Nehad Selaiha shares the tragedy of simple Egyptians doomed to exile As a stage director, Sayed Khater's work may not be substantial in terms of size or frequency, a fact he blames on theatre managers and a certain proud reluctance on his part to push himself forward or make the almost inevitable, humiliating rounds of cajoling and pestering to get his projects through. What little theatre he has managed to put across, however, shows an impressive skill in handling different kinds of drama with remarkable power and efficiency and a knack for appealing to all kinds of audiences. Such works include two successful commercial musicals in the 1980s and '90s starring popular singers Ali El-Haggar and Medhat Saleh, a roaring social comedy about polygamy called Al-Murgiha (The Swing) by Fathiya El-Assal, staged at the now defunct Mohamed Farid Theatre, the former headquarters of the state comedy theatre company, in 1993, an adaptation of Othello called The Last Round which took part in the first Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 1988 and featured a boxing ring at Al-Tali'a state theatre and, earlier, in 1985, a haunting, atmospheric production of John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea performed at the (also defunct) Youth Chamber Theatre in Ramses Street. With so much talent and such few outlets you would expect Khater to feel and look embittered; not a bit of it. Tall and handsome, always elegant and in his prime, he seems to take great pleasure in his work both as teacher and television actor and always looks debonair and thoroughly at home in the world. Indeed, he is the last person you would connect in your mind with the sorrows and suffering of the poor and downtrodden or with such heart-rending themes as death in exile. It was therefore with some surprise that I learnt he had lately teamed up with playwright Leila Abdel-Baset who seems to favour monodrama as a form and obsessively dwells in her plays on the social and personal deprivations of the powerless and dispossessed. In the shadow of the social and economic upheaval wrought by Sadat's open-door or lassaiz-faire policy in the 1970s and the mass exodus of peasants, workers and teachers to the oil-rich Gulf which followed in its wake, splintering thousands of families and destroying old value systems, Abdel-Baset launched a trilogy of plays centering on this problem and displaying its consequences in terms of human suffering and loss. The first part of the trilogy, Wagaa' Al-Bu'ad (The Pain of Separation), was a one-man show which gave us the experience of an estranged husband driven by dearth of means and unemployment to work abroad, away from home and family. His forty-minute monologue communicated quite vividly, in a moving lyrical vein, his terrible loneliness, his shame and humiliation at the treatment he is forced to put up with and his haunting fear of losing his virility. He looked and felt like a man struggling desperately to find a secure foothold in a sea of quick sand and holding on to some pitifully frayed shreds of old and distant memories. In Thaman Al-Ghorba (The Price of Exile) which followed Abdel-Baset shifted her focus and it was the turn of the lonely wife, left behind with the children, to tell of the enormous price she has to daily pay in the absence of her mate, in a highly conservative, parochial society. Without actually infringing the taboo on the expression of female sexuality on the Egyptian stage, Abdel-Baset managed to negotiate her way into many a dark and silent area of female experience. Superbly performed by Madiha Hamdi at the National Upstairs (another space which we have unfortunately recently lost), The Price of Exile communicated real pain and real frustration -- a sense of the sad waste of years, of being suspended in time, always waiting, always in the grip of fear and anxiety, worn by the battle to suppress her natural cravings. The small hall where the performance took place was significantly dominated by an empty four-poster bed and had the feel of a cell infested with the delusions of a lonely, aging woman slowly falling apart. In the final part of the trilogy, Ba'd Toul El-Ghiab (After a Long Absence), the husband and wife finally meet only to discover that they have become strangers to each other. The four-poster bed is there once more, but the wife's efforts to reach her husband or revive their old passion break on the rock of his new obsession with money. On a table near the bed, a large Samsonite stands conspicuously, obviously stuffed with cash. When the husband decides to leave once more following a business call, even though he learns that one of their children is in trouble with the police, the wife freezes ominously and asks for a divorce. With Ya 'Aziz 'Eini (O Apple of My Eye) Abdel-Baset seems to have wanted to round off the trilogy with another part, making it into a quartet, and build the sense of alienation and exile into a general, recurrent experience of Egyptian peasants and trace its historical roots before the 1970s. How much of the play currently on show at Al-Ghad Theatre is her own work is difficult to verify since the text is not published and it is an open secret that Khater has worked with her extensively on it. Instead of a realistic monodrama in the same vein as The Pain of Separation, we are treated here to a musical-cum-documentary drama with lots of historical footage featuring significant moments and turning points in modern Egyptian history as well as videotaped dramatic sequences representing scenes from the hero's miserable childhood and repeated cycles of oppression and disillusionment. These are projected on a round screen on top of a platform or 'mastaba' right in the middle of the stage and flanked on one side by a tiny structure representing the bare, cell-like room inhabited by the peasant in his exile and on the other by steps leading to the door of the peasant's house back home and, a little further down, a round, upright structure suggesting a waterwheel. The whole set, by Salah Hafez, has a distinct pharaonic look while the figure of a huge mythical bird with wings ending with human hands hangs prominently above the set, dominating the whole scene and suggesting at once the longing for freedom and the weight of the chains which binds it to the painful history projected on the screen. This paradoxical symbol gains in power and becomes bitterly ironical at the end when the ceiling of the peasant's room begins to ominously descend until it nearly crushes him while his wife gets caught in the waterwheel at the other end and it begins to spin madly as if sucking her into a merciless whirlpool. As the peasant begins to tell his story, identifying with his forefathers and all oppressed peasants down history and the past is recreated in vivid images on the screen, the tender, lyrical and highly emotive monologues which mark the beginning give way to live and screened narration and the message that Egyptians have long been exiles in their own land is enforced by Wael Hilal's highly expressive lyrics and Ali Saad's stirring score which draws on many familiar folk songs, including the one which gives the play its title. To further generalise the hero's tragedy and add some variety and colour, Khater introduced two fellow exiles (Sami El-Masri and Fawzi El-Meleigi) in brief but effective appearances as well as some expressive choreographed sketches performed by dancers Harbi El-Ta'ir and Khalid Abu Bakr. Ya 'Aziz 'Eini, however, was primarily intended as a vehicle for Mahmoud El-Guindi, a performer of great talent and emotional power. Supporting him was the gentle, almost ethereal Nahed Rushdi in the role of the long-suffering, warm-hearted and deeply affectionate wife and together they gave a very convincing, highly poignant performance.
