Nehad Selaiha discovers the allure of hidden things in The Curtain at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Though Youssef Idris has left us six plays, including his ground-breaking, Al-Farafeer (The Underlings, 1964), he is best known and loved for his short stories and novellas which continue to attract theatre and film makers till today. In his lifetime, six of his stories were turned into movies, with big stars in the lead, gifted directors and prestigious script- writers when he himself was not undertaking the job. In 1963, Qisat Hob (Love Story), for which he wrote the scenario and dialogue, was screened under the title La Waqta lil Hob (No Time for Love) and starred Faten Hamama and Rushdi Abaza as the romantic couple caught in the 1956 war. It was so successful that within less than two years Hamama was back on the screen in another Idris story, Al-Haraam (The Forbidden), with playwright Saadeddin Wahba writing the screen version this time. It was followed in 1967 by Idris's own adaptation of Al-'Eib (Shame) in 1967 -- a scathing social satire with a strong romantic element, starring Lubna Abdel-Aziz and Rushdi Abaza. In the 1970s Shame was successfully serialised for television and there were three more films: Qaa' Al-Madina (The City's Lower Depths, 1974) adapted by Ahmed Saleh and starring Nadia Lutfi, 'Ala Waraq Sulifan (On Cellophane Paper, 1975) scripted by Kawthar Haykal and also starring Lutfi, and Al-Nadaha (The Siren, 1975) starring Magda. After his death in 1991, a television play was made out of his story Al-Sheikh Sheikha -- a punning title which sounds in Arabic like the word shoukhshikha, meaning a rattle, and refers to the central character in the story, a village idiot, while budding filmmakers continued to use his stories in graduation projects at the Cinema Institute and short feature films at the National Cinema Centre. The most recent of these was Marwan Hamid's Kan Labud An Tutfi'i Annur Ya Leila (You Should Have Put Out The Light, Leila). In theatre, the fact that Idris was himself a playwright, and a very fussy one who did not brook the slightest interference with his texts, put paid to any attempts at adapting any of his stories for the stage in his lifetime. It is enough to remember his long and bitter wrangling with Karam Metawi' over Al- Farafeer in the 1960s and with Mohamed Subhi and Galal El-Sharqawi over a planned production of Al- Bahlawan (The Circus Clown or Acrobat) in the 1980s -- a project which eventually miscarried -- to understand why dramaturges shied away from his fictional works while he lived. He had a hot temper and a weekly column in which he could publicly tear to shreds anyone who dared gainsay him or meddle with his works. Ironically though, when he died in 1991 and was safely out of the picture, so to speak, theatre people chose to honour his memory not by reviving his plays as he would have wished, but rather by making free with his short stories and transferring several of them to the stage. In 1992, the second Free Theatre Festival was dedicated to his works and most of the plays presented were stage-reworkings of his short stories and non-dramatic writings, including his famous three articles -- Towards an Egyptian Theatre -- published in 1964 by way of a critical, mind- setting introduction to his Al-Farafeer. The most memorable of these adaptations was Tareq Sa'id scintillating Ansaf Al-Tha'irin (Demi-Rebels) in which six short stories were drawn on to structure the script. By the end of the 1990s, Rasha Khairy had dramatised Beit min Lahm (House of Flesh), first performed as an amateur student show at the American University in 1998, then transferred to the state-theatre sector by director Asem Nagati and presented at the house of Zeinab Khatoun in 1999, and poet Sayed Higab had adapted three short stories into three little operas and composed the lyrics for them. Set to music by Sherif Mohieddin and directed by Mohsen Hilmi, Mashouq Al-Hams (Whisper Powder), Halet Talabbus (Caught in the Act), and Fawqa Hudoud Al- 'Aql (Beyond Reason) were performed at the Small Hall of the Opera House, with Nivene Allouba and Ashraf Sweilam singing the lead parts. The venture proved successful and was even more so when it was revived in 2001, at Al-Gumhouriya Theatre, in a new, untraditional production by young singer and opera director Mohamed Abul-Kheir. In his production, Abul-Kheir rearranged the sequence of the triple bill, beginning with Beyond Reason (which had featured last in the earlier production on account of its large cast to guarantee a "grand finale"), then working his way through Caught in the Act with its more limited cast and ending with the two-hander Whisper Powder. Behind this new arrangement was a directorial conception which sought to link the three operas through the theme of incarceration central to all of them and translate it theatrically into three variations which, together, form a visual progression from the large metaphoric prison of family, society and conservative traditions to a real prison, made up of endless small cells, and inhabited by people who long to reach each other but are doomed to isolation. Whereas Hilmi's production had wound up with a positive choral conflagration, Abul-Kheir's ended with a whimper. The most recent theatrical foray into the fictional world of Idris was masterminded by Swiss director Thea Dumsch and developed in May-June 2004 in a writing workshop attended by Tareq Said, Abeer Ali, Maher Sherif, Amani Smir, Rasha Abdel-Moneim and Mohamed Abdel-Khaliq -- all founders and members of independent theatre groups -- and organised by the Pro Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland in collaboration with Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the "I Act" foundation. Dumsch had read a selection of stories by Idris done into German and thought The Curtain could transfer well to the stage. For 14 days she worked with the group over the text, in close collaboration with the actors, formulating many ideas, improvised scenes and tentative scripts. At the end of the fortnight, Dumsch commissioned Tariq Sa'id and Maher Sherif to write the final script, incorporating many of the contributions of the group. The script was then translated into German for Dumsch to add the final touches, then redone into Arabic and put in rehearsal. It finally opened on 5 February, playing three nights at the big theatre in the Bibliotheca, with Nariman Barakat as the wife, Khaled Raafat as the husband, Andreas Storm as the European friend of the family, and Arifa Abdel- Rasoul, Salah El-Sayeh, Ahmed Hosni and Said Qabil as the relatives of the couple; on the 12th, it moved to Cairo with the same set and cast where it played six nights at El-Sawy Cultural Centre. Compared to the story, the stage version of The Curtain fails to capture the delicate tinge of irony which shades the objective tone the narrator maintains throughout, allowing him to keep his characters at a safe emotional distance and offer them as typical social specimens to be analysed and sneered at. One also misses the pervasive satirical intent of the narrative and Idris's subtle humorous exposure of the cowardice, hypocrisy, self-delusion and false bravado underlying the mores and morals of the Egyptian middle classes. In the story, Bahig (called Bahgat in the play) is a typical Egyptian middle-class male who after graduating, getting a job and sowing his wild oats decides to settle down and get married. He chooses a beautiful young woman with no career ambitions to share his life, and she is happy to stay at home and play housewife. On the outside, Bahig and Sanaa (or Sunsun as he calls her) seem like a modern Egyptian couple with no hangovers from the past; deep down, however, both cling to the old concepts of hunting male and hunted female. Though he trusts his wife absolutely, has infinite faith in her loyalty, as the narrator repeatedly assures us, and publicly professes to a faith in the equality of the sexes, among other progressive ideas, Bahig cannot shake off his deep-seated, inherited belief in the evil designs of men and the frailty and fickleness of women; his many sexual escapades before marriage have taught him to unexceptionally distrust both sexes. His wife, on the other hand, though strong and wilful, feeds his protective urge by posing as a helpless female in order to boost his male vanity, monopolise his sexual attention and tighten her hold on him -- a typical oriental feminine ploy. At this stage, though no material curtain appears, the ideas, masks, tactics and protective illusions of both husband and wife constitute a metaphoric blind which hides their reality from both themselves, each other and the outside world. The fact that this outwardly modern, inwardly traditional young couple live in Heliopolis (in Arabic: Masr Al-Gedida, meaning new Egypt) has symbolic import and enhances the irony of the situation. All goes well for a while until the old widow living across the street, in a flat which faces the couple's, moves out and a new tenant moves in. Bahig had hoped the new tenant would be a beautiful young woman with whom he could surreptitiously flirt and saw nothing wrong in this, regarding it as a natural male prerogative. To his shock and dismay, however, the new tenant turns out to be a single, handsome young man and his appearance on his balcony one fine morning drives a wedge between husband and wife, shattering Bahig's flimsy pretence of self- confidence and trust in his wife. As the reality of fear and doubt replaces the illusion of power and security, tearing apart the couple's metaphoric blind, a real curtain makes its appearance to shut out the threat. Ironically, as the narrator tells us, before the husband insisted on putting up the curtain, the wife had not noticed the change in her neighbours. It was the curtain and her husband's fears and warnings which alerted her to the presence of a possible source of seduction. Her curiosity is aroused and increases as her husband becomes more and more obsessed with the curtain, forbidding her to open it at any time, for any reason, and intently watching it from the street below, on his way back from work, before going up. When one day he detects or imagines he sees a flutter, he goes up in a rage, drags his wife onto the balcony, beats her in front of the new tenant, divorces her and packs her off to her parents. Bahig's sexual appetite for Sunsun, however, gives him no peace and he is willing to let himself be persuaded by relatives and friends that the curtain could have moved by a breeze or an air current. He takes Sunsun back and decides to remove the curtain to spare himself the agony of watching it and guard against any future suspicions. Sunsun, however, though she has forgiven her husband, cannot forgive the new neighbour who had caused her to be beaten and longs to catch him looking at her, as her husband told her he often did, to give him a peace of her mind and teach him a lesson. The new tenant, however, completely ignores her, never once raising his eyes in her direction. This nettles her at first and gradually the anger and irritation give way to a secret longing for him to look at her. Sunsun does not know of course that while the curtain was there, the new tenant could hardly take his eyes off it. Before it appeared, he had hardly noticed Bahig's balcony and, anyway, since he had a job in the morning, another in the evening and attended college in the afternoon, he was too busy to even step out on his balcony. The curtain, however, once installed, caught his attention and tickled his curiosity. When he thought he glimpsed the shadow of a female figure behind it one day, his imagination was on fire, feverishly churning erotic images of voluptuous females inspired by descriptions he had read of oriental harems in The Arabian Nights. As the days went by, his fascination with the curtain grew and the images it provoked so engrossed him that he gave up his night job in order to have more time to spend on the balcony. But seeing Bahig beating his wife and hurling obscenities at her had given him such a shock that he decided never to look at that balcony again. Sunsun, however, does not give up and one day he suddenly raises his head and their eyes meet. She flies inside in terror, trembling all over, and that day decides to put back the curtain. It guarantees privacy, she tells her husband and from that day onwards, the narrator tells us, the curtained-off balcony where she had rarely sat before became her favourite living space. She spent most of her time there without bothering to dress decently, feeling sheltered and at ease, while enjoying the sensation of having the neighbour's eyes glued to her curtain all the time and occasionally peeping at him through a narrow slit as if to reward his patient, passionate vigil with a fleeting glimpse of part of her face. As for the husband, he was happy his wife had finally come round to his view and regarded the curtain as a protective shield against intruders, and if he chanced to look up on his way to or back from work and saw the curtain move, he simply sighed whispering: it must be al-hawa -- a word which could mean either wind or love. Acting as a metaphor to expose and satirise common attitudes to sex and love in Egypt, the curtain, as an object, also orchestrates the flow of the narrative dividing it into three distinct movements: putting up the curtain; removing the curtain; and putting it up again. You can see from this summary that the story -- apart from the arguments over the curtain -- has very little reported dialogue and, except for the three acts connected with the curtain, the violent scene on the balcony, and the wife's departure and return, has very little significant external action; most of the real action takes place and develops internally, on the mental and psychological levels. Without a narrator to show the reader what goes on in the minds of the characters there would be no story. To get round this difficulty and introduce Idris's critical perspective on the Egyptian middle classes into the stage-version, Thea and her group had to resort to an openly theatrical formula, with the only Swiss member of the cast, Andreas Storm, playing master of ceremonies as well as friend of the family. This formula allowed the characters to speak their minds directly to the audience and the introduction of an aunt, three uncles and a friend allowed the adapters to process through them, in a dialogic form, a lot of the information given by the narrator in the story and make them voice some of the traditional views about marriage, men and women Idris lambasts. These views were also occasionally repeated, in a voiceover, in the form of confidential tips from the elderly relatives to the young couple. In the interest of open theatricality too, Thea and her scenographer, Karin Suess, seated the audience close to the actors, with only a narrow passage, representing a street with a café on one side, separating the front row from the box-like set with two windows, front and back, representing the living room in the couple's flat. While the window in front was fitted with a Venetian blind and overlooked the auditorium, the one facing it at the back had a cloth curtain and looked out on the fictional street and block of flats opposite in the story. At one point, a video of a busy street was projected on the back curtain to drive this point home. It was as if the audience, like the neighbour on the other side, were watching what went on inside the flat through a window and intruding on the couple's privacy, while the raising and lowering of the Venetian blind at the beginning and end after Andreas Storm's prologue and epilogue identified the blind also as a stage curtain and the space beyond it, the living-room of the couple, as a theatrical space. The metaphor of life as a stage was active here. Where the adaptation varied widely from the story was in the treatment of the character of the new tenant which was simplified and reduced to a mere dramatic agent -- a shadow existing in the mind of the husband and wife and a theatrical entity or cliché that is roped in whenever necessary to fulfil a function in the plot. The fact that at one point he is made to confide in the audience and confess that though he looks like Omar Sharif he is really harmless is poor compensation for the loss of the intriguing complexity of his original. More significantly, the stage version confined itself to only the first movement of the story, ignoring the other two. This naturally alters the end, and with it the tone, mood and final impact of the work, making the characters more aware and far more sympathetic than Idris ever intended. In the play, once the curtain is hung, it stays there till the end. After the explosion scene and the mediation of the relatives, all the characters step into the flat; and while they conduct a farcical experiment to exonerate Sunsun by proving that the curtain could move if one blew hard on it, the neighbour suddenly appears to the husband like a ghost, as if defying him, and even fondles his wife right before his eyes. It is then that the husband realises that his imaginary rival has inhabited his mind for ever, that his sexual jealousy can have no cure, and that no curtain can ever rid him of his doubts. If they are to remain married, the couple will simply have to learn to live with the ghost of this neighbour between them forever. The final scene shows them standing apart in the dimmed room, looking intently at each other, as if trying to read each other's thoughts, and fearing what they might read there, while the neighbour sits placidly in an armchair in the middle and a strong wind blows at the back through the curtain. This is a far cry from Idris's sardonic finale, but in the context of the performance it was both convincing and moving. The only thing that really irritated me in this production was the forced inclusion of a foreign friend, as if to provide a European perspective on the situation, while at the same time attempting to forestall any criticism of the attempt by making Sunsun attack Andreas Storm for objecting to her husband's unwarranted jealousy and accuse him of wanting to peddle around in the West another story of female oppression in the East. The scene was outrageously off key, forcing upon our attention the fact that a foreigner directed this play and, worse still, that she anticipated a kind of hostility and, therefore, was apologising in advance for meddling in our culture. The obvious conciliatory intent of the scene threw me off and Sunsun's suspicious attitude towards Andreas's intentions, her wholesale condemnation of Westerners and her chauvinistic, indiscriminate defence of the worst aspects of her culture were deeply embarrassing and struck me as an insult. The scene signified a lack of trust in the capacity of Egyptian audiences to look honestly at their culture in the presence of foreigners and hinted at a kind of morbid cultural sensitivity on the director's part. One thing Thea should have realised: that she could not render Idris's vision faithfully while apologising in the same breath for doing so.
