Nehad Selaiha ponders the wisdom of moving theatres out of town Up until last year, when the American University moved out to New Cairo, the few productions annually staged by its Performing and Visual Arts Department formed an important and vital contribution to the theatrical scene in Cairo. For many years, the Wallace, which opened in 1969 with a production of Othello, served as a valuable window on American and world theatre, presenting not only famous classics and contemporary plays, but also a variety of lesser-known and rarely-staged American and European texts from different periods. It was at the Wallace that Egyptian audiences were first introduced to such outstanding new plays as Lisa Loomer's The Waiting Room, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, Maria Irene's Fornes's Abingdon Square and Niel Simon's The Good Doctor, as well as to older but perennially popular works like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke and The Glass Menagerie, Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, or A. R. Gurney's Love Letters. Plays from Europe, not counting Shakespeare's, included Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Moliere's The Miser, Caryl Churchill's Vinegar Tom, not to mention a rare production of Machiavelli's 1518 The Mandrake (or La Mandragola ) and a wonderful introduction to the work of the famous Odin Teatret through a 5-day workshop conducted by its founder, Eugenio Barba, and his great disciple, Julia Varley, in February 2001. Where else in Cairo could one come across such wealth of theatrical knowledge and enjoyment? For many years, since my final comeback to Cairo in the mid 1980s, the Wallace was my favourite venue and I always looked forward to its offerings with great excitement and was rarely let down. Apart from the pleasure I always found there, it never failed to expand my knowledge of world theatre and fill in some gaps. In May 2001, however, Wallace was finally put out of service, and what a really sad day that was. For the farewell production, Frank Bradley (who, happily is still with us) and Paul Mitri (who, sadly, has left us) chose Jim Jacob's and Warren Casey's nostalgic, rock 'n 'roll musical Grease, perhaps for its predominantly nostalgic mood . In a note in the show's programme, Bradley, then head of the Performing Arts Department, confessed to the same sadness the audience felt at having to say goodbye to the Wallace. For him, however, the "sadness" was "tempered by the thrill we feel as we see constructed before our eyes one of the finest theatres in the Middle East," meaning "The Falaki Theatres (main stage and studio) in the new Falaki Academic Centre." True to Bradley's expectations, the two new Falaki venues were extremely elegant and superbly equipped. At the time, however, as I wrote in the Weekly on 17 May 2001(Issue No. 534), I could not (indeed, still cannot) see why the good, old Wallace had to be shut down and the space put to other uses. "I could think of a hundred artists willing to rent it," I said, and went on to suggest that if the AUC did not want outsiders, it could let it for a moderate fee to its own graduates who were running independent theatre groups and desperate for rehearsal and performance spaces. I did not know then that I would be asking the same question with regard to the two Falaki Centre venues 8 years later! That the AUC needed a bigger space and had to seek it somewhere away from downtown Cairo is perfectly understandable, despite all the hardship it has caused all round. But why on earth destroy in the process two perfectly good theatres that cost a lot of money to build and have since their opening attracted large audiences and a faithful, devoted clientele? -- indeed, theatres that have done a great service to the United States, brightening its image when it was getting blacker by the hour in the eyes of Egyptians during the Bush administration. Productions like Bradley's Antigone, where the set and costumes suggested the occupied territories and the heroine subtly pointed in the direction of Palestinian female suicide bomber Wafaa Idris, giving the old Sophoclean text vibrant topical relevance and allowing it to engage the Arab political scene in dialogue, or his production of Brecht's A Man is a Man, which implicitly condemned the invasion of Iraq, identifying it with 19th Century colonialist military expeditions into Asia, went a long way towards convincing their Egyptian audiences that not all Americans were like Bush and that many of them had fairness of mind and human decency (see "Antigone in Palestine", the Weekly, 9 May, 2002, Issue 585 and "American spell", Weekly, 7 November, 2002, Issue 611). True the AUC new campus has two theatres, the Malak Gabr proscenium arch theatre and the Gerhart chamber theatre (which, by the way, do not begin to compare with the Falaki venues); still, what is the harm in the AUC having 4 theatres, two downtown and two in New Cairo? I suppose it all boils down to money. Forgetting that universities are supposed to do more than simply train youngsters for the work market and are expected to contribute actively to the cultural and artistic life of the society where they happen to be, the AUC, which is planning to convert the old campus into a further education centre, has seen fit to put two perfectly good theatres out of action, converting the studio into a lecture room and thinking to do a similar outrage to the main stage by transforming this "one of the finest theatres in the Middle East" into a conference room. For the past 3 years, ever since the move to New Cairo got underway, Frank Bradley has been crusading to avert such a prospect and thinking up ways to make it financially and/or ethically worthwhile for the AUC to let the Falaki main stage continue to operate as a theatre. He has not succeeded so far, but I hope and pray that he will. How wonderful it would be if he and his creative colleagues and students at the AUC could bring into town the plays they stage out there, in that dismal, godforsaken place called New Cairo. Though a number of the regular Falaki audience are willing and able to make the trip to the new campus to see the excellent performances offered there, there are many for whom the new venues have proved simply out of bounds. Not that the Malak Gabr and the Gerhart lack an audience when they put on plays; they are usually full; but the quality of the audience has changed. It is not the same widely varied congregation of theatre lovers and connoisseurs you used to find at the Wallace or the Falaki; it is predominantly a rich, suburban audience who are there for lack of other nearby theatres or other entertainment places to go. That theatres belong in cities not in the desert was the first idea that came into my mind the first time I visited the AUC new campus to see a play. Not only did I dislike the architecture intensely, but the landscape and the whole place made me feel as if I was somewhere in the Gulf. Moreover, the Malak Gabr main theatre seemed a big comedown after the Falaki main stage and felt small and oppressive. Though the play was a comedy by Moliere, beautifully designed (by Stancil Campbell), nimbly directed (by Bradley) and excellently performed by Mahmoud El-Lozy and a competent cast, I failed to enjoy it. All the time I kept thinking what it would have been like at the Falaki and could not shake off the idea however hard I tried. On the way back to Tahrir square on the bus thoughtfully provided by the university for the car-less or less adventurous members of the prospective audience, I remember vowing to myself never to go back again. Predictably, I did not review that Moliere production. But, predictably too, I soon broke my vow. For how could anyone resist the trickle of mouthwatering treats that followed? In October, 2009, Laila Saad invited me to see the first production by the AUC Alumni Community Theatre that she had helped set up. It was a double bill of two Harold Pinter one-act plays ( Celebration and Party Time), superbly designed, directed and performed, and presented under the title Who's Having the Duck? The fact that it took place at the more attractive Gerhart Theatre, which reminded me a lot of the Falaki studio, was all the more reason to enjoy the show. Unfortunately, I failed to review that wonderful Pinter evening at the time, but intend to do so at some future opportunity. Mahmoud El-Lozy's version of Tawfiq El-Hakim's The Thief came next, and though it was performed at the Malak Gabr theatre I was able to enjoy it, may be because, as I said in my Weekly review (on 3 December, 2009, Issue 975), "the whole mode of the production seemed to nostalgically hark back to a theatre of the past." On 5 March I was back at the AUC new campus to watch Bradley's production of a comedy by a relatively new American playwright at the Gerhart. As I hadn't heard of Sarah Ruhl before, I was once more deeply grateful to Bradley for bringing her to my notice. New playwrights keep sprouting all over the world at such a dizzying speed it is impossible to keep track of all of them. Hence the value of directors like Bradley and cultural venues like the AUC performing arts Department. Ruhl's turned out to be a very peculiar kind of play; it begins with a dead man (Gordon) sitting at a table in a deserted café opposite a woman (Jean) eating lobster soup who, upon discovering his death, falls instantly in love with him and appropriates his cell phone. As the calls keep pouring in, from his mother (Mrs. Gottlieb), mistress (Carlotta), wife (Hermia) and business partners, she pretends to know the dead man and takes it upon herself to console them, spinning a web of lies about imaginary last words he said and messages and gifts he sent them. The eccentric nature of the woman's action, for which we are given no reasonable justification except for the fact that she works in a holocaust museum and is, therefore, obsessed with the relics and memories of the dead, is matched by the oddness of the characters she meets and the mysterious hints they keep dropping concerning the dead man's profession, which turns out to be trafficking human organs. The sense of oddness, however, is balanced by the palpable realism of the places where the action takes place in the first part of the play: a café, a Catholic church where a Mass is held for the dead man, a bar where Jean meets Carlotta, the living and dining rooms in Mrs. Gottlieb's house where Jean visits, is invited to dinner and meets his wife and brother (Dwight), and the back of the stationary store where Dwight works and where he and Jean eventually make love. Curiously, despite the realistic settings and the gruesome subject, the whole of the first part has the air of a mock romantic comedy with a sentimental heroine. However, at the tail end of that part, and just before the blackout, Ruhl springs upon us a disorienting detail that makes the play suddenly go off at a tangent: while Jean and Dwight kiss and 'embossed stationary moves through the air slowly, like a snow parade,' as the stage directions say, the dead 'Gordon walks on stage and opens his mouth as if to speak to the audience.' From that moment on, and for the whole of the second part, the play casts off its thin realistic crust and takes off on the wings of fancy, soaring into the realms of the metaphysical and the grotesque. Transporting the heroine first to South Africa and the world of gangster movies, it hurls her next, with another stupendous jolt, into the other world, or the after life, before finally bringing her back to earth to wed Dwight. In that part, Ruhl seems to have given free reign to her wit and imaginative inventiveness, treating the audience to many original, intriguing and sometimes humorous ideas about the afterlife and sundry meditations on love, loneliness, goodness and human contact. However, as it stands, the second part of the play fails to relate to the first and seems like a string of rough sketches jotted down by a writer in the process of thinking up a new play. Taking its inspiration from that small new technology gadget that has mercilessly come to dominate our lives, this weird concoction of a play moves from meditations on what mobiles have done to people, isolating rather than connecting them, to reflections about what happens to all the words spoken into them -- 'all those molecules, in the air... whizzing around -- those bits of air and voices' -- and whether they survive the people who spoke them, forming a new 'music of the spheres'. While death obsessively overshadows the play, cell phones trigger a questioning of the relation between life and death and soul and body. Even in life, the play argues through Hermia's description of her lovemaking with Gordon, people can depart from their bodies through the power of fancy to watch themselves from outside. But however much of an imaginative tour de force may be, it still remains a deeply flawed play. As one reviewer said: "What began as a potentially witty comedy about love, death and socially invasive inventions cries out for a stronger, less messy rewrite." In performance, poses many challenges, not least of them are the quick scene changes and sudden shifts of tone and mood. Bradley's production met both more than adequately. The basic stage design (by Sara Shaarawi) consisted of two rows of tall metal frames covered with semi-transparent paper and placed all round the performance space, one in front of the other, to create a corridor where figures could be seen moving or waiting and openings through which the characters could come and go and the anonymous figures could pop in with their umbrellas or without. Inside those walls, the different locations were indicated by the lighting (also by Shaarawi), which coloured the walls differently to suit the place and mood, and by simple props smoothly brought in and taken out by the four black-clad stage hands who had initially appeared, before the play began, moving around and talking into cell phones. However, in this kind of play, the performance ultimately floats or sinks depending on the quality of the acting, particularly where the heroine is concerned, and in this respect, Bradley's choice of Berfu Nisan Turkmenoglu for Jean was a very fortunate one. Her Jean was thoroughly naïve, childishly cunning, pathetically flustered on occasions and consistently sincere. She gave a convincing, sympathetic image of a full grown woman who has nevertheless remained a child inside, always anxious to please and do the right thing. The rest of the cast gave adequate, smooth performances, with Adham James Haddara (as the weak and kind Dwight) and Noha El-Kholy (as the imperious Mrs. Gottlieb) particularly standing out. Despite the text's flaws, was a very exciting theatrical experience which I will always remember whenever I hear a cell phone ringing.
