wife in El-Hakim's text was magically and quite deliciously recast into the stereotype of the shrewish, belligerent female -- a kind of human bulldozer -- and more than a match for the Devil in hatching evil designs and cunning strategems. Martine Ishaq played the role with real verve, extending her irritation from the mundane to the metaphysical, iconoclastically lumping her sire with the Lord in the same basket, and bringing to the part many original and scintillating comic touches. To dramatically flesh out El-Hakim's quasi- Socratic dialogue, Nagui Abdalla and Amal George introduced new characters: the social reformer's brother, an impoverished school teacher-cum-social worker, financially harassed by his prospective father-in-law (beautifully played by Paul Sobhi in clever imitation of the style of famous comedian Mohamed Sobhi); his gentle, romantic, head-in-the- clouds fiancée, Mona, sensitively performed by Sarah Zakariyya; and the three gas, electricity and water bill-collectors, plus a postman, all superbly played by Amir Samir in the best tradition of caricature farce. The role of Lucifer, the wittiest and best-drawn in El-Hakim's original text, suffered minimal verbal alteration, but gained immensely in irony, moral thrust and humour from the two dramaturges' new conception of the character as a chic, urbane, cynically tolerant and business-like person. In his handsome appearance, subtly comical courteous demeanor and decadent man-of-the-world weariness, Murad Kamel was simply a treat and evidenced vast resources of acting talent and an enormously powerful stage presence. He is an actor who has the skills and necessary charisma to rise to stardom. Ultimately, however, and despite all the changes, indeed, improvements, or because of them, the Angels Team version of Towards a Better life carried the same message that El-Hakim intended and put it across more forcefully: material improvement is not enough to guarantee 'the good life'; 'spiritual' and 'moral' improvement has to go hand in hand with it. Underneath the brilliant veneer of farce, this performance continued to explore the same terrain as the earlier ones and investigate the question of how to attain freedom and happiness, individual and/or collective. Like all their former productions, the Angels Team's Towards a Better Life came out as a modern morality play with pronounced political overtones and a pungent satirical flavour. But for the death of Michel Maher's father, this production would have opened the 2nd festival of the United Drama Groups earlier this year. And if you wonder why we are lighting only 10 candles though the team will be 11 years old on the 5th of September this year, you have to remember that on 5 September last year, the Beni Sweif tragedy happened, costing us more losses that we have time to mourn. The Angels Team have dropped this year out of their history, consecrating it to the victims of that terrible fire and to the theatrical communal memory; they marked this decision by lighting this year only 10 candles and trying to forge ahead towards a better life.
