Nehad Selaiha applauds a Cultural Homes production of Alejandro Casona's Lady of the Dawn My first encounter with Alejandro Casona's 1944 The Lady of the Dawn took place in August, 2006 at El-Sawy Cultural Centre (better known as Al-Saqia, or waterwheel) in the course of its 4th annual theatre Festival for independent theatre troupes. I had not come across the play before, and in view of the execrable acoustics of the theatre, the weak voices of most of the actors and/or their bad elocution and the extensive cuts director Mohamed Nash'at had to make in order to compress its four acts into the one and a half hour time slot allowed every performance, it was difficult to follow and at times did not seem to make much sense. Mahmoud Mekki's Arabic translation of Casona's 1949 romantic, twilight comedy, The Trees Die Standing, rechristened Qareeb...wi Ghareeb ( A Near Relative...yet a Stranger), had fared much better the previous year at the National, where it opened in April, in a polished production, elegantly directed by Nabil Muneeb, sumptuously designed by Salah Hafiz and starring the great Samiha Ayoub and seasoned comedian Abdel-Ramhan Abu Zahra (see review entitled 'Evergreen', the Weekly, 14 April, 2005, Issue No. 738). When director Amr Qabil launched a project last year to stage The Lady of the Dawn for the Modern theatre company at Al-Salam theatre I was delighted. I had read the play since and liked it enormously. Its rural setting, lyrical atmosphere, mixture of realism and fantasy and central metaphysical theme give it an eerie charm and invest it with the mystical qualities of a folk legend of universal appeal. No wonder Casona called it 'a ballad'. Disguised as a beautiful young woman on a pilgrimage, Death arrives at the sad home of the Narces family where the grandfather lives with his 2 grandchildren and their mother after the death of all his sons in a mining accident and the mysterious drowning of his eldest granddaughter, Angelica, in the big river four years ago, only 3 days after her marriage. Since Angelica's body was never found, her mother cannot accept her death and keeps her memory alive and her room and all her things intact. The play starts on the anniversary of Angelica's presumed death and we soon learn the identity of La Peregrina (or Pilgrim) from a conversation between her and the grandfather who, after straining his memory for a bit, remembers that he saw her before at the site of his sons death. We also discover that this time Death has come for Martin, Angelica's widowed husband. However, after playing with the younger grandchildren for a while, something she has not done before, Death feels suddenly weary, takes a rest and oversleeps, missing the hour when she was supposed to carry Martin away. This allows him to rescue the homeless and desperate Adela from drowning herself in the river and he brings her to the home of the grandfather. La Peregrina then leaves, warning the grandfather that she will be back after several moons to take a way a life, but whose, she does not yet know. She only obeys orders and does what she is told, she explains to the distraught grandfather who pleads with her to leave his family in peace. When La Peregrina ominously materializes several months later, generating a lot of suspense, she finds that Adela has taken the place of Angelica in the family, dragged the mother out of her long mourning and has even fallen in love with Martin and him with her. She also discovers the ugly secret which Martin has been keeping from the family for years out of respect for their feelings -- namely, that Angelica did not really drown but eloped that night with a stranger who was waiting for her on the other bank of the river. This is why Martin cannot marry Adela and decides to leave. But would Adela still be there when he does? Or is she the person Death has come for this time? Fortunately for the young couple, and indeed for the whole family, while they are all out celebrating the festival of San Juan, Angelica suddenly returns and meets La Peregrina who stayed behind. She is broken, defeated and miserable after her lover deserted her and wants to resume her previous life as if nothing has happened, she tells her. La Peregrina, however, persuades her to surrender to death in order to preserve her image and her family's reputation and carries her to the river where she really drowns herself this time. When Angelica's body is found, seemingly perfectly preserved after supposedly being dead for years, the mother announces that her daughter is a saint and an appropriate burial is finally held, allowing the family to accept her death at last and carry on with their lives, and the young couple to get married. As Death departs from the Narces's home, she sums up the message of the play, ruefully telling us what a wonderful life we humans have, despite its sorrows and transience, and how she envies us our mortal existence and capacity for love. For months, Amr Qabil talked of nothing but The Lady of the Dawn, and when one day he rang up to jubilantly announce that he had finally succeeded in persuading veteran actress Mohsena Tawfiq to star in the title role I was overjoyed. She had been away from the stage for over two decades, and since her last stage appearance, in the late 1980s, was as Mary, the wife of Daniel Barnes who works for the Political Police in an imaginary country called Surelia and becomes sexually impotent after torturing a political prisoner on orders of his superiors, in Antonio Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del doctor Valmy (variously translated as 'The Double Story', The Double Life', or 'The Double-Case History' of Doctor Valmy), it seemed somehow fitting that her comeback should be in another Spanish masterpiece by another great Spanish playwright. Curiously too, Nabil Muneeb who directed Tawfiq in Buero Vallejo's Doctor Valmy had, like her, kept away from the stage after that play, only coming back in 2005 to stage Casona's Trees ! Though no longer young, Tawfiq's intense, ethereal presence, her sad, drawn face and thin lips and that hungry, yet faraway look in her big, dreamy eyes, not to mention her stirringly passionate style of acting, made her seem a perfect choice for the part of La Peregrina. Not surprisingly, however, given Tawfiq's reputation as a waywardly temperamental actress, maddeningly finicky and difficult to deal with, within a few weeks of rehearsals the relationship between Qabil and his leading lady became terribly strained. She worried excessively, made everyone around her tense and nervous and seemed to need reassurance 24 hours a day, Qabil bitterly groaned. But he was willing to put up with that and more if only she would stop interfering in every aspect of the work, particularly the casting and choice of artistic crew, and did not insist on having a young, handsome and very expensive film star, with no stage training of any kind and no voice to speak of, play Martin opposite her. Soon enough, Qabil found himself pushed aside as director and his role taken over by her, and that was when he decided to withdraw. Though the project was his and he had invested a lot of time, work and mental energy into it, he knew very well that, as a young director at the beginning of his career, he was the weaker party and that if one of them had to go, it had to be him. Another young director, Tareq El-Dweri, was summoned to take over, but he too ran away after a couple of weeks and that wonderful project finally foundered on the rocks of a monolithic ego. But The Lady of the Dawn was destined to surface again, and, once more, on the fringe of mainstream theatre. Using Mohamed Al- 'Usheiri's Arabic translation, director Mohamed Al-Taye' staged it for Al-Qabbari Cultural Home in Alexandria and brought it to Cairo to compete in the 36th Annual Regional Theatre Festival for Cultural Homes, held at the Floating Nile theatre in Giza from 4 to 14 May this year. It was unpropitiously scheduled on 13 May, an unlucky number; but though the text had to be drastically pruned, as in the 2006 Al-Saqia staging, the cast list, as usual, sported no big, or even modestly known names and one glance at the stage was enough to tell you that the budget, as in all Cultural Homes productions, was ridiculously small, the performance was uniformly smooth, clear and coherent and at times breathtakingly beautiful. To bring the text nearer home, focus its main theme and underline its universality, Al-Taye' hit upon the ancient death rituals and lamentations, still widely performed in Upper Egypt by both Muslims and Copts, and used them, in a slightly modified form, as a prelude to herald the entrance of Death. To do this, Al-Taye' used an abstract, geometrical set (by Mohamed Abdel-'Aal'), consisting solely of a flight of steps connected to the centre of a raised, crescent-shaped platform that dominated the stage, sloping down to the floor at both ends while leaving niche-like spaces underneath, and was fitted all round the inside edge with soft light sources, suggesting candle lights. On this tilted crescent, he placed a chorus of wailing female mourners (Rana 'Alaa El-Din, Panseeh Mohamed, Iman Lutfi, Heidi Amir, Farida Ahmed, Marina Zakariya, Donia Aziz and Athaar Abdel-Ghaffar), led by the mother (Abeer Ali), all traditionally dressed in the long, black mourning weeds and head covers typical on such occasions, and carrying big crosses round their necks to mark them as Upper Egyptian Copts. On the darkened stage, they were barely visible and, save for their swaying movements, seemed to melt into the surrounding darkness. Only their hands, faces and crosses were visible in the flickering light and the effect of this image, combined with their heart-rending, rhythmical wailing was tragically beautiful and eerily chilling. Al-Taye' kept his chorus on stage all the time, as in Greek tragedy, using them to frame the scenes and give the play's realistic setting an epic dimension and a folk-legend atmosphere. When the characters were engaged in dialogue, the chorus withdrew to the recesses underneath the platform and watched in silence, occasionally swaying gently and softly humming their sad lamentations. In between the scenes, they emerged from their niches to perform funereal dances and loud, choral lamentations, or to represent the village folk. Not so happy was the director's introduction of a cello player (Islam Khamis) in a trim, white suit who intermittently appeared at the top of the stairs playing his instrument. He was added, I suppose, to further edge the play away from realism towards the surreal, but he only managed to disconcert the audience, seeming like a useless and somewhat pretentious addendum. Equally unhappy were the two insipid songs La Peregrina and Adela are made to sing with the two grandchildren, which had the effect of thoroughly diluting the scenes where they occurred and making the characters -- adults and children alike -- look and sound ridiculously insipid and repulsively, affectedly 'cute'. Still, the production had enough positive points to counter such slips. Apart from the brilliant directorial conception, which brought the play closer to ancient Greek drama, the ingenious set, with its symbolic locations and recesses, and the director's evocative lighting plan, the acting was adequate on the whole, with Mohamed Yusri (the grandfather), Salwa Ahmed (La Peregrina) and Riham Abdel-Raziq (Adela) giving particularly good performances, at once articulate and deftly nuanced. But though this Alexandrian Lady of the Dawn was absorbing and highly enjoyable, I still hope that one day Egyptian audiences will get the chance to enjoy the play in full. Two B's and One Hymnus
