Nehad Selaiha remembers director, playwright, song writer, composer and pedagogue who would have been 76 this April How deeply sad it is when you suddenly discover that a person with whom you frequently rubbed shoulders for years but never bothered to know or even have a little chat with, only distantly greeting him with a smile or a nod whenever you met, was in fact an unusually gifted artist and an exceptionally warm and exciting human being. , who died a few months ago. was such a person to me and it is with profound regret that I write about him now, having heard so much about him in the months that followed his death, to pay him a belated homage that unfortunately he will never read. I first met him at the Theatre Institute when I briefly joined the Academy of Arts in 1977 for a short time before packing up and leaving home and byre once more.. At that time he was in his mid forties, with a reputation for being highly eccentric, a bit of a madcap and something of a gypsy. Though you could see that he was once a very handsome young man, with pale blue eyes, soft, golden hair and a fair complexion, by the time I met him he had developed a paunch, a deep tan the colour of brick and his hair had all but turned silver. He dressed casually and carelessly (shabbily would be more accurate) , like someone who had just jumped out of bed and put on whatever clothes he found handy and forgot to comb his air to boot. Always walking with a slouch, his chubby, childlike face puckered into a deep frown, as if pondering some impossible dilemma, and often muttering to himself, he looked forbiddingly self absorbed and shut off in a world of his own. Occasionally he would come upon you unexpectedly, sometimes grabbing you by the arm to stop you in your tracks, and voice aloud in an absent-minded drawl and a pronounced provincial accent an odd remark that seemed startlingly irrelevant and out of context, or confidentially discuss an idea of his, starting in midstream and assuming you knew all about it, as if you had been deep in conversation with him for hours before. The few times this happened to me I felt flustered and completely at sea, not knowing how to respond. No wonder I was a little afraid of him, and whatever efforts I made to know something about him, to combat fear with knowledge as it were, were invariably met with a gesture of sarcastic dismissal or a smirk. "Ah!'Arnous? Never mind about him. Just ignore him," his colleagues and superiors would say. A pity I did not ask the students. I now realize that I would have got a completely different report; but it wasn't the done thing to discuss fellow teachers with students. The fact that 'Arnous had joined the theatre institute as an undergraduate at the relatively late age of 27, having first worked as a primary school teacher in Port Said where he spent his childhood and early youth before deciding to dedicate his life to the performing arts, coupled with the fact that since his graduation in 1965 with honours and appointment as instructor in the institute he had shown little interest in academic promotion, obtaining his postgraduate diploma as late as 1982, his M.A two years later and Ph. D. in 1994, when he was nearly 60, did not earn him much respect in academic circles. He did not seem to mind when his class mates and even his students became his seniors and happily pursued the things he loved to do, harbouring no grudges or resentments. His utter lack of competitiveness and complete indifference to rank and status were vexing, seeming to spread a pall of doubt on the real meaning and value of academic titles, for it is one of the sad facts of life that for some people the value of their achievements is gauged by the amount of envy they provoke. 'Arnous envied no one. He was too busy with his projects, visions, teaching, writing and music; and when he had any time to spare, he spent it among simple folk -- artisans, seamen, factory workers, street performers, small merchants and fishermen -- meeting them at roadside, baladi cafes, in fairgrounds and market places, at moulids or other seasonal, popular religious ceremonies, or at the seaside in their villages along the Suez Canal. These people fascinated him and gave him his first lessons in theatre. It was from their gestures, movements and facial expressions, the way they walked and talked and told their real stories, embroidering them with fanciful details, as well as from their rich artistic folk heritages and collective memories that he learned to be a performer and drew his ideas on improvisation and how to use it in actor training. This was the subject of his M. A. thesis which he prepared under the supervision of director Galal El-Sharqawi and defended in 1984 before a panel of examiners that included the late, great Saad Ardash. Unlike most of his colleagues and students, 'Arnous shunned mainstream theatre and the media, directing only three plays (his own Rahma and Olive Beach and a version of the folk Hilaliya Epic ) for the State-theatre organization in 1988 and 1993 respectively, and one play ( The Last Rehearsal ) for the Cultural Palaces organization in 1994. It seems he only found himself as an artist among simple folk and his ambition was to bring theatre to them wherever they lived. Long before he joined the theatre institute, when he was still studying at a teachers training college in Port Said, he formed his Shabab El-Bahr (Youths of the Sea) roving ensemble, composing songs for the group on the Simsimiya (a string-instrument typical of that region, resembling a Sitar ) and performing in the city and neighbouring countryside and in all the fishing villages round Lake Manzala. Port Said was the city that suffered most during the tripartite aggression on Egypt in 1956 and it was partly to raise the morale of its people and help them get over the devastation they suffered that 'Arnous founded this troupe. In 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser died, triggering another national crisis, 'Arnous rushed back to Port Said to compose a passionate valedictory song for the president that soon spread to all parts of Egypt and was chanted by millions during Nasser's funeral. It was as if 'Arnous could only express his feelings strumming a Simsimiya and his love for that instrument led him to create a modified version of it and call it the ' Arnousiyya, after his own name. 'Arnous's next theatrical venture after Shabab El-Bahr was a mobile theatre made up of two trucks which, like the medieval pageant wagon or the ancient Greek Thespian cart, moved around Sayeda Zeinab square in old Cairo giving performances. This was in the late 1970s; a decade later, towards the end of the 1980s, and upon his return from Jordan where he spent the years 1983 to 1987 coaching actors at Yarmouk university and forming a wide circle of devoted disciples, Arnous came up with the idea of a 'theatre in a suitcase' and tried it out himself, carrying a suitcase full of costumes, props and musical instruments round Al-Hussein old quarter of Cairo and stopping at street corners or in the big square to perform songs and sketches. Many people there, shopkeepers and street vendors, still remember him. Around the same time too, 'Arnous set up with popular singer Mohamed Nooh a café theatre in the Café Astra which once stood in Tahrir square and staged an interactive theatrical experiment called What Happened in the Stalls at the Journalists Syndicate.. And when 'Arnous was not singing by the sea, performing at street corners, conducting some crazy theatrical experiment somewhere, or quietly studying the motley pageants of humanity at some humble café (what some of his 'respectable' academic colleagues disdainfully described as 'slumming around and mixing with the lowly and uncouth'), you would find him fraternizing with his students, sharing with them his dreams, memories and experiences, as well as what little money he had when they were out of pocket, cheering them up when they were down and often giving them food and shelter in his ground-floor flat off Lazoughli square in downtown Cairo when they lacked them. As director Amr Qabil, 'Arnous's former student and directing assistant told me, "the door of that flat was always left open even when 'Arnous was out and one could walk in at any time day or night." No wonder 'Arnous marriage in the early 1970s did not survive for a year; no ordinary Egyptian woman could be expected to tolerate such a gregarious way of life. The marriage produced no children, but 'Arnous never lacked for sons and daughters. All his students were his children and he loved them all, treating them as friends and equals. They adored him in return and it is through them that one can get to know the real 'Arnous: a warm, spontaneous person with a great capacity for love and no inhibitions of any kind; a man of infinite tolerance and great generosity, at once innocent and wise, sensitive and blunt; a man who spoke his mind candidly regardless of social etiquette and conventions and did not hesitate to stop in the middle of a busy street to physically demonstrate to his companion an acting exercise he had just thought up or to sing a song that suddenly came into his head. Listening to the many anecdotes 'Arnous's students tell about him, one is strongly reminded of that quality Keats ascribed to Shakespeare, calling it Negative Capability -- a non-judgmental, benevolent, all- embracing attitude that accepts everything, reveling in all and damning nothing. Though 'Arnous received a gold medal from King Hussein of Jordan in 1995 for his services to theatre there and was later honoured in Syria at the 13th Damascus theatre festival, he, like many genuine artists before him, was not recognized in Egypt in his lifetime. It was only after his death, and mainly through the repercussions it made in theatre circles in Jordan and Syria, as well as the pressure exercised by his own students in Egypt that the high officials in the State-theatre and Cultural Palaces were forced to officially honour him. First, Amr Qabil persuaded the latter organization to allow him to stage a production of 'Arnous's 1988 play, Rahma, for the regional Al-Sharqiyyah theatrical company at Al-Zaqaziq cultural palace at the end of March, then, together with director Isam El-Sayed, the head of the theatre section of that selfsame organization, shamed Ashraf Zaki, the current acting-head of the State-theatre organization into hosting the performance for one night (11 April) at Miami theatre in Cairo. Through Qabil's efforts too, the National Cinema Centre was persuaded to sponsor a short documentary film, consisting mostly of photos and a few video recordings, on 'Arnous's life and career to be shown on that night before the performance. I had watched Rahma (Ruth) before at Al-Hanager Centre in 1999. When I saw it again in Zaqaziq, I felt it fitted better there, as if it had come home to the people it was written for. Amr Qabil, who had assisted 'Arnous in the Hanager production felt the same. 'Arnous's folk play, with its rural setting and legendary atmosphere, its simple concepts and confrontations of good and evil, its archetypal symbols and characters did not look as naïve or outdated as it had done among the elitist audience of Al-Hanager. Drawing on the old folk legend of 'Ayoub Al-Masri' (the Egyptian Job), a local variation on the biblical story, as well as on a play by Naguib Sorour (another theatre poet and social outcast), which draws on the folk, narrative mawwal of Hassan and Na'ima, 'Arnous, who makes pointed verbal references to Sorour's play, quoting its title several times in the dialogue, transforms his heroine, Rahma, into a symbol of all the life- saving graces -- justice, tolerance and mercy -- that humanity has sought since the dawn of history. (For a description of Sorour's play, see my article "A modern Isis stalks the boards" in the Weekly, March, 2003). Like Sorour's play, Rahma is written in a mixture of verse and rhymed prose, in both colloquial and classical Arabic, and draws on the folk oral tradition and old popular modes of communal entertainment to fashion a new kind of epic, poetic drama -- on the model of Brecht -- through which the poet can project his reading of modern Egyptian history and air his ideological beliefs in effective theatrical terms. Here, the tragic love stories of Yaseen and Baheya, Hassan and Na'ima are replayed in a different variation through the story of Rahma, Ayoub's wife, who carries around his skeleton in a basket, certain that, like Osiris, he would come alive again, visits her birth place to save her people from the drought and tyranny of Nuri and his gang, meets her old rival in Ayoub's love and is forced to sacrifice her thick braids to secure bread and water for the dying people of her village. The play ends with Rahma's departure after inciting the people to rebellion, but the cyclic structure hints that the conflict between the good and the bad, between people and their oppressors would be renewed, indeed, is a condition of existence, and that she would be returning soon to suffer the very same ordeals over and over again. Al-Sharqiyyah troupe's production was simply stunning -- a veritable labour of love, unstinting, passionate and sincere. The grueling rehearsals through which Amr Qabil put his cast and crew over two months paid enormous dividends in terms of good and fervent ensemble acting, skilled and disciplined choreography, a vivid set and eloquent sound effects, a riveting musical score and enchanting songs and an evocative structural set. Amr Qabil's Rahma was a truly popular spectacle that 'Arnous would have been truly proud of. On the way home from Zaqaziq I found myself wondering if 'Arnous would ever achieve the legendary status the same as Sorour. Honestly, I don't think so. While Sorour craved the limelight, 'Arnous didn't; while Sorour quarreled about money, 'Arnous was hunted down and coerced into coming to Al-Hanager to receive his cheque (he simply was not interested, Amr Qabil says); and while Sorour was an extremely self-conscious person, resented not being recognized and had a knack for dramatizing himself, 'Arnous was happy to remain in the shadows, with the simple, common people, scorning all haloes. One last, lurid detail: I have just been told by 'Aranous's nephew, one of my many sources and informers on 'Arnous's life, that the our dear departed lost his mother and two of his sisters in a car crash at an early point in his life. Would this explain his harping on the dead coming back to life in Rahma, among other things?
