Nehad Selaiha finds food for thought in a new production of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children at Al-Hanager I often wish plays could travel across times and cultures unburdened by theories and critical stuff. Imagine reading Oedipus without the shadow of Aristotle often coming between you and the play. What kind of fresh, raw impact would it make on us then? The idea is dizzying. But it is much, much worse when dramatists take it upon themselves to theorise about their own work: their words become gospel and are often wielded as a truncheon against dissident voices. Thank God Shakespeare never attempted such a thing. His silence on his dramatic work, indeed his near indifference to it, though quite baffling and academically frustrating, has been a great blessing: despite the critical tomes that have been heaped upon his plays and the stuffy, crippling interpretations that have been foisted insistently on the innocent public and drilled into the minds of school children and English language students around the world, his silence leaves a gap, a breathing space -- room for the imagination to roam free in his world and even run riot, subverting all preconceived ideas as to meaning and intention. This is perhaps what made Keats hit upon the curious idea of "negative capability" when speaking of Shakespeare's work and is not very far from what some postmodernists mean when they conditionally link presence to absence; it is also why Shakespeare is so universal, always so relevant and never dates. Brecht is an altogether different kettle of fish. In his major plays, he stuns you by his capacity to match Shakespeare's almost unbeatable sense of the theatrical, his poetical prowess, his uncommon delight in the earthy wisdom and language of the common people, his daring ethical questionings, and his intuitive grasp of the flimsiness, innate instability and rich elusiveness and diverseness of what, for abstractive convenience, we term 'human nature'. Unfortunately, however, he arrived in Egypt rigidly swaddled in layers upon layers of obfuscating theory spun by no one but himself. That it was obfuscating was a mercy: it made room for difference, and difference is often, and according to Islam, as a verse from the Qur'an tells us, is "a mercy." In 1963, Brecht was first introduced in Egypt with a production of his The Exception and the Rule at the elitist pocket theatre (a somewhat ironical detail since his plays were specifically intended for the masses and working classes) and this was immediately followed, almost accompanied in the same year, by a translation of his A Short Organum for the Theatre by Farouk Abdel-Wahab. And there was the rub. From that time on, you could not approach any of that great poet's plays without the critics and academicians immediately assuming a fearfully solemn pose and taking up his theories, particularly his Verfremdung, or alienation effect, to use them as a rigid yardstick with which to thrash the director. This usually resulted in endless, elaborate critical squabbles, passionately conducted, where everyone appeared more Brechtian than Brecht. In a letter to an unidentified actor, dated 1951, Brecht writes (in John Willett's translation): "I have been brought to realize that many of my remarks about the theatre are wrongly understood. I realize this above all from those letters and articles which agree with me. I then feel as a mathematician would do if he read: Dear Sir, I am wholly of your opinion that two and two make five." Later on he explains to the befuddled actor that what he, the actor, took as his (Brecht's) "insistence that the actor oughtn't to be completely transformed into the character portrayed but should, as it were, stand alongside it criticizing and approving" was a wrong impression caused by his "way of writing" and hastens to add: "To hell with my way of writing." Brecht was too good a poet not to realise that "a realistic theatre," as he advised the anonymous actor, "must be peopled by live, three-dimensional, self-contradictory people, with all their passions, unconsidered utterances and actions." In directing his plays, he never imposed the doctrines he laid down in the Short Organum ; in a note to the letter Willett assures us they were, "by all accounts, neither discussed nor put into practice in the Berliner Ensemble." Indeed, Regine Lutz, one of the Ensemble's principal performers from 1949 told Willett that she had never read Brecht's theoretical works. As you read through Willett's carefully annotated compilation of Brecht's notes and theoretical writing in Brecht On Theatre, you progressively realise that what Brecht hated most in theatre, the prime art of lying, was, simply, lying: pretending that the staged pageant was reality, or a spectacle replicating reality -- and what is worse, a reality that was permanent, unalterable. It meant fixing reality beyond any hope of change, any hope of redemption, and for him this spelt not only a curse but a damned and damning lie. If theatre had any meaning at all for Brecht, it was to awaken us to the ineluctable reality of change -- the only certain fact in life. What Brecht wanted fiercely to guard was the theatricality of theatre -- its essence as imagined, transient, alternative reality, approved for a while by provisional consensus; the purpose in creating it was not to miserably replicate or fancifully, vicariously supplant the real, but to question what we comfortably, lethargically, take for reality, whatever colour or mask we choose to put on it -- to nudge this illusion out of its firmly ensconced corner in our minds and force us to face the challenge of freedom -- the freedom of recreating ourselves and the world. This is the reason, perhaps, why Brecht hated naturalism. To the anonymous actor he warns that "a complete fusion of the actor with his role which leads to his making the character seem so natural, so impossible to conceive any other way, that the audience has simply to accept it as it stands" can result in "a completely sterile atmosphere of 'tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner'." But Brecht's dream of "quite a new attitude on the part of the actor," and his vehement rejection of the assumption underlying naturalistic acting that "people are what they are, and will remain so whatever it may cost society or themselves: 'indestructibly human', 'you can't change human nature' and so on," were tall orders and have both come to grief. Mother Courage was a case in point. Written in 1939, it was meant as a cautionary tale which shows through the fate of a common, ignorant, defenseless small-trader, Anna Fierling, the consequences of blindly battening on war and failing to develop the right kind (read Communist) of political awareness. Consciously, Brecht intended to make the audience believe that the essence of Anna's courage was a rabid commercial instinct, to make money out of the war whatever the cost to her self and family and remain ignorant of her terrible losses till the end. What comes across in the play, however, is her fierce instinct for survival. This is emblazoned as a caption that sums up her character in the first scene as she marches in singing: "Wherever life has not died out / It staggers to its feet again." And though she professes loyalty to the Protestant "Hero King" of Sweden, she instinctively knows that no matter what "the big shots say," that "they're waging war for almighty God and in the name of everything that's good and lovely", if you look closer, as she says in Scene Three, you will find "they ain't so silly, they're waging it for what they can get". To ordinary folk, like her, "victory and defeat both come expensive". The best thing for the likes of her is "when politics get bogged down solid". Her acrid ethical cynicism and a-moral, pagan wisdom reaches a hyperbolic yet credible (and quite endearing for citizens of the third world) zenith as she thanks the Lord that humans are corruptible. "After all," she tells the Chaplain, "they ain't wolves, just humans out for money. Corruption in humans is same as compassion in God. Corruption is our only hope. Long as we have it, there'll be lenient sentences and even an innocent man'll have a chance of being let off." Of this kind of earthy wisdom, Mother Courage has a lot more to say, and Brecht seems intent on solidly framing her words as if they were coded messages. Though her title was ironically won on account of her braving her way with her wagon through a fierce battle to sell 50 loaves of molding bread before they became inedible, and though she haggles over the price of her wagon as her son faces death and consequently loses him, and though her daughter's life was blighted at the beginning and continues to be wasted beyond a hope of salvation on account of her mercenary interests, soiled, crass, ugly and vulgar Mother Courage emerges a heroine. The last scene in which she is shown alone, pulling along her cart, having lost all her three children in a war she had sought to profit from -- a scene which follows the death of her dumb daughter Kattrin in a heroic attempt to wake up the sleeping Lutheran city before it is massacred by Catholic soldiers -- this last scene, as Martin Esslin puts it (in Brecht: A Choice of Evils ), was intended to "arouse the spectator's indignation that such blindness and stupidity were possible. The public was to leave the theatre determined that something positive must be done to stop wars." "But when Mother Courage was first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus with Therese Giese, an actress of great power in the title role," as Esslin relates, "the public's response was quite different: they were moved to tears by the sufferings of a poor woman who, having lost her three children, heroically continued her brave struggle and refused to give in." For them, she was "an embodiment of the eternal virtues of the common people." Brecht was naturally enraged. He bitterly complained (in a note to the revised text of the play in the ninth volume of Versuche ) that "The first performance of Mother Courage gave the bourgeois press occasion to talk about a Niobe-tragedy and about the moving endurance of the female animal." Warned by this experience, he rewrote the play for a fresh production by the Berliner Ensemble, making some alterations to emphasise the negative aspects of his heroine and entrusted the role to his wife, the great Helene Weigel. Once again the production was a triumph, and once again for all the wrong reasons as far as Brecht, who directed it, was concerned. The leading Communist critic, Max Schroeder, according to Esslin, described the heroine as "a humanist saint from the tribe of Niobe and the mater dolorosa. " The resilience of Mother Courage in the face of oppression and her undefeatable spirit in adversity which won her popular support disturbed the East German authorities. More unsettling still was the apparent, automatic identification in the minds of the East German public between the beastly soldiers Mother Courage denounces but has to deal with, and the Russian Soldiers parading the streets of East Berlin. An epilogue was suggested to Brecht -- something with a more positively Communist message, something which, according to Esslin, "showed that she had at last realized that she would have to become politically active." Brecht was too good a poet and playwright to succumb to such pressures. Though Mother Courage continued to gainsay his precepts and gain sympathy however cold and detached the style of acting adopted, he preserved the integrity of the text, leaving us with the sight of the bereaved Anna, dragging her wagon solo and silently at the end. The fact that Brecht's characters invariably belie their author's pronounced, printed, and zealously translated, propagated and academically canonised intentions has always proved a stupendous obstacle when it came to staging his plays, at least in Egypt. As with the rest of the Western European dramatic heritage, we have had to accept with all the imported writers, as part of a deal, all the theoretical trappings and critical dead wood of centuries that cling to them like preservative leeches. Every time a Brecht play is attempted, wild controversy erupts. The academics are up in arms, with the reviewers hanging on to their tails. Verfremdung is dutifully, almost piously trotted out and imaginary rules, for which Brecht himself has failed to provide any measuring tables, are diligently marshaled and patrolled to catch out the actors and director. Amr Qabil, a brilliant young director, with many successful forays into world drama at university and the French cultural centre, has been the most recent victim of this hilariously farcical but dreadfully painful exercise. The first thing I was asked when the show was mentioned was whether it was 'properly Brechtian'. I stupidly gaped as I usually do when faced with such stupid questions. I have been teaching Brecht's plays and his dubious theories for years and every time it is a novel and exciting experience. There are no conclusions, no certain ways, no final, binding interpretations. His texts are eternal ventures into the wonders of life and enchanting virtuosity of theatre, and this is what I would like to think Amr Qabil learnt in the postgraduate diploma course I taught him at the Academy of Arts. I also like to think that that course of lectures, or interactive discussions and reflections, as it really was, was the spark which brought about the union of Qabil as director and TV star Dalal Abdel-Aziz who attended the same course. With so much fighting around, so close to home, and much of it masquerading as holy wars, Qabil's choice of play made perfect timing. Though rendered in classical Arabic, with no local visual markers of any kind, the play seemed to leap across the years and land right into the heart of the present; no one in the audience could fail to make the connection between what takes place on stage and what is taking place in Iraq. Qabil was so confident of this he avoided all gimmickry, using white lighting in most scenes, uncostly neutral costumes (properly drab and shabby), a simple, grubby set (by Nabil El-Halwagi), made up of screens at the back to reflect the shadows of fires and explosions and a wooden scaffolding, supporting a bridge, with a ladder on each side, hung over with a yellow brass plate which serves as Kattrin's drum while strongly suggesting a huge coin. This simple, fiercely stark set, which left the stage free for the actors and Mother Courage's wagon, seemed curiously to echo Brecht's thoughts on stage design. In an undated, unpublished note unearthed by Willett, Brecht says: "Space needs to be brought to life in the vertical plane. This can be achieved by stairs." The set, too, must, on the time scale, become plainly intensified; "it must have its own climax and special round of applause." In the production, the two ladders leading up to the bridge on top are alternately negotiated by the soldiers of both camps and the chaplain: the former as if to reach the coin; the latter as if to reach God. Neither makes it to the top; only the dumb Kattrin does, transforming the coin into a drum and a saving grace to the sleeping town and dying in the process. Yasmine Youssef's anxious, hesitant look upward as she gingerly tackled the first rungs, gaining in courage and determination and she moved to the top, her furiously passionate beating of the brass circle once she was there and the sight of her bullet-riddled body as it slumped across the edge then slid to the ground down a black wooden cross brought out by the pious farmers, gave El-Halwagi's set, in Brecht's words, "its own climax and special round of applause". Such intelligent manipulation of the set on Qabil's part was matched by his sound judgment in the choice of venue, soundtrack and cast. Where else in Cairo nowadays but at Al-Hanager would you find an artistic director willing to sponsor a sensitive, even dangerous text like Mother Courage, with all its shocking, iconoclastic pronouncements uncensored, and put up with almost a year and a half rehearsal time? Once more, Huda Wasfi has worked against the odds, braving the deathly miasma that has been fast enwrapping the theatre for a while, and championing a young and virtually unknown director to prove that there is hope still. And to Wasfi too, the star of the show, Dalal Abdel-Aziz, owes a big debt of gratitude. Dalal is a very beautiful woman and a richly talented, vivid and vivacious performer. She started her career in cinema, video and vaudeville, scoring many successes and becoming a popular star. But when Wasfi, in a magnificent, imaginative fit of bravado, chose her to star as the eponymous heroine in Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena Marturano at the National in 1998, opposite Yehya El-Fakharani, with an Italian director (Mariano Regilio), the experience seemed to transform her, causing a deep upheaval in her life, and introducing her to the joy of serious acting even in the most comical of parts. Though a university graduate, with a degree in agriculture, she set about rebuilding herself, first joining the English Department programme at the Cairo Open University, then the postgraduate artistic appreciation programme at the Academy of Arts. Since then, even those who only know her through television serials have noted her vast, stunning development as an actress. But Filumena is one thing and Mother Courage quite another. It was on Dalal's request that we veered the course in a Brechtian direction, using Mother Courage and her Children as a model on which to test Brecht's concept of epic theatre. Qabil had already suggested to her the part and though terribly awed by it she was as always defiant and adventurous. She read Brecht and his theories and having digested what she could of them laid them aside and plunged headlong into the role. Though plump and rosy-cheeked, unlike anything remotely resembling the gaunt, austere figure of Helene Veigel in the preserved photos of the Brecht's production of the play, she was undaunted and intuitively drew courage and inspiration from her innately sound and solid sense of theatre and Brecht's insistence that acting "is not a cold and mechanical operation" and that the actor's prime duty is to have "real contact with his new audience and a passionate concern for human progress". With two sure-footed, experienced actors supporting her performance -- Asem Nagati as the Chaplain and Sherif Awwad as the Cook -- and a wonderful team of young actors, including the graceful Dalia El- Guindi as the prostitute Yvette and the silently eloquent and quite riveting Yasmine Youssef as her daughter, Kattrin, Dalal dominated the stage like a veritable whirlwind and gave a powerful, moving, fascinating and often delightfully hilarious performance. Was it meticulously Brechtian? Who cares?
