Nehad Selaiha finds magic and enchantment in Alfred Farag's The Princess and the Vagabond Once more Alfred Farag journeys to The Arabian Nights in search of poetry, wisdom and inspiration. His first visit there took place early on in his career, in 1962, yielding his first stage hit, Hallaq Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad), which starred the inimitable late comedian Abdel-Mon'im Ibrahim. The play owed not only its setting (in Baghdad), its atmosphere and one of its two connected stories to The Nights (the other was taken from Al-Mahasin wa 'l-Addad, or Pros and Cons, by the Abbasid writer al-Jahiz), but also much of its grace, charm and good- natured humour and in it, no doubt under the influence of Sheherazade, Farag was able to forge a new brand of dramatic dialogue -- an ingenious, lively blend of classical and colloquial Arabic which became distinctive of his work. Subsequent trips to The Nights produced Buqbuq Al-Kaslan (Lazy Buqbuq) in 1965, with Ibrahim in the title role, Ali Janah Al-Tabrizi and his Servant Quffa, 1968, with Ibrahim as Quffa, Rasa'el Qadi Ashbiliyya (The Epistles of the Judge of Seville) in 1975, Ayyam wi Layali Sindibad (Sinbad's Days and Nights) in 1985, El-Tayeb wal Sherrir wal Jamilah (The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful) in 1995 and, two years ago, in 2003, Al-Amira wa 'l-Sa'louk (The Princess and the Vagabond), currently playing at the National. Of all the Nights -inspired plays, this last one seems at once the tenderest, profoundest, most wistful and most technically ingenious and tantalizing -- an eloquent testimony to Farag's unflagging creativity and imaginative power. Nowhere else -- not even in Al-Tabrizi -- has he achieved such a masterful fusion of dream and reality, fantasy and illusion, blurring the dividing lines between them in the true spirit of the Nights, or of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, or used this technique with such efficiency to question the nature of time, art, reality and the human condition as he does here. While the trip to the past on the wings of the imagination undertaken by the hero, which constitutes the major action in the play and is Farag's own invention, contains a subtle, satirical dig at the vacuous romantic dream of returning to some golden past, entertained by most fundamentalists and religious extremists (which gives the play some topical political relevance), the two tales from The Nights, which introduce two more fantastic trips in the form of a memory or daydream and act as supporting minor actions, evoke the theme of the Fall, adding a new dimension and making the whole play seem like an impossible metaphysical quest. Christening his hero Hassan, after the famous El-Shatir Hassan of The Nights, Farag places him in 18th century Cairo and gives him the job of a scribe. Hassan, however, is no ordinary book-copier; he is also a poet whose fertile imagination leads him to embellish what he copies, particularly The Nights, with what polite society regards as obscene words, erotic descriptions and bawdy rhymes. Hassan's interpolations do not stop at fiction, however, but extend to his copies of Ibn Khaldoun's The Prolegomenon which he invariably annotates with comments and footnotes in which he couches his rebellious political views and criticism of the rulers of the day. Though he seems to spend his days immersed in books, booze and the amorous embraces of various humble mistresses, Hassan arouses the wrath of the authorities who send the police to arrest him on charges of obscenity and political incitement. To elude them, having refused to fly to Upper Egypt, as his friend and employer, the bookseller Ali, advises, he decides to disguise himself as a beggar and stay in his beloved haunts. He believes that he can find safety in disguise and avoid being "alienated from his place and time," as he tells Ali. Ironically, however, the disguise, as it eventually transpires, transports him out of both his place and time, and out of his presumed "real" identity as well, and ultimately acts as a metaphor for the poet's and intellectual's ineluctable existential alienation from his times and society through the agency of the imagination. The disguise activates the first movement of the play which involves a trip -- a total departure from place, time and self -- and unfolds like an inverted Cinderella story in which the ill-smelling beggar in rags is picked out for a husband by a beautiful princess and carried away to her gorgeous palace. The transition from reality to fairy tale, from marketplace to enchanted castle, however, is cunningly managed by Farag under a thin realistic crust to avoid any violent contrasts and to persuade the audience into thinking both worlds belonged to the same plane of reality. The princess is presented in relatively credible realistic terms as a spurned, insulted wife who discovered her husband, Prince Saqr, in the arms of her cook one night, among the dirty pots and pans and supper leftovers in the kitchen, and seeks revenge. She too will humiliate him by taking for a husband the shabbiest, ugliest pauper she can find, and this turns out to be Hassan. Ignorant of her motives, Hassan cannot believe his luck and grows suspicious; and since no rational explanation serves, his imagination flies to The Nights for one. He remembers the story of prince Abuldahab who got lost in a wood chasing a deer on a hunting trip one evening and was nearly seduced to his doom by a she- ogre disguised as a beautiful maiden and intent on eating him for supper. In his imagination, Hassan identifies with the prince in the story and casts princess Zumuruda (Emerald) who woos him in the role of the ogress. The way this story is presented, however, as a narrative in a voice-over, with the action performed in mime by a different set of actors, and with Ali, the bookseller, visibly laying the writing table for Hassan, inviting him to write, and hovering around him like a ministering angel (as Farag instructs in the printed text and was done in performance), further complicates the relation between the stage fiction created by Farag (Hassan and Ali in 18th century Cairo and the story of the marriage and divorce of princess Zumuruda and her revenge plan), the inverted Cinderella theme Farag marshals, and the fictional tale of prince Abuldahab. While the brilliant surface of the text, the visible action and heard dialogue, sweeps the audience along in suspenseful excitement as to what will happen next, the confusion created by the intersecting planes of stage-fiction/stage-reality and its implications are subliminally registered in preparation for the final twist which bursts upon us like a thunderclap. The tale of prince Abuldahab, which arouses Hassan's fears, activates the second movement of the play -- also neatly made up of five scenes, like the first, with the final scene taking us back full circle to the beginning and winding up with a thrilling coup de theatre. While the first movement may be called "the departure", the second could be called "the return"; in both cases, however, and though the play takes the form of a symbolic trip of self-discovery and maturation, in much the same way as A Midsummer does, each of the two words remains ambiguous and constitutes a paradox on account of the constant merging of physical and imaginative reality. "Departure" from what and "return" to what remain teasing, thought-provoking questions long after you read the play or watch the performance. One is vividly reminded of the lovers' dialogue in A Midsummer when they are finally back in Athens and wonder if they are awake or still asleep, dreaming. Having remembered and narrated to us the tale of prince Abuldahab, Hassan urges his friend Ali to report his whereabouts to the police, thinking they will save him from the clutches of the ogress Zumuruda. By the time they arrive at the palace, however, guided by the diligently faithful Ali, Hassan has already been contracted to his captor and does not want to be rescued. The princess manages to convince them to leave him with her till morning and offers him the chance to escape on condition that he divorces her before he leaves. Her purpose in marrying him, as she explains to him, was not simply to punish her husband but to use him as a muhallel. Her divorce from prince Saqr had been final; and according to Islamic Shari'a she cannot take him back as husband, as she wishes to do, until she has married another and got divorced from him. The man who performs this role of intermediary spouse is called Muhallel, from hallal, meaning the man who makes the resumption of the former marriage right and lawful. Intended as a deterrent for Muslim husbands against lightly throwing the divorce oath at their wives, this law has been exploited in a plethora of films and plays as a sexually titillating plot device. In The Princess, however, this hackneyed and much debased popular device is refined and becomes the medium for one of the finest, most lyrical and moving love scenes ever seen in a comedy on the Egyptian stage. And the mystical feel of the scene is enhanced by the setting -- a bathing place -- and the washing ritual which precedes it and symbolically purifies or baptizes the couple. As Hassan initiates the princess into the true meaning of love, the word paradise keeps cropping up on his lips in connection with Zumuruda. Hassan refuses to escape and is willing to risk his freedom for even one night in his newly found paradise. Faced with his rapturous adoration, the princess surrenders her heart to him and leads him out of the washing-place into a hall with seven doors, the seventh of which leads to her boudoir, and asks him to wait till she prepares herself and lets him in. As Zumuruda disappears behind the seventh door, Hassan's imagination, triggered by the name of the door, flies to The Nights ; the seemingly realistic action gives way to the fantastic tale of Abdallah and the forbidden seventh door which first transports him to paradise then to hell. Unlike the story of prince Abuldahab and the ogress in the first movement, which deluded Hassan and nearly deprived him of the sight of paradise, the story of Abdallah (though narrated in a voice-over with mimed action like the first) acts ominously as a true prophecy of Hassan's fate. Like Abdallah, Hassan is impatient for knowledge of the teasing secrets that lie behind the forbidden door and opens it against his mistress's strict injunction. And though the play is now supposed to have reverted to the realistic plane, we are nearly stunned by the sight of screaming women, rushing from the door, carrying lighted oil lanterns, then lying dead on the floor. It is only in the next and last scene that we discover the identity of these wailing women and realise that, unbeknown to us, Farag had shifted the earlier scene at the end to another imaginative plane, as if by a cunning sleight of hand. The final scene, which takes place in a courtroom after Hassan's arrest, though seemingly realistic and supposed to dismiss all the previous action since the disguise as merely a dream, does not completely resolve the mystery surrounding time and reality in the play. Hassan is told that Zumuruda's "palace of pearls", as her castle was called, was burnt down by the princess two hundred and fifty years ago when her father was defeated in battle and she feared capture and humiliation, that the lantern bearers we saw earlier were her women who refused to leave her and died with her in the flames, and that he was captured, not in the palace of pearls as he thinks, but in the slums which grew among the ruins of the old palace, in the arms of a cheap whore. The staggering revelations seem to restore a semblance of rational order to the world of the play, reinstating the dividing lines between dream and reality, truth and fiction. But since all the characters enter the courtroom through the princess's seventh door, one is not absolutely sure, and the level of uncertainty is heightened by the bookseller's defence of Hassan which results in his acquittal. Ali, the bookseller, claims that whoever wrote the offensive verses and footnotes could never have been Hassan since he, the bookseller, used to put clear water instead of ink in the inkpot he used. That the clear, transparent liquid turned into ink on the pages was the work of a devil or a djinni, since every poet is supposed to have one -- what foreigners call "the poetic muse", he adds. The joke is complete when the judge dismisses the case against Hassan and orders the head of the police to seek and arrest the culprit, fugitive muse. That the muse can never be captured or the creative imagination reined in is emphasised by the sudden, startling entrance of princess Zumuruda and her train, exactly as she did in the marketplace scene in the first movement. For one deliciously giddy, disorienting moment, one gazes on in wonder, expecting the action to begin all over again. The princess, however, cuts across the thick layers of fiction which have dazzled and intrigued us throughout, and as she advances to take her bows and present the rest of the cast to the audience, she finally restores us to own present time and reality. With a play of this calibre, no wonder an artist of the calibre of Nur El-Sherif was anxious to take it on and wrestle with it as both director and leading star. That he fell in love with the play, as he writes in the printed programme, is evident in the production. In every scene it seems to revel in the text's intricate, imaginative course, its breathtaking shifts, twists and turns, and to joyfully celebrate the power of the artistic imagination and its miraculous ability to transcend the barriers of place and time and recklessly voyage through the past and future and the realms of the fantastic. Love is a great disciplinarian; and since Nur loved the play, he strove to match its author's eloquent economy and impeccable sense of timing, and translate his exciting imaginative flights into enchanting visual and aural compositions. The temptation of excess was an ever present danger since the play easily lends itself to being turned into a musical. In the hands of another director, it would have been stuffed to bursting point with songs and dances and rambled on for hours. Such a policy, not withstanding its commercial merits, would have completely swamped the intriguing uncertainty of the text and its quizzical charm. As it is, Nur has made some concessions in the interest of clarity. At the end of the first scene, he makes Hassan lie down on the stage and visibly go to sleep; and at the beginning of the final scene, he shows him waking up in the same clothes, as if from a deep sleep. Perhaps Nur was right in judging that the majority of audiences would feel terribly frustrated and confused if he did not ultimately clarify to them, even at the cost of some betrayal to the text, the boundaries between physical and imaginative reality. But to make up for this concession, he charged every scene, even the most mundane, with a subtle degree of ambiguity and a sense of childish "let us pretend". To achieve this, he craftily manipulated his excellent cast, using their physical appearances and vocal modulations, and carefully regulating their performances on a finely graded scale, moving from the quasi-realistic to the openly farcical and studiedly caricaturist. Just as the text hovers between dream and reality, Nur kept the acting hovering between the affecting and affected, keeping his audience guessing all the time. In addition to his excellent cast, which included Manal Salama (the princess), Youssef Ismail (Ali), Said El-Saleh (the beggar Hassan buys his clothes from and later the court clerk), Farouk Ita (prince Saqr), Fadya Okasha (the lady in waiting), Samir Amer (the judge), Mohamed Radwan (the head of the princess's guards) and Mohsen Mansour (the head of the police force), Nur was lucky to have the support of a wonderful technical crew. Ziyad El-Tawil's musical score, with its melodious oriental tunes, was no mere background or frame. Apart from defining the atmosphere of each scene and placing the performance as a whole somewhere between a popular operetta and a nostalgic folk play, it served Nur as an active component of the spectacle, intricately interlacing the dialogue with funny or sarcastic musical phrases to underline the mood and character of the speaker, hint at how his/her words should be received, undercut any bombastic declamations, or intensify the emotional charge of certain scenes. Salah Hafiz's fast changing sets were beautiful and discreetly unobtrusive, foregrounding, with the help of Nancy Abdel-Fatah's lighting, Mona El-Zurqani's elegantly designed and brightly coloured costumes. Her bright reds, blues and yellows were a gorgeous sight which delighted the eye and thrilled the heart. And the studied brightness of this colourful pageant, which Mohamed Shafiq's choreography vividly accentuated, deliberately carried a hint of artificiality, like old pictures in a book of fairy tales come alive -- which is perfectly in tune with the play's prevaricating nature concerning reality and time. Though highly inventive and, despite the intermittent realistic veneer, a clear, elaborate fabrication, The Princess and the Vagabond, whether in reading or performance, flows on smoothly, slowly overwhelming you, sucking you in without your noticing it, touching some chords in the deepest recesses of the self, and continues to haunt you long after you have seen or read it. Like a siren it bewitches you, and as it keeps beckoning, you keep returning to the National in search of wonder and more enchantment.
