Nehad Selaiha embraces the spirit of mirth at Al-Tali'a despite the gathering darkness I know of nothing more gratifying than seeing a young artist whose progress one has followed over many years finally coming into their own and winning recognition. Since his undergraduate days at the faculty of commerce, when he became intensely involved in university theatre, directing and acting in many plays, Amr Qabil has been growing by leaps and bounds. Though he joined a bank upon graduation and still earns his living as an accountant, he continued to make theatre, founding in 1997 his own independent troupe, Hamsah (Whisper), and directing its members in more than 10 productions at different venues. My first encounter with his work was at the Russian cultural centre in 1997 where he staged his own adaptation of a short story by Mohamed Salmawi called Al-Fawakheer (Potters' Quarters); and though it was his first venture outside university theatre, and despite the extremely poor budget and the primitive performance conditions at that centre then, Al-Fawakheer created a strong impact. Nine years on, and after I have forgotten what it was all about, I still remember its old- world atmosphere and gentle nostalgic mood, the studied fadedness and rugged simplicity which stamped everything in sight and, in the subtle play of light and shadow, suggested something remembered rather than seen. In 1999, after a production of Alfonso Sastri's The Condemned Squad, performed in a conference hall at the headquarters of the Commerce Graduates' Union, Hamsah found its way into the French Cultural Centre with Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi -- a production which revealed Qabil's special knack for parody and burlesque. Mudhakirat Ragul Mayyet (Memoirs of a Dead Man), a bitter-sweet dramatic concoction of poems by Amal Dunqul, and Liqa'...Raheel (Meeting...Parting) by Iraqi playwright Isam Mohamed followed in 2001 -- the former at Al-Salam Theatre, in the context of the annual festival of the Egyptian Society of Theatre Amateurs (ESOTA), and the latter at Al-Hanager. In that year too, Qabil decided to get a firmer, tougher grounding in drama and joined the Academy of Arts for a two-year diploma-course in criticism and theatre studies. It was a hectic period during which Qabil had to carefully divide his time between his morning job at the bank, his lectures and assignments at the Academy in the afternoon and his creative work in theatre at night, not to mention finding time to spend with his wife and twin baby daughters. Unlike most of his generation he had married early, as soon as he could support a family, to compensate for the loss of both his parents in his teens. This premature bereavement explains, perhaps, the elusive air of muted sadness one always senses in his presence, despite his cheerful temperament, robust optimism and sunny cast of mind and could also explain that delightful blend of gentle pathos and affectionate humour which invariably characterises his work. At the end of 2002, after a production at the French Cultural Centre of Moliere's Le Malade Imaginaire (in which Qabil played the title role besides directing) followed by Maurice Dekobra's Carnaval des Revenants, Hamsah was disbanded and Qabil decided to try his luck in mainstream theatre. Though armed with a diploma in his field and an impressive list of previous work in theatre, testifying to a long, practical experience, it was still a tough struggle getting the Actors' Union to legally endorse him as a professional actor and director. His debut in the state-theatre was a low-budget production of Nadia El-Banhawi's predominantly lyrical The Lost Melody -- a play that had been lying around at Al-Tali'a for quite sometime, waiting for a willing director. Qabil had shuddered at the offer to direct it, feeling it was a trap, an attempt to trip him at the outset; it was the kind of play he would have run away miles to avoid in normal circumstances -- so unlike anything he had attempted before it was, so uniformly serious, emotionally high-pitched and depressingly devoid of humour. But to get into the state-theatre, Qabil was willing to risk anything and contrary to everyone's expectations, including his own, the gamble paid off in terms of good reviews and a decent run. Having passed this difficult test, Qabil felt ready to tackle more challenging and demanding texts, such as Brecht's Mother Courage which he presented at Al-Hanager two years later, in 2005, with film and TV star Dalal Abdel-Aziz in the title role. Qabil's stage version of Mother Courage often bubbled with laughter; and yet, for those familiar with his work, it seemed as if the name and reputation of Brecht and the kind of expectations -- right or wrong, often the latter -- they raise in critics and learned members of the audience had somehow awed the director and cramped his style. Fortunately, his latest production, Comedia 'A'eliyya (A Family Comedy), a Cultural Palaces production, the first of its Cairo-based Al-Samer company since the tragic Beni Sweif disaster, carries a less forbidding authorial signature and has, therefore, allowed him to give free reign to his powers of comic invention. The text, by Mohamed El-Sherbeini (a prolific and much neglected playwright to whom I hope to do justice in a future article), is at once deeply serious and hilariously funny, at once illusionary and openly theatrical. As such, it seems a perfect vehicle for Qabil's favourite, distinctive artistic mode which prefers to inject the treatment of serious issues and human dilemmas with liberal doses of sarcastic, good- natured laughter and keep the performance hovering on the dividing edge between credible and touching make-believe and a frank, tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of theatrical fabrication. Imagine sitting in a theatre to listen to a concert of popular music and suddenly, when you've just begun to enter into the mood of the event and sway to the music, finding reality rudely invading the stage in the figure of a homeless young couple who have sneaked into the building through a back door, thinking it was a derelict, disused place; this is how A Family Comedy begins: with a mistake which serves also as a satirical dig at state-owned theatres, especially in the provinces, which remain out of action for long spells and chronically suffer from lack of audiences when they function. The performance begins with composer Mohamed Ezzat conducting a live oriental band which accompanies singer Shaymaa' Hafez as she treats us to a lovely Um Kulthum song. No trace of make-believe at this point; the musicians and singers appear in their real identity and do not pretend to be anything other that what they are. As soon as Mona Hussein (a gifted all-round performer) and Ashraf Farouk (a talented comedian) materialise on stage, however, impersonating a homeless married couple, the make-believe begins and the band and singers are drawn into it, becoming characters (fictional musicians and singers) in a contrived theatrical illusion. Having established this meta- theatrical frame, the play allows the couple to address the audience directly and explain their predicament and how it came about from their different points of view. This triggers a dramatic action which takes the form of a circular narrative reenacting past events in the present, conjuring up many characters and compressing many years in the space of two hours, the duration of the show. While the meta-theatrical frame guarantees the coincidence of dramatic time (the imagined duration of the fictional action on stage, in this case, the time it takes the couple to tell the story) with the actual performance time, thus endowing the play with a fast, springy tempo, the formula of the play-within-a-play which the dramatic action adopts works against illusionism, realistic representation and empathy. This allows Qabil to rope in a large variety of acting styles, ranging from parody and burlesque to stylization, exaggerated caricature and slapstick farce, and also to introduce a number of expressive songs and hilarious musical sketches, all of which he penned himself and had Ezzat set to music. My favourite sketch is the one which replays the fight between the heroine's father and her brother (delightfully caricatured by Galal El-Ashri and Mustafa Huzayyen) over a rich bride as a parody of similar famous scenes in old American musical movies; while the vain, brutish father masquerades as a typical, black-clad villain-cum-thug, the timid, half-witted son enters in a shower of silver confetti, wearing a huge, red bow tie and romantically waving a small bouquet; as he skips and whirls around before his father pounces upon him, he fleetingly becomes a travesty of Sinatra singing in the rain. In another, more boisterous sketch, a quarrel between the hero's and heroine's families over money which turns into a verbal slanging match is translated into a hilarious dance mimicking a violent tug-of-war game. Indeed, at every step, barring the final part, the show bubbled and bristled with highly imaginative comic details contributed by both the director and his cast. A Family Comedy, however, is more than just a rollicking comedy where laughter is pursued for its own sake. Rather, it uses laughter to sharpen our awareness of the serious, urgent problem it tackles: the inability of young couples to afford a place of their own which can drive them sometimes to callously usurp the homes of parents or siblings. The hero, Abboud, and heroine, Madiha, are one such couple; and the fact that the person they try to cheat out of a home is Maha, Abboud's sister who has been working in some Gulf state for years, putting up with loneliness and humiliation in order to provide for her brother and two sisters and secure their future, makes the situation more distressing. When the long-absent, self- sacrificing Maha (rendered with touching emotional restraint and quiet dignity by May Rida) comes home, she is shocked to discover that the brother she had mothered as a child after their parents' death and financially supported as an adult, generously supplying him with funds at one point to start a family, had foolishly squandered the money she had given him on gifts for his greedy bride and an expensive wedding and ended up installing the costly bride in her flat. More galling and insulting still are her sister-in- law's plans to further exploit her by attempting to palm off on her for a husband first her imbecile, illiterate brother, then her coarse, drunken father. From the two sisters she had also raised and helped to marry and set up homes, she only meets with embarrassed evasiveness and cold indifference; neither is willing to host her in her home for more than a few days and their husbands palpably resent her return. Such crass ingratitude is not uncommon in Egypt nowadays. Whole families depend on an absent member working in the oil-rich Gulf and organise their lives accordingly, secretly hoping he or she never decides to come back for good. They never pause to think of the needs and suffering of that person and only remember him or her when they need something, or when that person comes back for a brief holiday, loaded with presents of course. The last half hour of A Family Comedy is dedicated to Maha, the absent sister, and poignantly communicates her sense of loss and betrayal. As she discovers that nothing now connects her with her family except an old picture on the wall, the comedy completely abates and gives way to pathos. Qabil handles this moment with loving care and great finesse, providing a beautiful, deeply moving song to express Maha's unspoken feelings and framing her in a tiny spot of light floating in the dark to accentuate her loneliness. Maha never appears again, and we are told that she has gone away somewhere, but not before she had sold the flat in the absence of Madiha and Abboud, leaving them out in the cold. Her revenge corrects the moral balance, leading the play back to the starting point and allowing the audience to sympathetically consider the predicament of the young couple and how desperate they must feel, especially that Madiha is expecting and far gone into her pregnancy. The play leaves us with the question: what are they, and other couples like them, to do? It is a credit to El-Sherbeini and Qabil, and indeed to their wonderful actors, musicians and technical crew, that within the framework of a roaring, scintillating comedy they could present, and convincingly link together, two of the most pressing problems facing Egyptian society today and display, by way of warning, their damaging consequences in terms of the disruption of family ties and corruption of human relationships.
