Nehad Selaiha celebrates Lenin El-Ramli's Captives at Al-Sawi Centre On 25 January, at an elegant reception at the residence of the Dutch ambassador in Cairo, Lenin El-Ramli received the 2005 Prince Claus Fund award for theatre. His speech on that occasion was witty, brief and profound. "When I reflect on the Prince Klaus award I have been granted, I do not find any cause for surprise, even though it is a Dutch prize and I am Egyptian and my name belongs to Russia," he said. "Neither of my parents had ever had anything to do with Russia or ever set foot in it," he went on to say. "They had, however, felt a bond of kinship with the thought of a man, Lenin, who lived a long way away from their land and decided, without a moment's hesitation, to call their first born after him. Their son, however, experienced a sense of alienation early on in life and writing -- as a way to reach the other -- was his way of grappling with it. Like his parents, the son conceived of this 'other' as an entity which embraced people other than his own fellow citizens. Like a castaway on a desert island, he would write messages and send them floating in bottles over the waves. Some of his bottles were picked up by people of his own land; others reached the shores of Holland. Despite the barriers of place, language and parts of the historical heritage, there are many things we, Egyptians, share with the 'other' in Holland. To be among the many who constitute a link between people all over the world fills me with happiness. I, therefore, would like to thank our Dutch friends not only for the happiness they have given me personally, but for the idea of the award itself which they have consecrated to writers in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Your messages have reached our shores, I tell them, and when the time comes for me to finally close my eyes, I will tell my children: dream of a day when all the people of the world shall swim in one sea." Eight days later, on Thursday, 2 February, El-Ramli's Captives, funded by the Royal Netherlands Cultural Fund, premiered at Al-Sawi cultural centre in Zamalek, in a double bill consisting of two performances of the play in both Arabic and English. The choice of venue, a non-governmental one, and of cast and technical crew -- all young, richly gifted independent artists -- was emblematic of the independent status of El-Ramli as artistic creator and theatre-maker. Communication with the 'other' across barriers -- not simply of language, culture and religion, but also of a politically and ideologically engineered and manipulated barrage of media messages which foster suspicious antagonism between nations and peoples, was the subject of the play. More than anything, Lenin fears and abhors war and the concepts and prejudices that are insidiously drilled into us from birth and which we come to take for granted -- assumption and beliefs which gradually build up into a heavy, suffocating roof to the free mind, as he protests in his chef d'oeuvre, Ahlan Ya Bakawat (Welcome Gentlemen, currently playing at the National). Though written in February 1967, when the 6th of June war between Egypt and Israel was brewing and its thick, dark clouds were ominously rolling in, and set in the context of another bloody conflict, the 1956 Suez War, the play seems in performance to transcend the barriers of time and cut across any specific, referential historical boundaries. In both wars humans were forcibly turned into politicized animals out to liquidate each other in the name of justice, self-preservation, a holy cause, or what you name it. Lenin had lived through the 1956 nightmare, the terrors of the air raids and booming sirens, when all the windows were painted dark blue and every house had to have a bomb shelter in the basement and a brick wall, as a kind of bomb-shock absorber, in front of its entrance. He was ten at the time; and when the conflict between Egypt and Israel threatened to flare up eleven years later, the alienated first-born of El-Ramli family was eligible for military conscription and badly needed to sort out his feelings and loyalties. What happens if two decent, young and sensitive people meet across a deadly fire line in a war forced upon them was an existentially and morally irking question. What kind of twisted, propaganda-based and media-fostered psychological reasoning drives us to turn murderers in the name of national allegiance or justice? The poetic impact of the play is astounding in view of its simplicity of structure and directness of import. In the thick of the '56 conflict, with enemy airplanes booming overhead, a young Egyptian woman walks into a deserted, half-wrecked classroom, decorated with a prominent photo of Nasser, to find herself face to face with a British paratrooper captured by a resistance group led by her brother. Everything looks faded and well-worn, like an old memory glimpsed in a foggy dream -- an imaginative, semi-expressionistic contribution by set- designer Hazem Shebl. On a grimy, dusty blackboard, a message says that the prisoner is well tied up while a written letter, signed by the same invisible Ahmed, instructs a person by the name of Mohamed to kill the prisoner forthrightly so that, if they were captured, he would not testify against them. Centre-stage, up front, is a coffin with a dead rat inside and a half-filled bottle of whisky. Though the rat terrifies Fatima, as the captive chooses to call her since she refuses to divulge her real name (for him all Arab women are called Fatima and all men Mohamed) the bottle occasions a lot of murky, quirky mirth as it turns out to belong to one of the Egyptian freedom fighters. Alcohol, the captive paratrooper George tells Fatima, is a necessity in war, either to make people pick up the necessary courage to kill or help them forget afterwards what they have done. Punctuating the confrontation between the innocent, child-like Fatima who is afraid of mice and dogs and is yet burdened with the duty to kill her country's enemy, and the British soldier who tries to convince her that both of them are ultimately victims of a horribly senseless war machine, are rasping, crackling outbursts of rousing 1950s' war songs, played on a run-down, choking and coughing radio. Those songs provided an ironic background to the dialogue of the two enemies and served to carry Fatima across the silent stretches and gaps of doubt and overwhelm her human scruples. As the couple fervently trot out their firmly cherished, albeit often ludicrously phrased prejudices, you are never allowed to take sides -- a marvellous achievement of the play. One is kept guessing all the time and the central, heated debate is constantly informed by a feeling of danger, of suspense, of something about to snap, which never lets up and propels the action towards its open, violent, dubious conclusion. Since the conflict between East and West, North and South has not yet been resolved, Lenin could not credibly round up the lethal ideological match between George and Fatima. We are left at the end with a frightened, shattered aggressor/ victim and her bleeding victim/aggressor. Nothing is, or can as yet be, resolved, and the problem of finding a satisfactory solution is shifted onto the audience. The Captives is yet another message in a bottle sent by El-Ramli to float over the waves, a beautifully written and directed plea for tolerance and understanding. And encased in this bottle are lovely performances from Yara Gobran and Ratko Ivekovic, in the English version, and Samah Hassan and Hisham Zaki in the Arabic one.
