Nehad Selaiha is deeply moved by an Egyptian adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening When poets celebrate the coming of spring they never pause to think of the painful and often dangerous processes that underlie this sudden explosion of beauty and colour. Birth, change and growth, however positive they may seem, have a dark underside and are never free of a certain amount of suffering. The only poet to pinpoint this fact was, perhaps, T. S. Eliot when he wrote, in the opening section of his Waste Land, entitled "The Burial of the Dead", that "April" was "the cruelest month." Nearly 30 years before The Waste Land, however, precisely in 1891, another literary figure -- a poet of the theatre this time-- described in vivid terms the painful feelings that accompany the onset of puberty and the burgeoning of sexuality -- the vague longings and doubts, the general anxiety, the loneliness and nebulous sense of shame. It is true that Wedekind subtitled Spring Awakening "a tragedy of childhood", dedicating it to the parents and teachers of his time to warn them against the tragic consequences of their rigid, hypocritical, cowardly and taboo-ridden moral code, which insisted on keeping children in the dark about the basic facts of life in the name of modesty or decency, and of their adopted stupid educational system which consisted in cramming the mind to the point of numbing the brain and paid no attention to the children's natural abilities and latent talents and tendencies, thus crippling their imagination and inquiring spirit and nipping their individuality in the bud. Nevertheless, there is much more to the play than just a fierce satire against coercive, insensitive, or timid parents and narrow-minded, tyrannical teachers. The fiercely hostile reception of Spring Awakening when it was first performed in 1906 (albeit in a bowdlerized version), with many parents damning it as an insolent challenge to their traditional authority and the sacred rights of parenthood and many critics deeming it scandalously obscene, perverted and even diabolic, solidified this reductive view of the play as a cautionary, didactic drama advocating sex education, more enlightened and liberal educational systems and less repressive ethical codes.But besides its educational message, Spring Awakening is also about how youngsters respond to the pangs of growing up, how they try to cope in different ways with the changes in their bodies and in their awareness of themselves and those around them, and how they often helplessly swing between extremes of joy and sadness, and of sensuality and idealism. Though Wedekind's teenagers are shown as pathetically confused and vulnerable, tormented by fear and guilt and troubled by doubts about personal worth, sexual predilections and the meaning of life, they are never idealized. Some of them can be ruthless bullies at times and one of them, Melchior, the only boy in the group who knows the facts about intercourse and procreation and even writes an essay on the subject to enlighten his friend Moritz, repays Wendla's affection with rape, thus putting her life in danger and indirectly causing her death. Unlike Moritz and Wendla, Melchior has a modern, enlightened mother with progressive ideas who respects her child's intelligence and tries desperately to project him and defend his unconventional behaviour but ultimately cannot hold out against the pressure of public opinion and her husband's dogged belief in authority and discipline. Indeed, Melchior stands out among the other teenagers as a romantic rebel in the making and a budding Faust who would sacrifice anything to satisfy his thirst for knowledge and experience. The grotesque symbolism of the expressionistic last scene, with the headless Moritz and the mysterious, hooded figure, clearly points in this direction. While Wendla and Moritz are straightforward victims and poignantly illustrate the tragic effects of the repressive moral and educational systems dominant in the play, with the former sent to her grave by her pious, prudish mother and the latter driven to suicide by the pressures of the school system and his parents expectations, Melchior, though he is chucked out of school and sent to a reformatory, is not presented as a victim. An atheist who disdains and rejects conventional morality, Melchior is closest in spirit to the bohemian Ilse, another teenager who runs away from home to lead a carefree and promiscuous life as a model and mistress of various painters. Significantly, she is the last person to see Moritz and taunts him about his sexual timidity, unwittingly giving a further edge to his determination to end his life. It is a credit to Laila Soliman that her Egyptian version of Spring Awakening (presented for six days at Rawabet at the beginning of April this year) sensitively captured many of the subtle shades of the original text, eloquently communicating the disorienting mixture of fear, heady excitement, joy and wonder that accompanies sexual awakening, while preserving the full force of its socio-moral criticism and cautionary message. Curiously, in her director's note, Soliman does not give herself credit for her discerning reading of the play. Explaining the logic behind the production, she writes : "Having come across the text during my university studies, it was impossible to oversee the parallels between the trials of its characters and that of contemporary Egyptian youth. In Wedekind's language, things are expressed clearly without necessarily being too spelt out. This serves the double purpose of translating the way people talk about sensitive issues in real life to the stage and also to tackle those same issues without alienating the audience. ... While the text is a product of its time, I cannot help but note that the core of the issues in question are very much still alive in the Egyptian Society of today and that it might be of value to revisit this text and draw on the connections that might exist between the social conditions of Europe of the late 19th Century and our contemporary society. This of course is with a clear realisation that the specifics will not hold but that the sensitive form which was quite innovative and ahead of its time then, might serve as a good entry point for handling such taboo subjects today." Though the production, funded by the Goethe institute in Cairo, reportedly took 3 months to research, many trips to the Egyptian countryside, endless interviews with teenagers, a number of workshops at some schools and long improvisation sessions with the actors in the rehearsal stage, not to mention German dramaturge Julia Schulz's extensive documentary footage, it is amazing how close the final product was to the original both in form, narrative outline, characters and general spirit and atmosphere. Keeping all the teenage characters and most of the events that relate to them, closely following their sequence in the play, and using key passages of the dialogue, delivered in Egyptian colloquial Arabic and re-distributed among the characters, Soliman removed all Wedekind's adult characters except for one teacher who at the beginning of the play recites a verse from the Koran about marriage and warns against the population explosion by way of a prelude to reading a lesson about reproduction from the 9th grade biology textbook used in Egyptian government schools. The biology lesson hilariously intercuts with the monologues of 3 girls, two of whom echo their mothers' contradictory feelings about their daughters' growing up, while the third reads the instructions on a pack of sanitary towels. The rest of Wedekind's parents, teachers and other figures of authority are shoved to the background and are either reduced to disembodied voices that occasionally rail against homosexuality, among other things, or solemnly recite the Egyptian law regarding the rape of minors at the end, or are mimicked by the youngsters who, as in the above example, ironically reproduce their words, taunts and strictures as if they had internalized their persecutors. This all but total banishment of grownups from the play had the effect of visually foregrounding the teenagers and focusing their painful isolation and the huge rift that separates them from the adult world. It felt as if we, the audience, had sneaked into the inner world of those youngsters, into a private, intimate space, half real and half imaginary, where they acted out their fantasies, aired their resentments and frustrations, guiltily explored their bodies and sexual longings and indulged in 'forbidden' pleasures. Mohamed Shoukry's minimalist set (consisting of two plastic sheets at the back, with a deep, dark area between them, a bench, and a wooden staircase leading up to a bridge on one side of the performance space facing a real 'toktok' at the other end), together with Saad Samir's ethereal lighting plan (which enveloped the set in a constant play of light and shadow, lending it, with the help of Julia Schulz's video projections, which constantly flickered on the plastic sheets, a dreamlike quality) and Mustafa Said's ominously tense and eerily evocative musical soundtrack combined to create and enforce this impression, subtly shifting the play away from realism to the borders of expressionism. Lina Ibrahim's costumes partook of the same realistic/ expressionistic quality: while most of the characters were accurately dressed to convincingly suggest the offspring of an impoverished, lower middle class in small provincial towns and poor urban districts, the Egyptian version of the bohemian Ilse was strangely attired in a red, revealing evening gown, with no shoes on, and flitted seductively around like a mischievous, bewitching elf, visually disrupting the realism suggested by the other costumes and the images of fields, streams, real houses and people flickering on the screen. But Soliman's adaptation of Spring Awakening, though subtle, witty and intelligent, could not have worked without the stunningly vivid and wonderfully eloquent contribution of gifted choreographer Karima Mansour. Her imaginative choreography did not stop at suplementing Soliman's sparse verbal text, filling in the gaps and ingeniously articulating what was left unsaid or only hinted at in bold, physical language (as in the beautiful homosexual love scene between Hönschen and Ernst, the two classmates of Melchior and Moritz), but went on to actively interpret other scenes, insightfully reaching for hidden deeper meanings and more complex emotions. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the scene where Wendla asks Melchior to beat her, which, in Mansour's inspired rendering, was translated into a frenzied dance that breathlessly climaxes into a solo orgasm on the part of Wendla, followed by her flight when Melchior is aroused. But Mansour's original creative contribution is perhaps most evident in the nervousness and hysterical anxiety which characterize the Ilse dance sequences, adding darker shadows to Wedekind's sunny portrayal of the character, in the intriguing collective masturbation scene near the end, and in an earlier scene where the Egyptian Wendla is made to express her ambivalent feelings about her body and burgeoning femininity by performing a belly dance that begins in grace and joy but gradually deteriorates into an obscene, grotesque mockery. The dance is performed opposite a huge projection of a smiling face that belongs to a peasant woman who, in an earlier footage, was seen and heard saying how she had felt boundlessly happy when she discovered she had become a woman and how she had longed to share her feeling with some one. And this is only one instance of how Soliman intelligently used her research material and Shulz's documentary footage not only to evoke a convincing Egyptian setting for her adaptation but also to initiate dialogue between image and actor and elude the conventions of realism. Other memorable instances include the one-sided conversation between one of the boys and his imaginary girl friend who is no more than an enlarged projection of a pin-up and the monologue delivered by Wendla near the end of the play, in which she relates quietly, almost lifelessly, in neutral tones, what her mother did to her when she discovered she was pregnant, while all the time her closest friend hysterically intones a chilling Sudanese death wail standing at the top of the staircase looking at her, and the plastic sheet beside her ironically displays huge close-ups of the face and bust of a woman being meticulously and sedulously made up and decked out for marriage. Soliman's Egyptian Spring Awakening was a haunting and profoundly moving experience, alternately funny and poignant and emotionally intelligent and honest throughout. In terms of dramaturgy and stagecraft, it was brilliant, compressing a long text into one compact hour by making extensive use of the techniques of film, particularly crosscutting between scenes running simultaneously, as well as the language dance and movement, giving it a fresh reading and local relevance, and processing it with fervour and great credibility through a bunch of uninhibited actors of immense talent, courage and dedication. Some of those actors I had already seen and admired in other performances on the fringe, but Salma Said (as Wendla/Rasha), Ali Khamees (as Melchior/Mustafa) and Ahmed El-Gendy (as Moritz/Yusef) were completely unknown to me and a wonderful discovery. They acted and danced with passion, conviction and marked technical skill, giving the performance a rich local flavour and an authentic Egyptian feel. Together with the gifted artistic crew, they made Spring Awakening by far the best production Laila Soliman has staged so far. Hopefully this brilliant and sophisticated young theatre maker (whose first original play recently received stage-readings in London and New York and was warmly welcomed and enthusiastically admired) will go on to give us other memorable treats in the future.
