Nehad Selaiha joins The Beggars ' Carnival at Al-Tali'a Theatre What happens when a theatre critic, one who has a regular weekly column in a widely distributed daily newspaper, decides to turn director and step into the hurly-burly world of theatre- making? Whatever his/her qualifications or motives for taking such a step, and no matter how many credentials they could wave, they would invariably be regarded as outsiders and duly, indeed fiercely, resented. A critic is first and foremost a spectator, one who stands outside the imaginary circle, on the fringe of what Peter Brook called the "empty space", the equivalent of the white page for the writer, to watch and (God help them) evaluate the flimsy, transient pageant any members of the weird thespian tribe decide to put on or map out. The feud between theatre-practitioners and the arbiters of taste, value-guards and theorisers has been long and bitter and it really takes a lot of courage and the-devil- may-care kind of attitude to desert the safe cloisters of the critical establishment to the grueling spheres of conjuring up ghosts and making shadows seem real. There is a popular Egyptian proverb which aptly portrays the plight of such adventurers: it describes them as those who "danced on the middle steps of a long stairway and could neither reach the top nor settle down at the bottom". Hassan Saad is one such unfortunate middle-of- the-stairway dancer; no way can you dissociate what he churns out on the stage from the rigid critical verdicts he has opined over so many years. Indeed some theatre managers would go so far as to accuse him of terrorising them into condoning his theatrical adventures without stopping to consider their real merit. The same thing applies to any theatre critic who decides to turn playwright. The late Nabil Badran who suddenly, and quite prematurely died two years ago at a little over sixty, is another case in point. For more than 30 years Badran remained divided between a critical and a play-writing career. As a journalist he had to earn his living writing about something and in his case, being a graduate of the drama department at the theatre institute, that something was naturally theatre, the discipline he studied at the Academy of Arts and qualified for back in the 1960s. I had known him as a critic and met him fitfully at some theatrical occasion before we got together in Mansoura. We had our differences, but watching an adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with him in that northern coastal town was a revelation. I was quite taken with his ardour, his childish delight in the hamness, squelchy melodramatic outpourings and amateurish gimmicks of those provincial actors and I loved him for it. Later in the evening, he told me about his writings, how he was the first one in Egypt to introduce the theatrical form called "political cabaret", and how much he longed to create a kind of popular theatre that could passionately involve the audience, appeal to all social classes and cultural categories and dares to go beyond the established technical specifications and acknowledged theatrical values. With some people, the theory is much more inspiring than the work it purports to offshoot, and in all the productions I have watched of Badran's work I could not but bemoan the laxity of professional standards, the flabbiness of the texture, the lack of rhythmical tautness and the absence of anything resembling tempo. The formula of "political cabaret" allows for lots of disconnected sketches and commentaries on topical matters and, as such, can be quite uncontrollable. The text is invariably reduced to a vehicle for the actors' improvisationary talents which vary from one night to the next and can sometimes sink to the tediously mundane and vulgar. The reason I am remembering Badran in connection with Saad is that both are critics turned theatre- makers and that last week the latter, posing as director, treated us to one of the last texts of the former. The influence on John Gay on Egyptian writers has yet to be studied; but his image of society as divided between beggars and big-time, lawful, or legally immune, thieves has haunted Egyptian writers since the 1960s. In Badran's Karnaval Al-Shahateen (Beggars' Carnival) Egypt is pictured as a country of beggars lorded over by corrupt rulers and foreign powers. In Saad's hands, the text was turned into a lively popular musical where comic invention is left to run riot, often making you forget what the play is all about. Naively agitatory and facilely topical, like a series of sensational headlines in some opposition newspaper, what this theatrical hotchpotch really lacked was a live band. The recorded score which accompanied the show, though zestful and quite brisk in a humorous vein, sounded limp and failed to match the energy of the dancers and actors. Indeed, at certain points it seemed to cramp the style of the performers and rudely intrude upon their lively repartee with the audience. Though the message was ultimately quite tawdry and feeble, one could not but delight in zaniness of the performers and their effusive vituperative powers.
