Nehad Selaiha enjoys the spectacle of cultural schizophrenia in Lenin El-Ramli's Ahlan Ya Bakawat at the National For playwright Lenin El-Ramli, 2005 has been an exceptionally good year. In January, he managed to get the Greek Cultural Centre in Cairo to sponsor a low- budget production of his Salaam Al-Nisaa (A Peace of Women) and staged it at the open-air theatre of the Opera House. In the spring, he was back in the Opera grounds, this time at Al-Hanager centre, with yet another new and successful play. Ein Al-Hayaa, or Spring of Life, directed by Issam El-Sayed and performed at the centre's gallery in an environmental setting designed by Hazim Shebl, proved so popular that Huda Wasfi, the artistic director of the centre, decided to give it another run in August. And no sooner had the Spring of Life closed than Ikhla'ou Al-Aqni'a (Take Off the Masks) premiered at the open-air theatre in Al-Gezira Arts centre; and though it only played on the fringe of the Cairo Experimental Festival, it drew more audiences and enthusiastic applause than any of the shows selected for the contest. The following month, El-Ramli was nominated for the 2005 Netherlands-based Prince Claus Fund Award for Theatre. The award citation describes El-Ramli as "a comic dramatist who audaciously questions the social conventions, hypocrisies and bogotries of both Egyptian society and the Arab world" and explains that he "has been granted the Prince Claus Award for his emphasis on political satire and comedy, and for maintaining a balance between popular entertainment and serious social, political and ideological satire". Soon after, El-Ramli was off to San Francisco to attend a stage-reading of an earlier play of his, Al-Kabous (The Nightmare), at the Golden Thread Theatre. 2006 promises to be as fruitful and propitious for this diligent, richly gifted and highly prolific artist. On 25 January, he will receive his Prince Claus Award in an official ceremony at the Embassy of the Royal Netherlands. But since festivities for El-Ramli are meaningless without theatre, and not being one to rest on his laurels, he is already busy directing Arabic and English versions of another new short play, Al-Asra (The Captives), to grace the occasion. The idea is to perform the play in Arabic for a few nights at Al-Saqqia Centre then tour with the English version in the Netherlands and, possibly, other countries. There is also a projected visit to Greece with A Peace of Women in March which requires getting together the cast and doing intensive rehearsals. However, the first auspicious event to mark 2006 for El-Ramli has already taken place and has been hatching long before the new year dawned. When Ashraf Zaki took over the state theatre organisation from Osama Abu Taleb early last year, one of his first decisions was to revive the National's 1989 smash hit production of El-Ramli's Ahlan Ya Bakawat (Welcome Gentlemen), with the same director, Issam El-Sayed, and two leading stars, Hussein Fahmi and Izzat El-Alayli. The opening last Thursday was a sparkling event which evidenced the Bakawat 's perennial appeal and the huge popularity of its author with the public. Written in the 1980s, at the height of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt, when the wave of religious bigotry and violence reached an unprecedented murderous peak, Welcome Gentlemen displays, in a highly concentrated form, the same reckless outspokenness, uncompromising intellectual honesty and rigorous, bold scrutiny of deeply entrenched cultural attitudes and prejudices that characterise most of El-Ramli's writing. Documenting the manifestations of this terrible plague of growing fanaticism and warning of its consequences is one thing, and many have done it without daring to probe anywhere under the surface to search for its origins; but trying to trace the plague to its roots in the hallowed depths of the inherited, venerated culture, is quite another and more dangerous thing, almost tantamount to heresy. It was no joke writing the way El-Ramli did back then; writer and thinker Farag Fouda was shot down by two members of the Islamic Jihad on a motorcycle as he walked out of his office one evening for saying more or less the same things El-Ramli says in his play. When the same people, or some of their ilk, disrupted a performance at a small cultural home in a village near Assiut in 1990, using iron chains and brutal threats to terrorise the actors, the Welcome Gentlemen team, led by the author, together with Mahmoud Yassin, the head of the National then, and super star Hussein Fahmi, rushed to Assiut to defend the right of theatre to exist everywhere and support their fellow actors; the play was performed in a heavily-guarded, primitively equipped open-air theatre, in front of a four- thousand strong audience. I remember chasing after the actors in a maddeningly slow, coughing and chortling train which suddenly seemed to give up the ghost just outside Assiut, refusing to budge. Walking for nearly half an hour in the wrong shoes across rough tracks to hitchhike a ride to town was no fun; but watching the show that night was more than ample compensation. I felt part of a resistance squad, an enlightenment contingent bent on fighting the "bats of darkness", as the press called those bigots then. Struggling through the traffic of Ataba Square last Thursday, on my way to the National, I wondered how the play would fare with me after all those years. Was its forceful impact 17 years ago a purely topical affair tied to a particular moment in history? 1989 seems a long way away and the threat of religious terrorism has faded from the surface, becoming no longer an obvious threat that one can openly confront. Insidiously, it has wormed its way into our mode of life and ways of thinking, becoming viciously, illusively internalised, like a cancerous growth, clandestinely and subconsciously monitoring the way we walk, talk, dress, and even teach drama, theatre and literature. Since theatre is a living, ever changing organism, talk of exact revivals seems an eerie thing. And this is what director Issam El-Sayed has stressed over and over in the media: it is not a new production but just a repeat of an older one that needs to be recorded and preserved in the theatre archives. Looking at a photograph, however, is not the same as being in the moment when the photograph is taken. The looking here betokens an absence rather than presence. How would one feel looking at Hussein Fahmi and Izzat El-Alayli going through the same demanding physical routines imposed upon them 17 years earlier by a youthful, budding director? Can one recapture the glow of that distant evening in Assiut? The test of the pudding is in the eating, as they say; and in the consumption of this revived version of Welcome Gentlemen, with more or less the same cast, except for those who died, the play tasted as fresh as ever, and seemed to lose nothing of its theatrical vibrancy or the immediacy of its relevance to present day reality. If anything, it gained more in topical significance as all the allusions to the imminent threat of the French campaign on Egypt at the end of the 18th Century seemed to imaginatively interlock with the recent invasion of Iraq. El-Ramli's reading of the history and progress of Arab reality and culture, as expressed in the play, has been profoundly right, I thought, and until we can free our minds from slavery to the past and believe that "the universe has no roof beyond which the free mind cannot fly," as one of the twin heroes of the play, Mahmoud, protests, we shall go on, round and round, in vicious circles, with no hope of release. But no amount of careful ideological deconstruction or profound dissection of cultural assumptions can create a viable dramatic text or theatrical production. Artistry is needed, and a great deal of poetic and visual imagination. Fortunately, El-Ramli has plenty of this. Using Shakespeare as a model, he often taps the resources of popular culture, reworking familiar themes, stories and conventional characters and situations for his purposes. His plays teem with echoes of other texts and one of the prime sources of pleasure in reading or watching his plays is following the subtle transformations such familiar material undergoes in the process of recreation. His inventive powers and unflagging imaginative energy are rarely spent on the devising of new plots. Rather, he expends them on tuning and refining old narratives to play his melodies, twisting them in deliciously startlingly new ways to generate fresh images and urgent topical denotations. In every case, however, he is careful that the topical relevance does not exhaust or swamp the imaginative power of the play or its ability to generate a variety of interpretations. Time and again he displays a rare knack for capturing exciting theatrical situations that bring realism to the brink of, and sometimes all the way into, fantasia; using realism as a launching pad, he takes audacious risks in the direction of the absurd, translating ordinary verbal metaphors into grotesque physical representations on stage. This allows plenty of scope for theatricality and challenges the performers to display their skills and versatility as it requires them to keep swinging between the two poles of fantasy and realism and more often than not to negotiate quick transitions between more than one part. Like HG Wells's The Time Machine, Mohamed El-Mowelhi's The Discourse of Issa Ibn Hisham and, more recently, the American movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the Star Trek television series, plus a horde of other similar, popular narratives, Ahlan Ya Bakawat features a journey in time, into the past rather than the future, positing through it a standoff between two eras and modes of thinking. It starts with a meeting between two friends whom we soon realise are really a single divided entity: Borhan, the scientist, whose name means scientific and/or logical proof, and Mahmoud, a poet and painter, whose name literally means in Arabic the "worthy" or "commendable". The confrontation takes on a broader significance through the realistic details of each friend's lifestyle. Borhan is a professor of science who has studied in America and drinks coffee and whisky; Mahmoud is an arts teacher in a poor Egyptian village and drinks nothing but tea. Borhan is rich and pampered, living in the city, in the lap of luxury, with all the state-of-the-art Western urban conveniences, including an Asian live-in housemaid, whom director Issam El-Sayed made into a creature with vaguely robotic movements; Mahmoud, on the other hand, is destitute, lacking the proverbial two pennies to rub together, living in a technologically backward society without material luxuries. Thus, from the start, Borhan is made to embody the material Western-oriented aspect of Arab culture, while Mahmoud represents its spiritual side and positive, moral values. If Borhan and Mahmoud are in reality two sides of the same coin, the act of splitting it into two roles, acted by two actors, embodies clearly on stage the idea of a divided cultural identity. The confrontation between the two friends, which centres on a discussion about the 21st century and the challenges it poses, soon leads to a mental cataclysm which takes the form of a physical earthquake on stage, carrying us, and the heroes, back to a point in time, three years prior to the French campaign on Egypt in 1798, and the start of the confrontation between East and West. The earthquake catapults our heroes into a sort of barn or silo -- a symbolic theatrical location which at once represents the depths of the human psyche and the storehouse of both the individual and collective national experience. This symbolic dual significance is reinforced at the end of this and subsequent scenes, in the dark intervals between the scene-changes, through a playback of a recording of the conversation between the two friends, which shows them discussing the past and future as though the visit is still proceeding calmly and the earthquake has never happened. The correspondence of this realistic auditory background with the fantastic stage setting preserves the two planes of the play side by side and defines the earthquake as a mental, metaphoric one; in other words, the journey through history unfolding on stage in scene after scene becomes a theatrical metaphor for an internal vision, or folie a deux shared by the two friends. When Mahmoud and Borhan start pounding on the huge door of the silo which dominates the set immediately after the earthquake, representing the gateway to history or the gate of memory, history floats to the surface of consciousness and takes on too, too solid flesh. The pageant of history comes bursting in through the door, embodied in its Mamelukes and tradesmen, soldiers and Walis, Ulama and slaves. This is the moment when the clash begins, centred around the poles of science, religion and politics. How the three have related and combined to produce the current state of affairs becomes the focus. As science battles against myth, the interests of dictatorial rulers and the rigid prejudices of the religious establishment, a battle which clearly evokes Galelio's fight against the church and political authorities in the 17th Century, rational thinking is put on the rack and finally succumbs to the lure of power and the fear of persecution, becoming an instrument of oppression. The effect of this defeat of rationality is clearly reflected in the citizens in the play in the form of mental lassitude, physical lethargy and an infinite trust in mythological, invisible powers. Surrounding the figures engaged in the central conflict between past and present, which occupies the forefront of the text, and occupying a miserable margin, is a weird assortment of characters representing the common people: whirling dervishes, dope- smoking café-keepers, street-hawkers, abject beggars and emaciated porters. A distinct lack of any kind of awareness or any mental activity is what characterises them all. The struggle between the forces of backwardness, represented by the Mamelukes' regime and its pet men of learning -- intellectuals and religious Ulama -- on the one hand, and the forces of enlightenment and progress represented by Borhan's scientific knowledge and Mahmoud's progressive ideas, on the other, pinpoints the source of the current crisis in Arab culture and the prevalent sense of a fragmented identity. As the forces of backwardness, using religious faith and the belief in the supernatural as leverages in their favour, manage to break down the enlightenment front, luring science to its side and falsifying it for its benefit, the march forward turns awry. Science and rationality, represented by Borhan and Mahmoud, are defeated: the former becoming another stronghold of backwardness, marrying four wives and owning slaves, attributing all his scientific inventions to mysterious divine inspiration and allowing himself to be wielded as a weapon of oppression against the masses; and the latter going mad and wandering like a lone preacher ranting in an endless desert. The problem of fragmented cultural identity, as posited in this play, lies in that the Third World has adopted nothing from the West save its material comforts, leaving its most important achievement, namely intellectual liberation and enlightenment; it has thus remained hobbled by its outdated backwardness. To make matters worse, we, as Arabs, have also ignored the forces and pioneers of enlightenment in our own culture, from Ibn Sina and Averroes to Salah Jahin and Amal Dunqul, allowing them to be silenced by successive dictatorships, and hounding them into depression, insanity or oblivion. This message is as relevant now as it was in 1989. The current production, even though it has replaced the dead or retired members of the old cast with new ones, follows meticulously the original in its emotional score and audio-visual details. The only new element are Hazim Shebl's sets which are a great improvement. When I reviewed the production for the Radio and Television Magazine at the time, I heaped praises on director Issam El-Sayed for this glorious debut at the National. I declared then that "he has proved his mastery of the language and tools of theatre, blended lighting, music, sound effects and movement into a harmonious composition which actively explained and enriched the text". One example I used was the robotic movement he gave to the Asian housemaid, which cast new shades of meaning upon Borhan's affiliation with Western civilisation, making him, as a Third World citizen, a tool of oppression and a threat to the humanity of other Eastern, or "Third World" people. Another example was the scene after the earthquake in which El-Sayed had the two heroes tied together back-to-back, visually embodying the idea that they were two halves of the same entity. His group scenes too, set in the old streets and alleyways of Egypt, past and present, were an eloquent audio-visual treat and quite unforgettable. Opting for stylisation, he carefully orchestrated the scene to rhythmically counterpoint, visually and vocally, the intersecting lines of the vegetable-seller, the café-attendant, the blind beggar, the Basbousa baker and Mahmoud's feverish questioning and preaching with the whirling dervishes abrupt rotations to create a magnificent, ironical pageant of corresponding colours, sounds and movement rarely seen on the Egyptian stage. In forming and linking his scenic compositions, El-Sayed used the technique of repetition with variation through parallelism, contrast and opposition, to give the whole show its own particular visual logic and homogeneous aesthetic rhythm. A telling instance is the repetition of the scene that begins the second act of the show at its end; the second time round, the scene is embroidered with new and richly evocative images, including a munaqaba (completely veiled woman swathed in black), who acts as the modern, 1980s' equivalent of the Mamelukes-age slave, Amna, and a thickly-bearded, white- galabiyya -clad preacher, bellowing through a bullhorn, played by the same actor who doubled as the religious advisor of the Mameluk ruler, Murad Pasha. Faces may change, the scene seemed to tell us, but the core of reality stays the same. Fortunately, the current production preserves all the former's delicate paradoxes and ironies. New, more pliant and elegant, the stage design in the current production has the same virtue of being both functional and actively dramatic as the old one. Following El-Ramli's strict stage directions, Hazim Shebl visibly framed one important detail in the set: the high Islamic-styled gate at the back, opening onto history. Functioning as an entrance on the practical level, this gate slowly gains in significance, finally becoming a focal dramatic point. In a veritable coup de theatre, El-Sayed visually counterpoints it at the end with the front curtain, making the former a gate to the past and the latter a gate to the future. This is achieved when Izzat El-Alayli, as the delirious, ranting and raving Mahmoud, frenziedly throws himself upon the curtain as it closes to signal the end of the play, trying to hold it open by main force, shrieking "No! It's not over! It can't end like this!" His attempt to keep the curtain open is partly an attempt to escape the fate of forever becoming marooned in a cyclic pattern of vicious repetition, where the march of progress is eternally doomed to turn backwards once it promises to reach a peak, where all the fought and won battles have to be fought over and over again. Mahmoud's desperate grab turns the curtain into part of the set, confining the boards between two "gates": into the past, and onto the here and now and the promise of a future. In this symbolic spatial configuration, the stage becomes a strip of fantasy, outside time, waiting to become one or the other -- an embodiment of the isolation of our current, stranded historical moment -- a frozen moment outside the flow of time. But for this final stage instruction -- Mahmoud's obstruction of the drawing of the curtain -- the bleakness of El-Ramli's vision would have been unbearable. By transforming the curtain into a possible escape route into the future, he turns the auditorium into the locus of hope and change; and though this shifts the whole burden of the future onto the audience's shoulders, it nevertheless gives the show, despite its savagely satirical bent and near nihilistic ending, a positive and optimistic thrust. Such visions of gloom and doom, however, do not strike you in the course of the play; they are so craftily camouflaged by wit and humour that you hardly notice them as they quietly seep into your mind to irk you later on. However grim and shorn of hope his reading of the reality and history of our part of the world may be, El-Ramli is too good a playwright, too real an artist, to forget that first and last theatre is a communal, healing celebration, a cathartic act of temporary magical transformation, a carnivalesque disruption of the tedium and drabness of daily life and an exercise in rebellion and freedom.
