Nehad Selaiha watches electronic rubbish taking over the scene in Ramsi Lehner's Analog at Al-Falaki Studio Theatre Alienation as a mode of consciousness engendered by economic exploitation, social marginalization, political oppression and powerlessness and/or as a dramatic effect borrowed from Bertolt Brecht's theory of epic theatre and intended to encourage an attitude of critical detachment in the audience has been a recurrent theme in Egyptian drama since the 1960s. In rare cases, as in the writings of Mikhail Roman, particularly his first drama, Al-Dukhan (Smoke), it fitfully carried distinct existentialist overtones which seemed to shift the accent from the plane of curable political suffering to the incurable pain of being. More often than not, however, it has taken the form of a violent, open or camouflaged, protest against military dictatorship and, increasingly -- since the 1970s and Sadat's economic open-door policy -- against capitalism, corruption, consumerism and the spread of material values. Underlying any treatment of the theme, however, was a basic, albeit undeclared and unspecified, assumption of what constitutes belonging and the possibility of recovering that sense of belonging. At no point in these dramas do you experience the disorienting sense of having no point of reference, no last resort, the nausea and giddiness of eternally falling into space. Cultural identity is a comfortable myth, in the best sense of the word. It is an imaginary, collective construction that you cannot totally explain or existentially encompass, but which helps you to survive and situate yourself in the world, both historically and geographically. And because it is imaginary, again in the best sense of the word, and materially ungraspable, it can accommodate as many ideologies as care to claim it and embrace an infinite variety of manifestations and ways of life. In the 1960s and up until the 1990s, though to a lesser degree (maybe until now, though I doubt it), a character could stand up on stage and enigmatically declaim: "this is Egypt, this is what it means to be Egyptian," or something to this effect, and somehow, almost miraculously, the audience would collectively applaud, assuming they have profoundly understood what the character meant, even though he or she has not deigned to explains what "this" in both sentences refers to. This invisible point of reference, this imaginary assumption has increasingly come under critical investigation in theatre since the 1980s. The opening verse of a late 1970s' popular patriotic song which says "don't ever ask what Egypt has given to me; only ask what have we given to Egypt" has progressively turned from the 1980s onwards into an acrid joke which keeps cropping up satirically in many dark comedies. And in 1988, a production of Youssef Idris's Al Bahlawan (The Acrobat-cum-Clown) at the National -- a play that argued that all the world was but one big circus -- featured a brief, painfully sarcastic monologue in which a young journalist tried to work out the meaning of home and country. "I keep hearing the word 'Egypt'", he says, "but who or what this 'Egypt' is, or where I can find her, I don't know." I remembered this bitter monologue a few weeks ago at Al-Hanager as I watched a stunningly poignant and heart-felt amateur adaptation of Alfonso Sastre's 1953 The Condemned Squad by director Mohamed Shuman in which he transposed the tragic action from the woods on a military front in an imaginary third world war to the borders of Egypt with Israel. As it gradually dawns upon the unfortunate conscripts that the enemy within is far more lethal than the one without, the meaning of home and country, of national identity and national belonging undergo a rigorous questioning and sceptical reevaluation. Shuman's production was bleak in conception and outlook, but not half as bleak as many of the performances staged by young theatre- makers and independent groups at Al-Hanager or at the French Cultural Centre under the umbrella of the annual "Festival des Jeunes Createurs". Though all the young members of Shuman's version of Sastre's Condemned Squad were bedevilled by a deep sense of frustration, confusion, impotent rage and profound hopelessness, his adaptation had the grace of bestowing upon them the gift of a meaningful death. This bespeaks a belief, however tenuous, vague and romantic in something valid, something worth dying for. Nothing remotely, faintly similar to this can be traced in Ramsi Lehner's Analog presented at the Falaki Studio last week . Here the feeling of alienation is presented as utterly bereft of any hope of future, real or mythical, social or philosophical, alleviation. Here the world becomes literally not a wasteland, a word at least suggestive of an open, space, open skies and a certain promise of freedom, even if such a promise boils down to endless wandering, but a desolate, cramped, nondescript cell, hung in the middle of nowhere, with no visible moorings in any recognisable reality, strewn to the point of strangulation with electronic rubbish and infested with an incessant flow of cacophonous sounds, images and confusing duplications; and in this context, the questions of identity, of self- definition, of relating and belonging are urgently posited and build up to a point of acute crisis. Analog, though it says nothing, is ultimately about being alone, at a dead end, in an electronically- manufactured reality which no longer knows who first set it going, unable to say or do anything. It is, nevertheless, a very eloquent, moving and thoroughly unpretentious work -- a word that seems to waylay the lone artist in the play at every turn as a fearful bogey disrupting every effort at artistic expression or communication and mocking at language itself. It comes across as an intensely personal statement, an agonized and profoundly sincere questioning of self, identity, past and future direction. But since its maker (and lone performer) is also an artist and citizen of the world, a person who has experienced since the earliest dawning of consciousness the decentering effects of cultural globalisation, the ferocious media invasion, the wild dissemination of information which works against any in-depth knowledge, levelling the invasion of Iraq or the coverage of tragic natural disasters with commercials about detergents and shampoos, and the consequent fragmentation of consciousness and perception this situation breeds, Analog is also about the dilemma of making art in a postmodernist world and about the limits of what seems to be its constitutive imperatives -- mainly parody, duplication, pastiche, cacophony, displacement, disposability, transience and fragmentation. How far can one go on working in such a fractured, decentered world without ultimately becoming pretentious or falling into a pit of deadly, senseless repetitiveness, or, as happens in this play, quitting and completely withdrawing from the scene. In Analog, Ramsi Lehner and his team, Khaled Zaki, Essam Abdallah, Luke Lehner, Ali Abdel-Mohsen, Yasmine Riad and Yosra El-Lozi, have carried the Egyptian investigation into the meaning of cultural identity and national belonging started in the 1980s not only a step further, but actually into a whole new stage, placing it in the context of globalisation and the electronic revolution and roping in the problems of cultural multiplicity (or fragmentation) and the real or imaginary dilemmas of artists caught in cultural "mezzaterra". As Egyptian-Americans, Ramsi Lehner and his brother Luke, and perhaps others among the team, are divided between two sets of myths and their related practices -- two cultures, two languages, two historical heritages; and if they are to survive, to remain sane, to continue to make sense of/to themselves and the world and maintain a degree of integrity, they have to be creative all the time, to freshly forge at every moment, every step of the way, their own sense of identity and their own middle of the road. Such people live dangerously, painfully, on the edge, with no secure bearings except what they devise and incessantly keep recreating for themselves. Such artists may never make it to commercial success, at least in Egypt; but they remain an invaluable part of the Egyptian cultural scene. This is perhaps what has led Basma El-Husseini, the artistic director and cultural planner of Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafi Cultural Fund to support and sponsor them, even though, as she told me, it seemed a hair-brained venture which spent close on an hour, using a lot of expensive audio- visual material and a heap of disused electronic equipment ready for the rubbish dump, to ultimately tell the audience that it had nothing to tell them, or if it had, it did not know how to go about saying it. Such crazy ideas, however, are sometimes the yeast for significant future theatrical projects. Chapeau to Basma, and long may she continue to sponsor the existentially tortured and culturally confused and alienated. They are the salt of the artistic earth.
