Nehad Selaiha on a fruitless hunt for theatre in Ramadan Throughout Ramadan I have been trying to break the vicious cycle of anger, frustration and depression that has been the story of my life since the Beni Sweif senseless tragedy. Not very helpful in this respect was the news that the Abdel-Rehim El-Zurqani hall at the National Theatre has been shut down for good while other theatres, including Al-Hanger and Al-Tali'a, as well as many of the Cairo and regional theatrical venues owned by the Cultural Palaces Organisation, such as the ones in Assiut and Aswan in Upper Egypt and in Al-Mansoura and Abu Kebir (near Zaqaziq) in the north, and even open-air spaces like the Nile Floating Theatre in Giza, Manf Hall in Agouza, and the garden of Rod Al-Farag Cultural Palace in Shubra -- venues which cater mostly for the poor and culturally deprived -- have been put out of action pending having them secured against fire hazards -- a job which, given our tortoise-like bureaucratic pace and its tortuous procedures, is likely to take years. Such wholesale closures are not conducive to optimism and have led many to fear, with reason, that the Beni Sweif fire has conveniently played into the hands of the philistines in the Ministry of Culture and provided them with a plausible excuse to close down some provincial theatres and curtail regional theatre activities in general. A number of cultural palaces will be kept of course as show-pieces; but the majority of cultural homes and centres in small towns and remote villages are likely to be dismantled or simply neglected and left to rot. This will save the ministry the LE3 million budget allocated to the regional theatre (out of which only LE700,000 are actually spent) and, more to the point, a lot of cultural headaches. It is a sorry situation since the underprivileged sector of the population whom the Cultural Palaces Organisation is supposed to serve, need more, not fewer performance spaces and forums for free expression and peaceful political protest and dissent. Equally depressing, in a lurid vein, was the news of a play performed inside a church two years ago causing an eruption of sectarian violence in Alexandria. I remembered someone once saying (was it Brecht?) that to hope that a play could cause a revolution was a very tall order. Nevertheless, one likes to think that plays could alert people to the many insidious forms of oppression they unwittingly suffer. What one could never have imagined was that a play could in absentia, so to speak, stir up so much blind fanaticism and vengeful wrath. It is a frightening prospect when theatre turns into a force of darkness rather than a road to light. It was in this frame of mind that I went to watch Mahmoud El-Lozi's revival of Saadeddin Wahba's Al-Mahrousa at the Falaki Centre main stage and my mood deeply coloured my reception of the production. For once it very much mattered where I was seeing the play. It hurt to remember that for years the only places where one could get a taste of the drama of the 1960s in performance was either in the provinces, at some cultural palace or home, or at the American University in Cairo. Now that the future of provincial companies is in the balance and looks quite bleak, we are left with only the AUC theatre, with its exclusive, select audience and one annual production of an Arabic play. What if this quasi-foreign space suddenly stopped putting on plays from the Egyptian repertoire? The day before, I had travelled to Zefta, a town in Al-Gharbiyya governorate, historically famous for having established itself as a separate republic for a few days in the early 20th century following a popular uprising against its corrupt local rulers and the British forces supporting them. The occasion was a memorial ceremony in honour of Hosni Abu Gweila, a gifted director and major force in regional theatre who died in the Beni Sweif fire. As I listened to his colleagues, students and disciples, and to other members of the regional theatre community who made the trip to honour him, I realised that with most of its leaders lost in the fire, the regional theatre felt suddenly derailed -- dazed, quite at a loss and off course. As Magdi El-Hamzawi, a local critic and cultural activist, put it: "Like trees, people of the calibre of Hosni Abu Gweila here or Salah Hamid in Fayyoum [he also died in the fire together with one of his sons and many of his young actors] do not grow overnight and are not easily replaceable; it will take us a long time to pick up the pieces and start all over again." At the end of the evening he told me: "I had steered clear of politics for quite some time, as you know. After 5 September I realised it was a luxury I could no longer afford." As I listened to him I began to wonder how long it would take the Zefta troupe to be able to put on at their humble theatre a production of a 1960s' play as brilliant as the one staged by Hosni Abu Gweila of Salah Abdel-Sabour's Night Traveller some years ago. On the way back, I suddenly found myself telling Maysa Zaki, my friend and former student who had accompanied me on this sad trip, how much I was looking forward to Al-Mahrousa which I planned to see the following day. The mere idea gave me a kind of comfort, reassurance -- a sense of continuity perhaps. In terms of the play itself, there would be no surprises; I had read it, taught it and watched the television recording of its first production at the National, in December 1961, directed by Kamal Yassin, many times. Following the example of Tawfiq Al-Hakim in his Diary of a Country Magistrate, a fascinating, quasi-documentary narrative, Wahba drew on his experience as a police officer in the country for his first play. The year he spent at police station of Menouf, a small provincial town north of Cairo, left him with a store of images, anecdotes and characters which served as material for Al-Mahrousa (literally, the God-protected), providing the setting, the social model, the atmosphere and character types. For form, like many of his contemporaries, particularly No'man Ashour, Wahba opted for social satire, joining comedy and the vernacular in a realistic form of drama at once popular and capable of serious political and social criticism. In terms of setting, however, Wahba was singular in opting for a rural one and making it the real hero in his first four plays: after Al-Mahrousa (1961) came Kafr Al-Battikh (1962), then Al-Sibinsa (Third Class, 1963), followed by Kubri Al-Namous (Mosquito Bridge, 1964). Equally novel at the time was Wahba's dramaturgy which replaced the traditional plot with a cumulative, anecdotal type of structure in which a succession of loosely connected comic scenes gradually builds up the setting and its inhabitants into a microcosm of Egyptian society and a metaphor for human oppression in general. The stock situations and character stereotypes of traditional popular comedy were deftly exploited to inject a dose of caricature and grotesque absurdity into the realistic representation, and while the dialogue bubbled with humour and wit on the surface, it often betrayed signs of deep stress and an acute sense of crisis and impending doom. Plays of this kind need above all good actors capable of wringing laughter out of distressing situations and endowing the most absurdly negative and ludicrous characters with a degree of human credibility and even pathos. Wahba was of course lucky in having the National Theatre company, with its galaxy of exceptionally gifted, dedicated and highly professional actors at his beck and call. Indeed, it is almost certain that after Al-Mahrousa he tended to write with those actors in mind, tailoring his fictional parts to their measurements. This in part explains the resounding popular success of the plays at the time they were first performed and the continued appeal of their television recordings among later generations. It also explains the disappointing reception of Al-Sibinsa when revived at the National in the late 1980s and the equally lukewarm welcome Kubri El-Namous received a decade later, even though veteran actress Samiha Ayoub, Wahba's wife, led the new cast as she had done back in 1964. Mahmoud El-Lozi could not hope to match the original cast of the play which included, among other illustrious names, Tawfiq El-Diqin as the corrupt police commissioner, Fardous Hassan as his vain, quarrelsome, upstart wife, Mahmoud El-Hedeini as the fair, upright district attorney, Shafiq Nureddin as the unconscionable, slow-witted, perjured ghafir (village guard), Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra as the new, idealistic young officer and Abdalla Gheith as the poor, helpless peasant on whom the omdah (village mayor) and police commissioner try to palm off a charge of murder in order to punish him for refusing to sell his land to the king's agents. El-Lozi picked the best talents he could find and his choice was naturally limited to those students and graduates who had a good command of Egyptian Arabic and could speak it without sounding like foreigners. To expect the cast to reproduce a semblance of a rural dialect, or the cadences and rhythms of ordinary provincial people in conversation, not to mention their body language, would be unreasonable. But the acting could have done with a faster pace and bit more verve and energy. The impression I got was of ham actors more keen on remembering their lines and vocally producing them correctly than on impersonating characters. There was a hint of faltering, of hesitation everywhere and split- second delays in responding to cues which made the naturalistic dialogue seem contrived, halting and badly rehearsed. One felt as if the actors were gingerly negotiating a very rocky terrain. Some did better than others -- mainly Yehiya El-Diqin as the police commissioner, Nora Mohamadein as his wife, and Mustafa Dirbala as ghafir Rizq, and some -- notably Ahmed Salah as the primary-school teacher and Ahmed Safieddin Safwat as Sa'id, the new office -- seemed to improve and gain in warmth and sympathy as the play went on. What really stood out in this production and was quite an original contribution, and a very significant and poignant one, was the visual rendering of the play -- Stancil Campell's and Jenny Arnold's sets, Dina El-Sheikh's costumes and Sarah Youssef's lighting. The backdrop of open fields under a clear sky which reflected in its changing colours the movement of the sun was visible throughout, dominating the stage and making all the interior sets and characters presented in front of it, by means of a few telling motifs and serviceable props, seem like fleeting shadows -- an airy, pathetically flimsy, transient pageant. Dressing the stage-hands who did the necessary alterations in the set as peasants and silhouetting them against this persistent, inert but forceful backdrop was a brilliant directorial decision which seemed to unobtrusively communicate El-Lozi's feelings about the play and ironically undercut its once optimistic message. The Nasserite dream which provided the play's perspective on the stories it tells was here nostalgically mourned and revealed as an illusion. The sun will shine and set; rulers will come and go; dreams will flower and wither; but in all weathers and seasons, and whatever the amount or form of oppression he suffers, the Egyptian peasant will continue to till his land, lifting his head to heaven every now and then to vent a curse or send a silent prayer. This was the play's message in El-Lozi's production.
