Nehad Selaiha staggered by the first crop of spring plays April may be the cruelest month as TS Eliot says; but long before it arrived, with the first intimations of spring in early March, I was greeted at every playhouse I visited with scenes of torture and devastation, chilling groans and shrieks, deafening gunshots and explosions, lugubrious renderings of pain and grief, and lurid images of splintered minds and mutilated bodies. At the National upstairs, where I went to see Another Life (adapted by Mohsen Youssef from Mohamed Salmawy's short story Wafaa Idris, about the famous Palestinian martyr/suicide bomber, and directed by Hossam El-Shazli) I could barely see the way to my seat. The tiny Abdel-Rehim El-Zurqani hall was plunged in darkness while a blinding spotlight was fiercely targeted at the audience as they entered, obliterating all around and making one's eyes smart. In a voice over, at full volume, Ahmed El-Haggar was mournfully intoning to the strains of a lute a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish about freedom, resistance and the heavenly rewards that awaited martyrs. When all were seated, a young woman in a flimsy, flowing white dress floated into view and whirled around for a bit, very ghost-like, then proceeded to snuff out the rows of candles which lined the floor of the space directly facing the audience one by one. This done, she disappeared and the lights came up on the platform at the back. It presented a startling image, like the inside of a part of a house that had just been bombed and was about to collapse. Everything in the set, the walls, doors and windows, or what was left of them (one wall was gone and some windows were mere frames), looked alarmingly skewed and lopsided and the very floor seemed to have partly caved in, leaving the kitchen table and other utensils and bits of furniture hanging (literally by a thread) in midair and threatening to drop any minute. Another lurid detail was a blood-red curtain painted all over with gaunt, black faces, reminiscent of the skull-like face in Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Scream, and covering a door in a nonexistent wall at the back where once the rest of the house was. As the play progresses, and Idris's father, who also died a martyr, keeps appearing through it, all dressed in white, to preach the virtues of martyrdom to all, the strange door turns metaphorically into a passage to the other life emblazoned in the title, thus becoming the focus of the dramatic action and the object of the heroine's dreams. Despite the palpably expressionistic stage and lighting designs, which placed us as audience in the same hopelessly dilapidated and ugly world as the characters, and the symbolic blocking of the two passages leading out of the hall on the right and left of the auditorium (both used as extensions of the set to represent streets outside the house) with Israeli soldiers whenever the heroine attempted to use them, turning them figuratively into invading routes for the enemy and suggesting a state of total siege, both the action and acting were relentlessly realistic. In a series of short, quick, highly emotional and sometimes excessively loud scenes, the play attempts to show Idris (Anne Tork) caught in a deadly tug of war, torn between love and duty, between Eros and Thanatos. The call of life is represented first by her husband who cannot understand her reluctance to become a mother and leaves her for another; then by two friends who urge her to leave armed struggle to men, telling her that a Palestinian woman's first duty is to bring more children into the world to outnumber the enemy, make up for the daily losses in life in the camps and keep the ranks of the resistance well-manned; and, finally, by a comrade who falls in love with her and tries to protect her from her fatal longings. The call of duty, on the other hand, is embodied in the ghost of her father, the memory of her brother, also martyred, a dying fida'i she meets during a raid one night and, above all, in her long-suffering but indomitable mother, forcefully played by Nohair Amin. That Thanatos wins is a forgone conclusion: we know that Wafaa Idris is dead; but even if we did not, we would have guessed it from the word go, and not only on account of the dance of Wafaa's ghost at the beginning. The actual writing failed to generate the necessary tension to convince us of the reality of the conflict in the heroine's mind or to create, or even make a show of initiating an honest, genuine debate of the issue. Both the text and performance seemed to take sides from the start, implicitly arguing at every turn that Wafaa's way was the only one and anyone who thought otherwise was a coward and a collaborator. This diluted the drama in favour of a brand of heightened lyricism, turning the whole thing into an elegy for Idris. This is how it was received and, perhaps, intended. But if so, why was the passage to the other life glorified by the text and celebrated in the title so gruesomely painted? And why was Wafaa's spirit made to snuff out so many candles in the opening scene, plunging the world in darkness? Was this a Freudian slip on the director's part, betraying a certain uneasiness about the play's message -- a sneaking, nebulous doubt that Wafaa's was not, perhaps, the best or only one? Within a week, I was at Faysal Nada Theatre, at the top of Qasr Al-Aini Street. There, Vietnam 2, a private-sector enterprise by Sana Al-Sharq For Media Production, written by Ahmed Mursi and directed by Alaa Quqa, argued for a similar thesis as the earlier play, but in a tougher and more elaborate vein. Once more, the theme was Jihad; but this time the setting was Iraq in the present and the enemy were the American forces there. Made up of two parts (it ran for three hours), the first was dedicated to a quasi Pan- Arab resistance cell, made up of an Iraqi, an Egyptian, a Palestinian living in Jordan and a Moroccan; it shows them waiting for orders, preparing for a dangerous operation involving suicidal missions, negotiating tricky hitches in the plan, struggling with their fears and doubts, vying for the honour of martyrdom and, in between, talking about themselves, their lives, families and sweethearts back home. Were it not for the contentious ideological underpinnings of the play which kept intruding, this part could have been enjoyed as a suspenseful war drama with a warm human element and many flashes of humour. The second part shifts the scene to the inside of an American military base where Dr Ali El- Mohamadi, the leader and mastermind of the group we have just left, and a professor of philosophy to boot, has surrendered himself to free another suspect and is being interrogated and alternately tortured, cajoled, and threatened. His interrogators form an odd trio: General Mac, the outgoing head of the base (played by the author himself) is cool, wily, efficient and ruthlessly practical; general Arthur, the new appointed head (grotesquely rendered by the director), is a vain, sadistic maniac cum dithering idiot, a kind of paranoiac Miles Glorioso who delights in torture and prides himself on the number of people he has shot in the course of his career; lieutenant Johnson (Ahmed Safwat), on the other hand, is an idealistic but gullible philosophy graduate who truly believes he is fighting for the freedom of the Iraqi people. When general Arthur shoots Miguel, one of the two Hispanic soldiers on guard for an imagined trifling offence, Ricardo, his cousin, who was recruited with the promise of American citizenship (sensitively played by Hossam El- Shazli), decides to take revenge and sides with the professor, holding his commanders at gun point. This leaves the professor free, first to torture the sadistic Arthur with electric shocks as he had done to him, then engage the other two in a debate about the rights and wrongs of the war on Iraq. You hear nothing new in this debate, nothing but what the media on either side has been repeating ad nauseam. The audience, however, were delighted to hear their views shouted from the stage and all counter arguments summarily dismissed or bluntly crushed. It thrilled them to hear the Bush administration roundly accused of global vandalism, institutionalised lawlessness, moral hypocrisy and the systematic distortion of the truth to dupe the American people and serve its own ends. The fact that the hero, Wagdi El- Arabi, looked anything but like Osama Bin Laden and his ilk, posed as a rational, enlightened thinker, carefully avoiding religious jargon and cleverly skirting any reference to the reign of terror before the invasion, made his argument appear innocent of ideology and cast him in the role of universal freedom advocate. The sceptics and seculars among the audience, or anyone with different views could relax and even allow themselves to be swept along by the impassioned rhetoric of freedom. In the heat of the moment they could forget that despite its large cast and crew, 22 strong, this was an all-male play tailored to tour in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, that the Egyptian volunteer (Shaaban Hussein), though loveable, treats his daughters as chattel, pledging them in marriage to strangers in absentia as rewards or tokens of friendship, that not only the Iraqi people, but, indeed, all the Arabs are superficially presented as one harmonious entity, with all their conflicts and tensions conveniently swept into the wings, and that by way of a curtain- raiser, a solemn prayer had been recited at the start, dedicating the show to God as an act of worship and hoping it would please Him. As the debate draws to an end, having shamefully halted the action for far too long, it finally transpires that the real purpose of the professor in giving himself up and starting this debate was to divert the attention of the top commanders from security matters while his group infiltrated the base. The final scene, conducted against the sound of deafening explosions and gunshots, shows the professor serenely smiling while general Mac, having overpowered Ricardo and sent him to be shot, points a gun to his head. At the same moment, in a carefully synchronised movement, Lieutenant Johnson, whom the debate has left mentally bruised and deeply shaken, raises a gun to his own head, identifying himself with the Iraqi freedom-fighter and condemning the war beyond any hope of redemption. The scene froze for a minute, and while the audience breathlessly waited for the bangs that never came, the curtain slowly began to close. No need for yet another artificial blast, the director had correctly judged; the rapturous applause of the audience would provide enough real din. And it did. Later in the month, I watched a new Galigula at Al-Taliaa, with the eponymous, bloodthirsty tyrant multiplied by three; The Patience of Job, a Cultural Palaces production hosted at the Open- Air Theatre in the Opera House, where another tyrant, originally a homeless gypsy, bandit and cutthroat, symbolised Israel and viciously gloated over the sickness and long-drawn suffering of an Egyptian Job while inflicting horrors on his nation; and Darkness, at a new space in Al- Salaam Theatre, which featured a grimy, pit-like set, representing the inside of a lighthouse, and consisted of a long, rising monologue which builds up to a frenzied finale, ending in a violent deed, and is delivered at a still, silent man in a wheelchair who, when viciously stabbed by the speaker at the end, turns out to have been dead all along. Faced with such a crop, I could not help thinking that, for this spring, blood and thunder were definitely in.
