An adaptation of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise leaves Nehad Selaiha looking for the play It is a truism of theatre history, indeed of the history of all the arts, that today's avant-garde is tomorrow's stale convention. Another, is that most innovations are deep down no more than old conventions redressed to suit new purposes. When Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise was first performed in 1930, its technical vagaries seemed quite revolutionary. What was actually refreshingly novel about the play, however, was not its dismantling of the imaginary fourth wall of realistic theatre and baring of the machinery of theatrical illusionism through the use of improvisation or the play-within-the-play formula -- two conventions that date back to the commedia dell'arte and can be traced in earlier forms of popular theatre worldwide -- but, rather, Pirandello's insightful reflections on the dialectic of life and art, form and flux. The structure of the play which harnesses together two levels of fictive reality and develops through the alternation of meta-theatrical scenes (the stage- manger's explanations, instructions and altercations with the actors) with realistic ones (the acted story) is the vehicle for this dialectic and focuses the paradoxical nature of theatre as a unique, peculiar event that mediates life and art, at once reaching for the fixed permanence and finality of artistic form while partaking, as a condition for its existence, of the fluidity, transience and state of flux which characterise life. The conflict between form and life, which is of the essence of theatre as live/ artistic activity, is first introduced as a theme in the prologue addressed to the audience by the pompous, long-winded stage-manager -- the ridiculously short and hairy Dr. Hinkfuss. As the play progresses and Dr. Hinkfuss repeatedly clashes with the actors, it generates other conflicts -- between the text and performance, illusion and reality, the mask and the face it hides and, on the social/ moral level, in the dramatised story of Signor Palmiro and his family, between the life force and natural human instincts, on the one hand, and the rigid social codes and forms which mask, suppress and distort them, on the other. In these conflicts, no party wins and we are left with a nagging sense of the theatricality and transience of all human activity and the relativity and make-believe nature of most of what passes for truth, including love, religion and art. What remains of value in Tonight We Improvise, for me at least, are not the technical aspects per se (which, funny and interesting though they sporadically are, strike me as a little too excessive), but, rather, the zest for life and art displayed by both the actors and the characters they impersonate, the intensity of the pain they feel when it is thwarted, the tragic unknowability of the truth about anything or anybody which drives Verri to the edge of madness in his efforts to dive into Mommina's mind and search her dreams until he actually saps her life, and, above all, Mommina's passionate hymn to theatre at the end which turns it into a magical experience in which, for one brief, glorious moment, art and life, the eternal and the finite, the imaginary and the factual unite, and the word is made flesh. Mommina, the heroine of the story proposed by Dr. Hinkfuss as skeletal framework for the actors' improvisation (which is based on a short story by an author called Pirandello -- an early example of postmodernist self- reflexivity here) was born to be an opera singer. Her identity could have only been defined through constant migration between fictional characters on stage and only in this migration she could have found happiness. Both her parents, Signor Palmiro and Signora Ignazia are liberal-minded and fond of music and theatre. The father dies defending an abused cabaret singer who reminds him of Mommina, and the mother enjoys partying, going to the theatre with her four daughters and their male escorts -- young aviation officers -- and can only find relief from pain in listening to singing, particularly Mommina's voice. When Signor Palmiro dies, however, Mommina, who is torn between the traditional image of good women prevalent in her society and her family's passion for life and theatre and their free and easy attitudes towards love and sex, accepts to marry the upright, well-to-do and morally conservative Verri. But rather than find her identity in the role of respectable mother and housewife he offers her, she finds herself Imprisoned and tortured -- the cornered victim of an insanely jealous man. Verri, a typical product of his constrictive, austerely Catholic, and rigidly coded Sicilian background, can neither forget nor forgive her liberal upbringing, and not content with incarcerating her physically, burns to obliterate her memories and dreams. Mommina, nevertheless, conquers him at the end and regains her freedom, even though it means her death, and her weapon is the thing she betrayed -- theatre. At the end of her tether, and aged beyond her years, she learns that one of her sisters, who had made a successful stage career as an opera singer, would be starring that night in Il Trovatore at the local theatre, and immediately her imagination is on fire. With only her two little daughters/fellow prisoners as audience, she reaches with her mind across the gap of years to the night she sang "Who cheers the days of the roving gypsy?" at a party at home, and beyond the walls to where her sister would be performing the part of Leonora. Using her memory of the opera, she impersonates her sister and brings the whole theatre, stage and opera into her little cell. But though her heart snaps under the effort and the ecstasy of the moment, she dies triumphant. That the moment of Mommina's death is also the moment of her triumph is a dramatic manifestation of the dialectic of art and life at the heart of the play: the moment Mommina defines her identity and fixes it in an artistic form is logically the moment she stops changing and departs from the temporal flux. In the adaptation currently on show at the National under the title Layali El-Azbakiya (Azbakiya Soirees) what saved the day was that final, passionate tribute to the art of performance. For three hours the show seemed to go round in circles and trip over hackneyed clichés, with the meta-theatrical scenes meandering and thinning in the process into surplus addenda that submerged everything and served no purpose except to showcase the actors' abilities at comic ad-libbing. Sami Maghawri, as Dr. Hinkfuss, made a meal of the space allotted to him, introducing the large cast at length, joking with the actors, flirting with the actresses (and there were many of them since director Samir El-Asfouri has seen it fit to augment the number of Signor Palmiro's daughters to eight instead of four), and holding forth about the hardships of staging plays in state-theatre companies today and the measly stipend the actors get. And since the production was conceived as a nostalgic popular musical that harks back to the days when El- Azbakiya quarter and its famous garden were the regular haunts of pleasure- seekers and theatre lovers, the action on both the meta-theatrical and realistic levels, was frequently interrupted by musical numbers in which not only the eight daughters of Signor Palmiro (Omar El-Hariri) and Singnora Ignazia (Magda El-Khatib), but also their guests, neighbours, and the servants of the household took part. Tottina's rise to stardom as an opera singer, which is only mentioned in the text in Mommina's final monologue and serves to trigger it, is lavishly and lengthily illustrated in various musical numbers (starring Intisar as Tottina), including a long concert sequence reminiscent of glitzy Hollywood musicals. The bid for laughter and glitter extended even to the realistic scenes, including the crucial ones of Verri's courting of Mommina, which were acted in the mode of farcical burlesque, putting paid to the dialectic of art and life inherent in the play. Even Mommina's final scene was not safe from parody and burlesque. The way Ahmed Zaher (as Verri) breaks the news of Tottina's coming to town to perform in Il Trovatore, aping a sanctimonious, hypocritical, addle-brained and gluttonous Islamic fundamentalist, seemed perversely designed to erode the effect created by the one scene in which this adaptation strove to establish some sort of topical relevance to the present. Before Zaher, or Verri, storms into the luxurious cell into which he imprisoned Mommina (Buthayna Rashwan) to question her about her dreams and thoughts, we were treated to an audio-visual formation which equated his conservative Sicilian background with the tribal mores of the most repressive of desert societies. In that scene, the plight of women in these societies became an eloquent metaphor for Mommina's tragedy, and the line of hooded men, in black cloaks, silhouetted against a smoky, red sky, and beating the ground with their sticks while shouting oppressive slogans against liberation in general was genuinely menacing. Instead of the snatches from Il Trovatore Mommina sings in the text, El- Asfouri used excerpts from beautiful period songs (roughly the 1940s), particularly Asmahan's Ya Tuyoor (Oh, Birds) -- the only Arabic song I know to use the operatic musical mode -- and one was grateful it was played in the original recording, in a voice-over. The rest of the music, by Gamal Mustafa (with the lyrics contributed by the adapter, Osama Abu Taleb, the head of the State-theatre organisation), were a veritable potpourri, and so was Dia and Mohamed's choreography. The show glided merrily on for close on four hours, rarely varying the mood, and the sole message seemed that we were there to laugh and have fun. It was only at the end, as Mommina spoke ecstatically about what theatre is like, that we were jolted out of the stupor, induced by the interminable cascade of erratic scenes and disconnected figures, into realising we were in a theatre. What the team of the work seem to have done was to take from Pirandello's play its most conventional elements -- the ones that readily accommodated themselves to conventional, popular theatre -- ignoring the way and purposes he used them for and, therefore, leaving behind his bothersome scepticism and irksome reflections. Done in the commercial sector, this would have been understandable; but in the public sector, at the national, and at the tax-payer's expense, it is inexcusable.
