Nehad Selaiha watches another first oeuvre with mixed feelings In the last issue I reviewed the debuts of two new playwrights: Mohamed Nasif's Break of Day at Night Fall at Al-Hanager Centre and 'Alaa Abdel-Aziz Suleiman's Tales Never Told by Sheherazade at Al-Gomhouriya Theatre. This week I would like to tell you about my trip to the National Upstairs to watch yet another budding writer making his debut in theatre. was originally called The Smell of Death, which the head of the National, Sherif Abdel-Latif, thought too depressing and off-putting. At his suggestion, the title was changed to the present one, and though it makes little sense, the author, anxious to air his text, could hardly demur. After all, how many new dramatists get to have a play staged at the National, even if it is only the room upstairs? But the title is the least of the play's problems. More serious is its tendency to overplay the literary elements at the expense of theatrical ones, its heavy dependence on verbal language in communicating meaning and using far too many words than necessary to do it, not to mention the pedantic choice of classical Arabic where its colloquial version was indicated. The play also strikes one as heavily derivative, with vivid echoes from Eugene Ionesco's The New Tenant and The Chairs, softer sporadic ones from Shakespeare, particularly King Lear, and other vague ones which tease the memory and give the whole show a kind of déjà vu feel. Indeed, Life has Another Smell seems to display all the faults of a first play, especially by someone with no practical experience of theatre-making. More than many first ventures, however, and though quite literary in style, it displays a certain awareness of the importance of the physical, visual elements of theatre, such as setting and props. This is probably the influence of Ionesco on the writer, and quite a salubrious one; I only wish he had also learnt from this master the art of verbal economy. The influence of Ionesco is particularly discernible in the stage image the play presents: a room cluttered with packaged electrical appliances and other technological gadgets which form a huge barrier dividing it into two small areas and preventing the man and woman there from reaching each other. This image (which reminded me at once of the old couple facing each other across a sea of chairs in Ionesco's Les Chaises and the room crammed full of furniture and things in his Le Nouveau Locataire ) acts as a concrete visual metaphor which is crucial to the meaning of the play. It sums up the tragedy of people who barter life and love for material goods and end up being destroyed by them. This meaning is worked out through the story of a couple who get engaged and for 20 years keep postponing their marriage until they could buy everything the mother of the woman insists they should have to guarantee their happiness. To find the necessary money, the man, who has dreams of becoming a poet and the talent for it, goes to an oil-rich Arab state and instead of poems, keeps sending home material things until they eat up most of the space in the flat and nearly crowd out the couple, exactly as the new tenant's furniture does in Ionesco's eponymous play. When the man comes back, he cannot reach his bride across the barrier of goods. They stand facing each other: he, a tired, balding, middle-aged man, with an ailing heart and not an ounce of poetry left in him; she, a faded, middle-aged virgin, pathetically clinging to the illusion of youth and beauty, craving love and nursing a doll at her breast to placate her frustrated motherly instincts. When they finally decide to give up everything to save what is left of their lives, it is already too late: the strain of moving the barrier kills the man. But though the setting is clearly Egypt, the time, the present, the characters, ordinary middle-class Egyptians, and their problem a hotly topical one, the author chose to write the play in classical Arabic, thinking, perhaps, it was a more suitable medium for his hero's poetic flights, self-searching monologues and philosophical reflections. In fact, the play would have gained in poignancy and pathos with far fewer words, and without these literary patches which seemed to belong more to the author than the character. The idea that for a drama to be regarded as respectable literature it has to be written in classical Arabic is quite ridiculous to say the least. Most of the memorable dramas of the 1960s and after used colloquial Arabic and uncovered the rich resources of this medium, its earthy concreteness, lively rhythms, poetic potential and vast capacity to accommodate the profoundest thoughts and most subtle feelings. Perhaps the author wanted to universalise his theme and characters by dissociating the language of the dialogue from the language of ordinary conversation and ridding it of as many local references as he could afford. The effect of this, however, was to drive a wedge between the physical reality of the characters and their words and make the play sound very much like a translated foreign text, with only the setting and names of the characters changed. In fact, this is what I took the play to be at first until I was told otherwise. Like a lot of hopeful would-be dramatists, Karam Mahmoud reads a lot of foreign texts in translation, particularly the classics of world drama, and cannot escape their influence. When he writes, themes and characters and even lines and phrases sneak unconsciously into the writing and his language becomes infected with the kind of dialogue he has been nurtured on. Hopefully, as he matures, he will be free of these influences and find his own individual voice and idiom. To overcome the feeling of foreignness induced by the language of the text, director Hassan El-'Adl chose a set with a distinct Egyptian look (designed by Fadi Foukeih) and allowed his competent actors -- Amina Salem and Farouk 'Ita -- to deliver parts of the dialogue in colloquial Arabic without changing the words, merely pronouncing them differently, in their colloquial sound versions, and investing them with the rhythms and modulations of colloquial speech. This helped to underscore the comic absurdity of the couple's situation and bring out some of the black humour latent in the text; it also made the characters more credible, more touching, more lovable and brought their tragedy nearer home. Ahmed Youssef's musical score also helped in this direction, interlacing the dialogue with snatches from nostalgic popular tunes and old cherished songs which firmly defined the setting as Egypt. One could say that the performance has saved the text and I sincerely hope it has taught Karam Mahmoud some valuable lessons.
