Nehad Selaiha chases after Akhenaton in Ataba square and finds him doubling as Oedipus Many years ago, I came across Immanuel Velikovsky's intriguing book, Oedipus and Akhnaton: Myth and History (1960). The author's ingenious and highly fanciful attempt to equate the mythological Greek Oedipus with the historical Egyptian Akhenaten, piecing together all sorts of clues, real and imaginary, in the true style of a detective novel, to build a convincing case and credible argument, was quite fascinating and highly entertaining. Though its historical veracity was clearly very much in doubt, as my brother, a trained Egyptologist, assured me, advising me to read it as pure "fiction", Velikovsky's crackpot narrative and many fanciful conjectures caught the imagination of the reading public in Egypt when the book was done into Arabic and inspired at least one dramatist to make it into a play. Mahdi Bunduq's Akher Ayyam Akhnaton (The Last Days, or Day, of Akhenaten -- as the phrase in Arabic could mean either) which I watched last week at Al-Tali'a is not, however, the first Egyptian play to tackle the story of the fall of this visionary, rebel pharaoh. In 1957, Alfred Farag's The Fall of a Pharaoh -- Akhenaten being the pharaoh in question -- was staged at the National by veteran director and actor Hamdi Gheith. Farag's play, however, which predates the publication of Velikovsky's book by some three years, ignores the presence and political influence of Queen Tiy, the beautiful and powerful mother of Akhenaten and matriarch of the Amarna family, whom Velikovsky identifies as Oedipus's mother, queen Jocasta. Though written in classical Arabic in the mould of a classical tragedy, the play seems too schematic and somewhat forced, landing us with a gallery of pallid figures and a specious and somewhat simplistic political message to the effect that a creed of peace and love needs military might to sustain it -- a message which ironically reverberates in the current political rhetoric of the USA. The idea of Akhenaten as the pioneer of monotheistic religion, promoted by Sigmud Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism, is extolled without any critical questioning or evaluation and the renegade pharaoh is pictured as a prophet and dreamer caught in a web of political intrigue and too idealistic to cope with it. One is only too thankful that the play stops short of identifying Akhenaten with the Hebrew prophet Moses who, according to Jewish, Christian and Islamic holy writ is said to have led the Israelites out of Egypt across the Red Sea -- as the Egyptian Ahmed Osman later proposed in his Biblical and Egyptian History. Akhenaten's peculiar appearance and controverted, ambiguous sexual identity were also issues that Farag steered clear of, together with the monarch's relationship with his adored mother and his firstborn daughter Miretaten (Beloved of Aten), or Mayati, as she was nicknamed in the Amarna Letters, whom he is believed to have married at one point. Indeed, wading through Cyril Aldred's Akhenaten: King of Egypt (1988), William L.Moran's The Amarna Letters (1992), or Donald B. Redford's Akhenaten: The Heretic King (1984), one is surprised at the richness of the dramatic material available in that pharaoh's life (even before those books were published) and cannot help wondering at Farag's abstemious handling of his subject. Written in the wake of the 1956 tripartite attack on Egypt, Farag's play had strong topical relevance when it was performed; nowadays, however, it seems to have little dramatic worth and, unlike most of his other plays, is seldom revived in the regional theatre or by amateur groups. By contrast, and undoubtedly under the heavy influence of Velikovsky's book, Mahdi Bunduq (an Alexandrian poet and writer boasting some 12 verse dramas on historical or mythological themes, ranging from Electra and Lear to Queen Hatshepsut, Noah and the Trojan war) recklessly embraced the controversial and much debated details of Akhenaten's personal life and relationships and with a little help from the imagination wove them into a suspenseful family melodrama involving incest, murder and revenge. Miretaten, or Miret as she is called in the play, is foregrounded as at once the daughter and sister of Akhenaten, and though she is romantically attached to her father, as a conversation with her Mitannian step-grandmother, Maya, reveals at the beginning, while he, in turn, confesses a secret desire for her at the end, she is given a one-night plebeian lover called Shi -- a word commonly used in Egypt to urge donkeys to move. In Bunduq's hands, Miret becomes a rich, complex character, forward, witty and strong-willed, at once romantic and ruthlessly practical. When her father/brother is finally overthrown and she is offered the throne on condition that she marrys her brother Smenkhkare, whom she detests, and abjure the worship of Aton, she accepts without hesitation and stabs her lover to death when he tries to stop her. Equally forceful is the presence of queen Tiy. Though physically absent, she dominates the play as the family's skeleton in the cupboard. Building on Akhenaten's correspondence with Tushratta, the king of Mitanni, which evidences the queen-mother's active role in foreign affairs and her cordial relation with the Asiatic king, Bunduq sends her on an imaginary secret trip in disguise to Mitanni with the purpose of satisfying her sexual cravings after her husband's death. There, Bunduq goes on to fantasize, the priests who regard the copulation of royal mothers and sons as sacred, arrange a sexual encounter between her and her son who happens to be there at the time -- an encounter which eventually produces Miret. In the heat of the orgiastic ritual, the couple fail to recognize each other. Tiy, however, discovers the truth upon her return to Egypt and with the help of Maya, her husband's Mitannian wife whom she regards as a daughter on account of her tender years, and Aye, the pharaoh's uncle and chief priest, who was also, historically, in control of the army, tries to abort herself. When the attempt fails, Akhenaten's bride, the beautiful Nefertiti, comes to the rescue and to save the queen- mother's honour and protect the throne leads everybody, including her husband, to believe that Miret is her own daughter by Akhenaten. Bunduq handles the revelation of this awesome secret with cunning dexterity to generate maximum suspense, while making it a turning point in the drama and in Akhenaten's and Miret's characters. The structure of classical tragedy he opted for, particularly the Aristotelian unity of time, helped him greatly in this respect. The compression of the whole drama in 24 hours -- a night and the following day till night -- with the play opening near the climax, when the plot against the king is about to hatch, triggered a sense of tremendous excitement and secured a galloping rhythm. The king's secret is tantalizingly trickled out, bit by bit, in various scenes and different moods until it fully comes out into the open in the king's confrontation with Maya. When he finally realises his guilt, the gentle, loving monarch, who spent his time meditating, seeking higher knowledge and composing lyrics and hymns to Aten, loses his innocence, and with it his self-respect and everything he believed in; he discovers that the idyllic kingdom he thought to have built was a charade, a wasteland infested with ignorance, greed and poverty, and that the self he believed to be as transparent as a clear pool under the sun, as he tells his wife in Bunduq's text, was really turbid and muddy at bottom. This is not all there is to The Last Day of Akhenaton however. Round the domestic tragedy which engages the centre of the play, Bunduq deftly embroiders, by way of a frame, a fantastic story about an alien from outer space, called Hermes, who lives in another planet and travels through space and time in a pyramid- shaped spaceship-cum-time-machine. On one of his tours, he picks up an Egyptian writer from our "decadent and much degraded" times by the name of Deeb. Together they journey back to the 14th century BC in search of a nobler age and to meet Akhenaten and his enchanting queen. Both, however, are arrested and thrown in prison shortly after they land: Hermes on a charge of lunacy and hallucination, and Deeb for being the spit image of a peasant who killed his neighbour. In the cell, they meet Shi, a poor, temple scribe accused of stealing some chickens. What Shi really stole were some secret temple documents, but the authorities would not admit it. The purpose of the theft was to publicise these papers among the people and reveal to them how they were conned, fleeced and exploited by Akhenaten's priests in the name of religion. This delightful, modest character, a combination of sage and clown, speaks for the common people in the play and provides a critical perspective on Akhenaten's new religion. As far as Shi and his like are concerned, the new faith has made little difference to their lives, perhaps made them worse. Theology does not interest Shi in the least. Instead of keeping his head in the clouds and composing hymns to Aten, Akhenaten would do better to think of some project to alleviate the suffering of his people. Too much gazing at the sun, Shi believes, has made him blind to it. When Shi realises that Hermes has a formula by which the rays of the sun can be turned into industrial energy and used to root out poverty, he engineers their escape from prison and another line of action develops, centering on the trio's attempt to meet Akhenaten and give him this new technology in the hope that it may rally the people round him and help him overcome his enemies. The chase of Akhenaten takes them in different directions: Hermes back to his ship; Deeb back to prison, and Shi first to Miret's room in the palace, then to the cave she retires to with Akhenaten to meditate and write poetry. In that cave they open their hearts to each other, read Akhenaten's poetry and eventually make love. Ironically, however, Shi never leaves this cave. What he thought was a secure haven and love-nest soon turns into a prison, then a tomb when Miret stops on her way to mount the throne to stab him. But for this love story between Miret and Shi, this whole line of action would have seemed mechanically foisted and quite redundant, and the ideological message it carries would have come across as hollow propaganda. The love story between princess and beggar and her ruthless stabbing of him when he seems to stand in her way gives dramatic weight to the play's critique of both Akhenaten's faith and rule, implicitly arguing that he fell not because of the secret opposition of a powerful priesthood or of a powerful army which resented his peace policy, but because his religious revolution did not extend to his way of life and was not coupled with a socio-economic one regarding the whole country. In a powerful, stormy confrontation between Akhenaten and Nefertiti, the political implications of montheism are aired and scrutinised: while he claims it spells the equality of all people and races since they all worship one god, she translates it into global hegemony -- the political and military supremacy of the nation who invented the one god. In the final scene, which brings all the thematic threads together, Shi finally gets to meet Akhenaten to reveal to him, through his daughter's deed, that he has been a hypocrite all along, caring only for himself and nursing an elitist religion; or, as someone eloquently put it, setting up with a group of sympathizers "their tabernacle to the daily light, in serene unconsciousness of the total darkness that enveloped all around and grew daily darker and more threatening." This revelation marks the final stage of the king's awakening to his reality and also of Shi's. For just as the revelation of the past, guilty secret is carefully ladled out in measured doses in the first half, the awakening to the truth of the principal characters in the second is also managed in careful stages and the balance of the two processes is delicately measured and beautiful to perceive. For both Akhenaten and Shi, the king and the commoner, however, the awakening comes too late, when all was lost. What remains of it is a lesson to future generations and rulers, delivered by Akhenaten as an elegy to Shi. One could of course argue that both Hermes and Deeb are dramatically redundant, serving only as a mouthpiece for the author and, indeed, they could be easily removed in theory without much damage to the play. In performance, however, the sci-fi frame provided by Mohamed Dardiri as Hermes, robot-like, in a glossy metallic suit, and Ashraf Saleh, as Deeb, in a shirt and trousers with a sheepskin coat which he later donates to Shi who, in turn, gives it to Miret when she is cold, seemed essential to the introduction of Shi and his ideas. Though director Ahmed Hani made a few excisions, omitting some rapturous tirades by Akhenaten and the conspirators' scene, vividly reminiscent in its ugly haggling of a similar scene in Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, a pity, I think, and though he translated some verbal stretches into visual stage imagery, specially the incestuous coupling of mother and son, using the technique of the shadow play, and though he punctuated the work with ritualistic scenes of worship and presented the royal marriage of Miritaten and Smenkhkare as a nightmare of the feverish Shi, he did well to keep the thin sci-fi outer line proposed in the opening scene. Indeed, Mahdi Bunduq was quite lucky to have Hani for a director. Verse dramas, particularly on historical themes such as Akhenaten, can be quite forbidding and cripple the imagination, especially if you are working on a very modest budget. Ahmed Hani did the wise thing; he saved up on stars' wages, using a cast of relatively unknown but competent actors and an excellent artistic team, including stage-designer Ramzi Bayoumi, costume-designer Huda El-Segeini, choreographer Mohamed Ramzi and composer Fathi El-Khamisi, all of whom did a wonderful job. Bayoumi's fast-changing, accurate sets, and El-Segieni's studied costumes, in particular, were a great asset to the show and evidenced a great deal of loving care and dedication. They seemed a natural part of the place and easily, seamlessly fitted every dramatic location and character. They carried us back, smoothly, without any seeming effort or hitches, to ancient Egypt as we imagine it to have been -- quite a feat if you consider the laborious, rigid and falsely stylized productions dealing with that era, such as Al Hanger's The Trial of the Priest, adapted by Mohsen Misilhi from a short story by Bahaa Tahir and directed by Nur El-Sherif in the late nineties -- about the same time Bunduq published his play. For Hani's actors, I have nothing but heart-felt gratitude and a rapturous accolade. Working for months with next to no money, sometimes with no money at all, as Hani told me, they poured their hearts and energies into the play, coming up with a performance worthy of the National. I was surprised to discover that Naglaa Yunis, who played Miret, and whom I have known as an excellent dancer in Walid Aouni's School of Modern Dance at the Creativity Centre and watched in some fringe performances at Al-Hanager and elsewhere, has blossomed into a full-fledged actress, delivering a difficult part, and in classical Arabic verse, as if she had spoken this brand of language since birth. She spoke firmly, correctly and feelingly and moved with the lightness and grace of a swan swimming in her natural waters; in every scene she figured, her lithe, slim, willowy figure, her girlish but well-trained voice and her strong personality and vivid stage presence captured the hearts of the audience. Other delightful acting surprises were Mahmoud Isa, a student at the Cinema institute, who undertook the colourful and extremely taxing part of Shi as his stage debut, negotiating all its tricky shifts and corners with admirable dexterity and coming out safe at the end, and Rehab Maher who undertook the difficult part of Nefertiti. Though not extensively shadowed in a psychological or ideological way, her part needed force, energy and concentration. In terms of looks, she also had to battle with the inherited image of Neferiti, popularised by her Berlin bust. To her credit, she made us forget it and concentrate on the suffering, struggles and fears of Bunduq's queen. Shaduwe El-Garhi, as Maya, invested a seemingly simple and straightforward part with rich psychological depth and kept us wondering about her true affiliation till the end. Hisham El-Sherbini, however, had a more arduous task handling Akhenaten. A handsome young man, he had to approximate the peculiar physical appearance of Akhenaten in his extant artistic representations and at the same time come across a credible human being, a king, poet, rebel, mystic, inveterate sensualist and dreamer, as Bunduq fashioned him. He managed all aspects of the character with great efficiency and was alternately moving and repelling. But the real, real surprise of this show was Emil Shawqi whom I have known as a student in the Academy of Arts and a director at both El-Tali'a and Al-Hanager. I had never seen him act and I was quite bowled over by his performance of Aye. Every time he walked on stage, you felt he was like a magnet, drawing all the actors into his circle and regulating their movements and responses. It was at once eerie and gratifying. It comes from having managed actors for such a long time, he lightly told me. I watched The Last Day of Akhenaton twice and the last time was the last performance. I found myself crying at the end. Why do beautiful things have to disappear so quickly?
