Nehad Selaiha enjoys a display of cultural schizophrenia at Al-Ghad Theatre A sense of cozy intimacy pervaded the small Al-Ghad Hall even before the play, Sameh Mahran's Meen Yakul Abouh (Who Dares Devour His Father), began. In the soft lighting, Mahmoud Hanafi's ingeniously simple and evocative stage- design suggested a rural setting gently wrapped in a halo of child-like innocence, like a scene faintly remembered from the past. Piles of small palm-boxes, lighted from inside with tiny, candle-like bulbs and partly covered with coarse paper carrying child-like colourful drawings and folkloric motifs, lined up the three walls of the performance space in a rough, irregular order; they looked like humble peasant houses, crammed against each other round a village square. Interrupting this pathetically fragile-looking structure were two windows (centre back and front left, from the audience's view) and three doors, two nearly facing each other on the side walls at floor level and the third lying at the top of a flight of steps at the intersection of the back and left walls. The figurative, metaphoric style of the design, together with the lighting, allowed the empty space in the middle to smoothly change character and, with the use of a few simple props -- two benches for a bed, another for a sofa, a low baking table, a small mud oven, two wooden storing barrels and a few straw mats -- to represent several indoor scenes and outdoor locations. For a few minutes the empty set was aurally framed by stirring excerpts from the mystical poetry of the Egyptian Sufi and Islamic thinker 'Umar bin Ali Ibn Al-Farid (1181-1235), set to music and magnificently chanted by Amer El-Toni in the tradition the religious Muwashahaat and Ibtihalat (Islamic songs of praise and supplications). The impact of this audio-visual prelude was profoundly moving, charging the atmosphere with poetry and awakening vague longings and nostalgic feelings. It also helped to put the audience in the right frame of mind, tuning them to receive the stunning ritualistic scene which sets the play in motion. In this scene, which follows a momentary blackout, a male figure dressed in a voluminous black galabiyya stands with his back to us and slowly raises his hands to his head as if about to begin a prayer. The hands, however, clutch the head fiercely, in an agonized grip, and seem to painfully turn the figure to face us. Signs of violent movement are detected underneath the lower half of the flaring robe and are followed by the sight of a head emerging from its neck-opening and jostling with the man's head for space. The man struggles to shove the intruding head underneath and immediately a full grown male figure rolls out from under its folds in a gesture suggesting birth. Here, Mahran, who also directed, draws on two old European myths which have equivalents in Egyptian lore: the German popular legend of the Doppelganger (or ghostly duplicate of every human being) and the ancient Greek myth of Zeus who devours his pregnant wife Metis to acquire her power of giving birth and eventually springs Athena, full grown, out of his head. Both myths seem to haunt Mahran's mind and inform all his writing, dramatic and otherwise. While the figure of the Doppelganger encapsulates the theme of the split mind or divided self, the Zeus myth projects a fearful, symbolic image of ruthless male chauvinism and ravenous patriarchal authority. Such themes are central to Mahran's thinking on the world and have long preoccupied him both as person and writer. Cropping up in play after play, under different guises, and with varying degrees of intensity, these themes are often rendered through potent, often novel and grotesque stage imagery which frequently, as in the case of Meen Yakul Abouh, vividly evoke old myths and popular beliefs. While giving the reality under investigation an ironical mythic dimension, this dramatic strategy works to enrich the conflict both inside the minds of Mahran's heroes and heroines and between them and their oppressive social reality and tyrannical cultural heritage. Meen Yakul Abouh begins with a mock birth ritual, a la Zeus, performed by the hero, which ironically yields a Doppelganger and marks the splitting of the hero's personality into two warring parties, one emotionally tied to the past through habit, fear of change and a sense of loyalty and belonging; the other, an intellectual rebel, chafing against the inherited way of life, its irrational foundations in consecrated myths and customs, and its crippling, mythological mode of thinking. In short, terse scenes, hovering on the dividing line between realism and expressionism, and alternately hilarious and pathetic, though consistently witty and pungently ironical, the play unfolds like a tug of war between the conservative, traditional, docile hero, Abdel-Aziz (sensitively performed by Yehia Ahmed) and his aggressively rebellious Doppelganger (rendered with physical gusto, great agility and an elusive shade of villainy by Sherif Sobhi). At times, the verbal sparring of this delightful duo was translated by choreographers Diaa' and Mohamed into intricate movement sequences in which the two bodies seemed to interlock in a tempestuous, mortal embrace. Towering above them, and dominating the whole scene, was the figure of Hajj Karim, the hero's father (stereotypically played by Kamal Zaghloul) -- a wealthy farmer and head of an order of dervishes which eventually milks him dry. Though venerable and awe-inspiring in the eyes of the son -- a well of piety, kindness and holiness -- to the Doppelganger, he is no more than an ignorant, bigoted dupe who lands his family in financial disaster and his son into a spiritual blind alley. Though the father dies in the course of the play, his mental and spiritual sway over the son continues and, in desperation, he takes refuge in drugs, having, in a fit of frustrated fury, impaled his secular, rational, critical shadow to the wall. When finally the village dandy (as his name, El- 'Ayeq, typifies him) -- a foundling picked by Hajj Karim and nurtured in his bosom like a poisonous adder, a fake disciple of the dervishes' order who commits almost all of the cardinal sins under a thick veneer of religiosity -- decides to step into his master's shoes and assume spiritual power over the village by marrying his widow, the hero, involuntarily, calls upon his shadow for help. The shadow, who has all along tried to tempt Abdel-Aziz to leave, had actually persuaded him to forsake his beloved Zeinab who, according to the ghost, would have dragged him deeper into the mire of backwardness and senseless procreation, has but one solution to offer: to come into his own and be rid of the oppressive shadow of his father, the hero has to literally consume him, together with his insignia, in a symbolic ritual. This act of cannibalistic internalisation, however, is ambiguous: it could mean a total identification with and reproduction of the father, or his complete annihilation and the beginning of a new phase for the son. Opting for an open end, Mahran does not resolve the issue and leaves his hero, and his audience, suspended before the choice. But whether Abdel-Aziz decides to eat his father or not, the sway of patriarchal authority, as the final scene indicates in a painfully ironical paradox, will continue to exercise its tyranny in a different form, which means a renewal of the struggle. The play pointedly ends with the hero standing before his father's shrouded corpse, trying to decide whether to devour him or not, while the window backstage frames his mother (Abeer Adel) and her newly wedded husband, the upstart El- 'Ayeq (superbly played throughout, in all moods, by Abdel-Rehim Hassan) as the hero's new father and Hajj Karim's surrogate. Like most postmodernists, Sameh Mahran does not believe that any individual can completely break free of the inherited, ideological frameworks. The best anyone could hope for is that by working within them one could interpellate and disrupt them. Hence the open end and the play's constant vacillation between the fascinating, giddy prospect of freedom and a new birth, and the pull of a soothing, uplifting and colourful tradition, represented by the zikr circles and the hypnotic swaying of the dervishes to Amer El-Toni's ecstatic religious music and songs. In line with the majority of postmodernists too, Mahran does not uphold the sanctity and authority of texts and is deeply sceptical about the idea of originality. For him all literature and creative writing is in fact "writing upon writing" -- a deliberate or unconscious process of appropriation and reproduction in which old texts are revised, disrupted or rephrased to express different ideas, formulate new questions and air pressing doubts. Between 1994 and 1997, he produced four experimental dramatic reworkings of five novels: two by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Tifl Al-Rimal, originally written in French under the title Enfant de sable (English translation, Sand Child ), and Laylat Al-Qadr, originally entitled La Nuit Sacrée (a holy night towards the end of Ramadan during which the gates of heaven are said to open and all prayers are answered); Al-Tawq wa Al-Iswira (The Collar and the Bracelet) by Yehia El-Tahir Abdallah; Ayam Al-Insan Al-Sab'ah ( The Seven Days of Man ), by the late Abdel-Hakim Qasim; and Khafyet Qamar (Lunar Eclipse) by Mohamed Nagui. In all cases, Mahran produced intelligent, performance-oriented dramatizations which fully exploited the audio-visual resources of theatre and, while crystallizing the novels' major themes, embodied some of his own ideas and irking questions. Though they followed the same narrative lines as the novels and stuck to the same characters, they came across as something so fresh and different that to call them adaptations seems downright unfair. In Meen Yakul Abouh, Mahran revisits Abdel-Hakim Qasim's The Seven Days of Man, taking more freedom with the novel this time than he dared before: the idea of eating the father in a kind of ironical holy communion is introduced and invested with ambivalent meanings; the latent conflict in the hero's mind is bodied forth through the figure of the Doppelganger; the character of El-'Ayeq is developed as the prospective usurper of the father's place; the relationship between Hajj Karim and his followers is translated into a grotesque visual image in which he suddenly sprouts many breasts at which the followers eagerly feed until they literally suck him dry and he falls dead; several scenes are knocked together and condensed in an amazingly complex, polyphonic montage, and lines dividing past and present, the shadows inhabiting the mind and the physical reality outside are blurred. Despite such authorial/ directorial innovations, and perhaps because he does not care much to be called 'original', dismissing the concept as yet another metaphysical fallacy, Mahran does not attempt to camouflage his source material, indeed is careful to draw attention to it by letting his characters keep the same names as in Qasim's novel, play more or less the same parts and perform the same actions. Nevertheless, Meen Yakul Abouh comes across as a fresh, autonomous and highly inventive theatrical creation -- a vivid, dramatic study of a case of acute cultural schizophrenia involving hallucinations, with an element of fantasy and ritual thrown in. Such imaginative readings of old or contemporary texts which generate a dialogue with them, often roping in other texts by way of counterpointing, ironical comment or corroboration, and end up reshaping the old material to accommodate different visions and deeply- felt concerns, richly deserve to be called 'original', even though some authors, like Mahran, may not care much for the word. But whether you call it 'original' or otherwise, Meen Yakul Abouh is eminently worth seeing; it will provoke and delight you and leave you with plenty of food for thought.
