Nehad Selaiha is profoundly moved by a production of a modern Spanish theatre classic at Al-Hanager Until the beginning of the 1960s, when translations of some of Garcia Lorca's major plays began to appear in the monthly Theatre Magazine, Spanish drama was virtually unknown in Egypt. The same could be said of Russian, German, American and Scandinavian drama. In those days Western drama simply meant French and British; and though American dramatists wrote in English, few seemed to know about them. By the end of the 1960s, however, thanks to an intensive translation drive sponsored by the state and chanelled through books, magazines, radio, television and the stage, the Egyptian reading and theatre-going public had been introduced to Brecht and Durrenmatt, Chekov and Gogol, Ibsen and Strindberg, Pirandello, Peter Weis, the German Expressionists and such leading American dramatists as O'Neil, Miller, Williams and Eliot, not to mention the Irish Beckett, the Rumanian Ionesco and the Russian-born Adamov. The dramatic traditions of Latin America, black Africa and the Far East had to wait another two decades. Lorca's three major plays -- Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba -- were among the famous stage hits of the 1960s, so close in temperament, atmosphere, mores and morals they seemed to Egyptian spectators. Strangely, however, Lorca's popularity did not encourage his lovers to look beyond his work and discover other writers; for over a decade, Spanish drama meant Lorca. It was not until the mid-1970s that another remarkable Spanish dramatist was brought to the attention of Egyptian theatre-makers and spectators. Antonio Buero Vallejo's passport into the Egyptian theatre and the hearts of many theatre-lovers was a lucid, highly actable Arabic translation of his harrowing two-part 'dramatic narrative' (as he calls it) La Dobla Historia Del Doctor Valmy (The Double Story of Doctor Valmy). Salah Fadl, a renowned Arabic scholar and literary critic had come across the text in Spain while studying there and thought it eloquently summed up the horrors committed in the name of national security by the Intelligence Service in Nasser's reign. In 1979, when his translation was staged at the National, the memory of such horrors was still green; political dissidents who, like Hannibal Marty in the play, had been subjected to barbarous torture and abuse but, unlike him, had fortunately survived, were released after Nasser's death and Sadat's accession to power and could now talk or write memoirs of their days "behind the sun" -- the popular nickname for Nasser's dungeons and concentration camps. Such accounts were in Sadat's interest and were welcomed and encouraged as a way to counter Nasser's lingering popularity and bolster his own. Indeed, Sadat's so called "corrective revolution", in May 1971, had aired the lurid, secret files of Nasser's infernal machine and used them to publicly discredit the strong men of the ancien regime who opposed him prior to arresting them and putting them on trial. That the reign of terror the May revolution claimed to have put an end to did in fact continue, claiming new victims and churning further atrocities, is one of the many bitter ironies of modern Egyptian history. By 1979, the wide support Sadat had gained in the wake of the 1973 October War had been seriously eroded by his unwise, irresponsible laissez-faire economic policy which resulted in a sudden, violent social upheaval, the peace negotiations with Israel which most intellectuals opposed, the systematic persecution of dissenters and the ruthless crack down on the Left. In this atmosphere, The Double Story of Doctor Valmy which portrays life in a police state and passionately condemns the torture of political prisoners, indeed, of any human being under any pretext, seemed to director Nabil Moneib hotly relevant and bound to touch a responsive chord in the audience. As for censorship, it could be always kept at bay by insisting the production pointed in the direction of the bad old days rather than the present. Actress Mohsena Tawfiq, an outspoken political dissenter and committed member of the Left, was chosen to lead the show and, not unpredictably, The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, rechristened Dimaa 'Ala Malabis Al-Sahrah (Blood on Evening Dress) was a roaring success. Nowadays, with so many people on the streets demonstrating against the extension of the emergency laws and the serious abuse of human rights they entail ("too many civil rights groups and busybody lawyers out there," as Chief Paulus complains in the play), director Tareq El-Dweiri thought it was time we revisited Doctor Valmy and launched his new production of the play at Al-Hanger two weeks ago. In staging it, a process that continued over a year, El-Dweiri has made some changes, including the title. Following Moneib's example, he picked out a small, ironical detail in the text and used it in the title as a general metaphor. In the case of Moneib, the title focused the contrast between the bloody action in the play and the glitzy appearance of the Senor and Senora who introduce it to the audience at the beginning, denying it has any relevance to reality, and used it as a general, ironical comment on the state of society. El-Dweiri's title, on the other hand, was inspired by the torturers' cynical reference to their victims as "songbirds" and to the torture sessions as "parties". Hafalat Al-Tawaqquf 'An Al-Ghinaa' (Stop-singing Concerts) ironically redefines the torture parties as gruesome concerts where the songs of freedom and resistance are silenced and only screams and groans are heard. More significant was the omission of some scenes and the slimming down of others, not to mention the ditching of all marginal characters and the removal of all phatic signs from the dialogue. As a result, the drama gained in tautness and concentration and the dialogue became crisper, faster and disturbingly stark. At some points too, El-Dweiri transposed sections of the dialogue, advancing or delaying them to stress a meaning, create a poignant contrast or establish emotional links. An interesting example is Mary's nightmare which is moved from its original place and slotted just before her meeting with Lucila, her former pupil and the wife of the prisoner her husband has tortured to death. The effect of the change was to emphasise that for both women life has become a nightmare. Such changes were dictated, and indeed can be only justified, by El-Dweiri's overall directorial conception which is largely cinematic. He conceived the show as a film performed live. Opting for a multiple set (by Fadi Foukeih), consisting of five levels and representing over half a dozen locations all at once -- Dr. Valmy's clinic, the office of Paulus, the chief of the security police, Daniel's and Mary's house, a street, a park, a tunnel leading nowhere, a torture room and several cells -- El-Dweiri used lighting to fragment scenes into sequences of isolated cinematic shots of different kinds and sizes, or to make the same scene appear as if taken from a different angle. For this effect to be achieved, the actors were required to constantly change their position on stage in the dark, rushing from one level to another, climbing up stairs and running from one end of the stage to the other, and all in a matter of seconds. El-Dweiri also borrowed from cinema the technique of crosscutting between two or more scenes to suggest they were running simultaneously. In the original text, Daniel's visit to Dr. Valmy's psychiatric clinic to seek a cure for his impotence intercuts with a scene from the past, a flashback which reenacts the brutal questioning of Marty and his subsequent torturing and maiming at the hands of Daniel. To further condense the drama, El-Dweiri moved forward the meeting between the wives of the torturer and his victim and wedged it into this double scene. As we moved back and forth among the three scenes, with the actors in each alternately freezing and coming back to life, each scene seemed at once to acquire an added force from the presence of the other two and to ironically comment on them. Foukeih's versatile set which covered the whole stage area, extending physically upward, at the back, into the flies and figuratively forward, into the auditorium, down flights of steps, together with Ramez Sabri's atmospheric score and sound effects and Mohamed Abbas's chilling video projections, was instrumental in realising El-Dweiri's ambitious conception and giving the impression of cinematic flow. The part of the set representing Daniel's and Mary's house was placed on a mobile platform which could be moved forward and back and turned round and sideways to suggest changes in the viewer's perspective. In the penultimate scene in which Mary's mind finally gives way under the weight of horror and she shoots her husband when he tries to touch their baby, El-Dweiri, who took part in planning the set with Foukeih, had part of the back wall of the house knocked down and had Paulus's three assistants -- Daniel's fellow torturers, or "national butchers", as Mary labels them -- turn it quickly round and round while the tragic scene was taking place inside, allowing the audience only fleeting glimpses of it. The effect was stunning: while the dizzying merry- go-round which made Mary look like a person sucked into a merciless whirlpool vividly communicated her state of mind as she sank into the pit of madness, the fact that Paulus's assistants who had killed Marty, raped Lucila, silenced Dr. Valmy (as the production, though not the play, suggests) and refused to release Daniel, thereby indirectly causing his death, were still the ones running the show was a cruel irony and seemed to mock at the misery and futile sacrifices of those who tried to resist the system. Executing El-Dweiri's conception made great demands on everyone involved in the show, particularly the actors, technicians and stagehands. With so many lighting and sound cues and the constant need to sneak in and out bits of furniture noiselessly, in the dark, and occasionally shift the position of the mobile part of the set, the hands and technical crew faced an awesome task which required extreme concentration, alertness, split- second timing and great agility. Happily, after many rehearsals, they have managed to do the job without a single hitch. The actors, too, soon got over the strain of having to run around so much and gave very fine, carefully thought-out performances. Sami Abdel-Halim's Dr. Valmy was every inch what you would think a kindly, overworked and underpaid provincial mental doctor ought to look like. Burly, unshaved and shabbily dressed in an ill-fitting, well-worn black overcoat and a large, floppy beret, he seemed a cross between an overgrown child and an ancient sage -- a mixture of eternal innocence and timeless, sad wisdom. Whether his tone was gentle, soothing and confidential, brisk and businesslike, or impatiently acerbic or sarcastic, he always breathed an air of such benign humanity that you felt he was about to embrace the whole world in a warm, protective hug. As Lucila, the young, sexually abused wife of the tortured prisoner Marty, Reem Hegab seemed like a tense, taut wire about to snap. She delivered her lines in nervous whispers, choking with sobs and pent up rage, or bleated them out hysterically, in chilling, piercing screams, like a slaughtered animal. Her rigid, wooden posture and sudden, jerky movements, even when executing her violent, brief, and highly expressive self- choreographed dances, together with her startling outbursts of hollow, lugubrious laughter were frightening, suggesting a person driven to the edge of insanity by an extremity of pain and fear. The burden of Mary fell upon the shoulders of Maysa Zaki and she handled the character's complex psychology and gradual disintegration with great perceptiveness, sympathetic understanding and subtle eloquence. Her almost euphoric exuberance and emotional effusiveness in the early scenes was calculated to betray a certain agitation, a kind of restlessness and nervous anxiety, suggesting a highly-strung, excitable person, capable of great affection and joy, but ill-equipped to cope with mental traumas. When reality invades her home, or, rather, doll's house, in the figure of her former pupil Lucila who rudely reveals to her the truth about her husband and what he does for a living, Zaki seems to suddenly age and physically change before our very eyes. The collapse of Mary's world and her rapid descent into madness was vividly, effectively rendered by Zaki in terms of gait and posture, facial expressions and body language. However violently emotional or hysterical the character grew, every gesture and movement, every look and tone of voice produced by Zaki seemed to be following a carefully prepared score which regulated the flow and rhythm of the character's emotions and allowed her to render them poignantly, with economy and passionate restraint, and without ever tipping into facile sentimentality or sensational melodrama. Ahmed Mokhtar's Daniel matched Zaki's Mary in lightness of touch and depth of impact. His pale, handsome face, with its finely chiseled features and frank look was like a clear, transparent crystal sheet which accurately revealed his inner feelings and what went through his head, however fleetingly. He held his body firmly, tensely, in a strained show of manhood which, given his impotence and the bewildered, lost-child- look which often flitted across his face, made him quite pathetic despite his enormous guilt. With admirable finesse and dexterity, Mokhtar convincingly negotiated the transition from insignificant dupe, repugnant torturer and mindless puppet to sympathetic figure and almost tragic hero at the end. In every aspect his performance was true to the spirit of Vallejo's work which focuses on the essential and tragic realities of human life, on guilt, pain and repentance, and also the fragility of happiness. Mokhtar's performance drew strength from Mohsen Hilmi's impersonation of Paulus, the head of the National Security Police and Daniel's boss. Indeed, their confrontations provide some of the highest and most memorable points in this drama. As a seasoned director, Hilmi knows that eye contact between actors can speak volumes and hint at depths beyond the reach of spoken dialogue. Moving softly around, in a black leather jacket with a fur collar, and, barring a few sharp barks, never raising his voice above normal level, always speaking in quiet, incisive, occasionally jocular tones, Hilmi was quite frightening, like a sly, hungry, ogre on the prowl, looking for victims. As the 'Abuela', or grandmother, Menha Zaytoun, unlike the other actors, had to leave the character Vallejo wrote behind and adjust to El-Dwerei's new and sinister version of it. The play portrays her as a kindly, half-deaf, fussy old woman who, as a widow, and under the pressure of need, was willing to entrust her son to Paulus, her former, embittered suitor, to save him from poverty and degradation; and because she could guess the nature of Paulus's work, and therefore her son's, she decides to hide behind her deafness, using it as an excuse to shut herself off from painful reality. In El-Dweiri's production, however, though she sticks to the words Vallejo gives the character, she is projected as a kind of ogress, a weird child-producing, child- destroying matriarch in collusion with Papa Paulus, the symbol of ravenous patriarchy; after sacrificing her son at his altar, she turns on her grandson and sets about preparing him for a similar fate. I personally found this reading of the character a bit farfetched and dramatically embarrassing -- a laborious and ultimately futile straining after additional meanings or symbols which ultimately confuse rather than clarify the play. In this respect, El-Dweiri was obviously influenced by Saadalla Wannus's adaptation of the same play under the title Ightisab (Rape). In any case Zaytoun had to respect the director's conception and did her best to look, move and sound like a hard, rapacious matriarch, and succeeded. The rest of the cast did admirably well within the limitations of the parts allotted to them, but Mohamed Shindi, as Marty and his ghost, and Mamdouh Maddah, as the sadistic Marsan stood out among the rest and made a deep impression. Like many other young directors before him, El-Dweiri will be forever in Hoda Wasfi's debt. Indeed, at no other production venue in Egypt could he have got the kind of support and unfailing encouragement, or the freedom to do as he liked that he found at Al-Hanager.
