Nehad Selaiha wonders at what some will do in the name of experimentation My first encounter with the delightful crowd of the famous "Carry On" British film series took place on a mild autumnal afternoon in September, 1966, at a small movie house on Edgeware Road -- one of the many branches of the ABC cinema chain spread all over London. It was my first day in "Asimat Al-Dhabab", or "capital of fog and smog", as London was habitually labelled by the press in those days. I was also what you might call a bride, albeit without the mandatory white wedding dress and other bridal accoutrements. I had arrived at Heathrow swaddled with the anxious blessings of my gentle, over solicitous mother- in-law, Hajja Shafiqa, and her fearful counsellings about how to cope with the unpredictable, temperamental flarings of my future husband -- something I had seen no sign of in our three years of artistic slumming round Cairo. And though he was a far better cook than I could ever hope to be, she had insisted on regaling me with recipes of his favourite meals and bags of spices, dried okra and moloukhiya. To top it all, I had to carry his favourite lute, encased in a slippery dark blue velvet case which constantly threatened to escape my grip. I had hardly slept the last few days due to the excitement of the occasion, the fussy preparations and endless stream of visitors and well-wishers. Instead of a bulky wedding dress which would make me embarrassingly conspicuous, I chose to bedeck myself in a thin woolen two-piece suit and high-heeled golden sandals -- hardly the right outfit for the cold, foggy capital. At Heathrow, my dainty sandals gave way; a strap snapped and a heel broke. Shivering with cold, I limped down what I hoped would be the last flight of stairs, holding the precious velvet-encased lute, and was received by my husband with open arms. Forty years on, I cannot decide who got the warmest hugs: me or the lute. Sleep, "blessed barrier between day and day,/ Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health," in the words of Wordsworth, was all I needed. But my groom had other, more amorously-inclined ideas. Dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant on Praed Street was manageable, indeed idyllically delicious -- lots of small, dainty dishes of vegetables and rice washed down with delicately flavoured wine; but a movie followed by a love session was more than I could cope with. That the movie of his choice was Carry On Screaming has since occasioned a lot of mirth among our close friends on our marriage anniversaries and has been often jocularly compared to the proverbial slaughtering of the cat by the groom on the wedding night to terrorise the bride into total submission and obedience. The bride on this occasion, however, slept through most of the movie, only fitfully waking up and blinking at loud sound effects. Within less than a month, however, I found myself deeply in love with the "Carry on" team. To their rollicking, freewheeling celebration of the human libidinal drive, their carnivalesque delight and liberal indulgence in verbal punning and sexual innuendoes, and their recklessly humorous debunking and unrelenting mockery of practically everything under the sun, past or present, I owe most of my sense of humour, liberal outlook on life and that blessed ability to view things, even the most sacred, from the absurd point of view. To be human, and keep your sanity, you should be able to look at yourself detachedly, from a distance, as it were, and affably, generously, laugh at your foibles, prejudices, and even your deepest and most cherished convictions: that was the invaluable lesson the "Carry On" films taught me. Right now, as so many violent protests are erupting everywhere over a dozen Danish cartoons, I cannot but value more deeply than ever the saving grace of a sense of humour. Disappearing ladies was, is, the theme of Carry On Screaming ; Angela Douglas acts as their iconic representative and Jim Dale poses as a parody of the knight in shining armour out on a sacred mission to rescue her from the clutches or, rather, if you know the film, from the frying basin of her villainous kidnappers. Harry Corbett and Charles Hawtrey play the detective and his assistant. In an unforgettable scene in which they try to put together (in legible letters, on a blackboard) the 'clues' (footprints, smells and citizens' reports of strange goings-on) they have garnered, they come up with the pricelessly comic statement that "Big Feet Smell Something Foul!" It eventually transpires that the foul play is stage-managed and performed by a deliciously quizzical couple -- Kenneth William and Fenella Fielding, as his sister -- with Bernard Breslaw as their ministering devil and incredible hulk. The trio's business of transforming live, voluptuous females into inanimate clothes dummies to be sold to large stores is conducted as a parody of a "fish-and-chip shop", run by Kenneth William and masterfully punctuated with his ridiculously ghoulish and long-drawn cry "frying tonight" every time a victim arrives. And though neither the inimitable Sid James nor that delicious, living caricature of the voluptuous female called Barbara Windsor were anywhere to be seen, Joan Sims and Peter Butterworth lurked in the wings, in minor but unforgettable parts, making occasional forays into the foreground of the hilariously convoluted, often bungled plot. Theatre, even bad and boring theatre has its rewards. When I went to watch Magdi El-Nazir's Al-Sarkha (The Scream), a spectacle that has been playing on and off at different venues, including the Black Box theatre at the American University in Cairo Falaki Centre, since last September, I little thought it would unloose so many memories or lead me to reflect, for the one thousand and oneth time perhaps, on the meaning and manifestations of experimentation and postmodernism on the Egyptian scene. Long before both terms, particularly the latter, came into fashion, the "Carry on" films had audaciously set about ironically parodying all sacred ideas and hallowed precepts. It was obvious the perpetrator of The Scream had never watched any "Carry On" film and had unwittingly fallen into the trap of creating a parodic simulation, in a depressingly grim vein, of the kind of show he wanted to achieve. Like Macbeth who had "no spur/ To prick the sides of ... [his] intent, but only/ Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself/and falls on the other side," El-Nazir attempted more than he could cope or was imaginatively equipped to deal with and lacked the virtue of humour which would have saved him and his show. El-Nazir's Scream is a prime example of the kind of fuzzy concoctions churned out every year on the occasion of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET). Since its inauguration in 1988, the concept which gives this festival its title has progressively grown more opaque, chaotic and obfuscating. Instrumental in creating this situation has been the loose definitions bandied around in many seminars and roundtables describing experimentation as "a voyage into the unknown," "an exploration of wild, uncharted imaginative terrains," or "breaking with tradition and throwing conventions to the four winds." If only people could do this as the "Carry On" team managed it over half a century ago! The confusion was exacerbated when another, equally fluid and slippery term, postmodernism, arrived on the scene. As it gained ground in critical circles and its tentative tenets and attitudes, such as the celebration of absolute relativity and valorization of the ugly, fragmentary and decentered, were circulated among young artists, it seemed to provide a handy excuse for shallowness, sloppiness and feeble-mindedness and was effectively used to elude or rebuff the barbs of critics. Every time a slatternly vapid show is lightly scrambled round the time of the festival, be sure that the epithet "postmodern" would turn up like the proverbial bad coin and be brazenly trotted out to silence any objection and brand the objector as an obtuse ignoramus. It's a tricky situation, particularly for the tolerant reviewer who is willing to endorse the wayward tendencies of modern performance art. What is really vexing is the hypocrisy of those perpetrators of so- called postmodern or experimental theatre in Egypt. While espousing and paying lip service to postmodernism, they shy away from pursuing its risks on any level other than the most superficial. And since postmodern theatre often resorts to parody, in such shows you end up with a parody of a parody, as it were: a show deeply, even cloyingly conservative, narrow-minded and parochial in its outlook and ideological assumptions, masquerading as a rebellious, subversive, shocking spectacle. El-Nazir has a natural flare for light, musical comedy and rich, colourful spectacle and his training at the Theatre Institute has given him technical competence in this respect. Why neglect such wonderful gifts and try to conform to an addle-brained, officiously pretentious image of the intellectual? Though we as Egyptians live by humour and have historically used it as a survival strategy and safety valve, a way to battle against the rigours of authority and the merciless vicissitudes of fate, we never seem to respect it or want to take it seriously. The oppression of women throughout history, portrayed in a series of quasi-expressionistic scenes, with lots of songs and dances, and featuring ghoulish episodes of cannibalism and rape, would have been ideally phrased in the hilarious idiom of the "Carry On" tradition and proved more politically interrogative and culturally challenging. The show, however, insisted on perversely taking itself quite 'seriously' and ended up as a travesty of itself. The beautiful Sylvia, encased in a skin- cloroured, tight leotard with a seductive, revealing dress on top was an embarrassing travesty of the character she was supposed to represent. As for the other actors, Abdel-Salam El-Dahshan, Shawkat El-Sheik, Shadi Asaad, Mohamed Fathi, Mustafa Mahmoud and Inji Khattab, they all seemed to wander in and out of the scenes, not knowing what the whole play was about. What a waste of great talent! Given half a chance, those actors would have ripped in a rollicking satire of Egyptian life and sexual transactions. But, oh, no. They wanted to be both "respectable" and "experimental" -- and the result was a big fiasco. If I were minister of education I would insist on every pupil watching the "Carry On" film series as part of the curriculum. We need to respect humour as much as we love it: without it we would turn into bigoted morons and hypocritical artists.
