Nehad Selaiha joins young artists to pay homage to Nagui George at El-Sawy Cultural Centre Nagui George was something of a paradox. Meeting him for the first (and last) time at the Workers Theatre Festival in 1990, in a dingy, rambling flat in a rundown building in Al-Gumhouriya Street, I was immediately struck by his appearance. Tall, elegant, extremely handsome, with a fair complexion and the nebulous aura of an aristocrat or a member of the haute bourgeoisie, he stuck out a mile and seemed quite out of place in such seedy surroundings. He had come to watch his play, I guessed, scheduled for a performance that evening. A courteous, philanthropic gesture to the proletariat, I sardonically thought. Squeezed in a sweating throng of avid, stage-struck young workers in the hall outside the largest room in the flat which had been transformed into a primitive theatre, however, I couldn't help noticing, and wondering at the friendly warmth and lack of ceremony with which this seemingly young dignitary and emissary of the lush, velvety world (as I then assumed) was greeted. He behaved like a person quite at home and seemed to know everybody. Rich people have been known to indulge a passion for slumming; was Nagui George one of them? To be absolutely honest I had never heard of him until that night and wouldn't have known he was a playwright had it not been for the festival schedule and the introduction of playwright and Mass-Culture veteran Sayed Awwad. This does not put a very favourable cast on my experience and authority as theatre teacher and critic. Much as I had tried to catch up on what had been happening in Egypt in main and off- main stream theatre in my years of absence, there were still painful lapses and embarrassing gaps. Nagui George's work was one of them. Al-Qadiya la Tuda fil Naphthalene (The Cause is not for Preserving in Naphthalene), a simple half- hour realistic affair with a direct political message, was stunningly refreshing, like a bucket of icy water thrown over one's head on a very hot day. Set on the morning of Sadat's visit to Israel on 17 November 1977, in the office of the headmaster of an old and reputable secondary school, it unfolds as a courtroom drama centering on the trial of a history teacher accused of seditious political sloganeering. As it turns out what is being really investigated is the definition and meaning of history: whether history is a set of incontrovertible facts or a series of conflicting narratives becomes the bone of contention for the audience. The teacher, significantly called Farid, which means unique, is castigated for teaching a lesson from the curriculum of modern Arab history set by the Ministry of Education and printed in the school history book -- something he has been doing for years. Suddenly, because of a twist in history, caused by the previous night's events, everything in that lesson has acquired a startling new meaning and come to rank in the mind of the system's officials as anti-peace agitation and treasonable, subversive talk. Farid, an impoverished, downtrodden citizen from Upper Egypt, who has struggled hard to rise above his pre-ordained station in life, put his faith in knowledge and education, and staked his sense of integrity and self-respect on doing his job as teacher well, suddenly finds himself taken to task for doing just that. He cannot understand his guilt: he did not say anything that was not in the book prescribed by the Ministry of Education. He cannot comprehend that, overnight, power-politics has overtaken the old narrative, introduced in 1952 under the auspices of the new regime, and made it not only suspect but also dangerous. What wrings one's heart is Farid's mulish and candid attachment to the official version of history on which he has been brought up. Ironically, he is not aware that school history books keep being rewritten with every change of political power. He goes to the gallows or some ungodly dungeon for mistaking one narrative for the one and only true text. Nagui George, a thorough opponent of Sadat's peace accord (as I discovered later), thought he was creating a martyr and hero; ironically, Farid's martyrdom and heroism are ruthlessly undercut by the well-known practice of re-writing history in this part of the world. This is something I experienced in my school days but Nagui, who belongs to my generation, with only one year separating our coming to the world, seemed to have forgotten somehow what crazy adjustments and re-adjustments we -- the sons and daughters of the revolution, as we were taught to proudly refer to ourselves then -- had to go through. That the heroes of yesterday could be the traitors of tomorrow was a lesson we were taught in those years. For my generation, the temptation to cling to one version of the past may be understandable but it cannot stand the test of honest scrutiny. What Nagui's message ultimately amounts to in his play runs counter to the play's obvious and conscious intent. Rather than a revolutionary hero, fighting for the integrity of history Farid, seen in the vista of changing historical perspectives, appeared to me in 1990 as an anguished, confused specimen of the generation that grew up with the 1952 military coup d'état. When I reviewed the play as part of covering the Workers Theatre Festival for the Cairo monthly Theatre Magazine, I remember thinking that I would like to see more of Nagui and talk to him. It never happened. On 28 April, 2002 Nagui died of a heart failure. He was only 56. A month later I found myself at the Cultural Palaces Floating Theatre in Giza attending a theatrical event dedicated to his memory. I was stunned and regretful. I had postponed interviewing him for far too long and now it was too late. I knew nothing about him at the time except that he was a gifted writer who rather than give up his political commitment chose to remain in the shadow, on the fringe, often running foul of the censor, a man born into one station who had chosen to hobnob with others less fortunate than himself. The audience were all friends of Nagui -- mostly Mass Culture and workers theatre officials and practitioners -- people you meet in provincial theatres and out of the way haunts, places where Nagui's obstinate and unrelenting political commitment had consigned his plays. Apart from Anas El-Fiqi, painter and stage- designer Samir Ahmed and playwright and lyricist, Sayed Awwad, there were no illustrious figures -- nothing that the local press would care to write about. Before the speeches, we were treated to a dramatic version of Nagui's weekly humorous articles, The Diary of a Civil Servant, published in Al-Ahali, the mouthpiece of Al-Tagammu Party, scripted by his life-long friend, Sayed Awwad. The performance, starring Azza El-Husseini, gave one a whiff of the bitter-sweet taste of Nagui's writing and set me pondering, once more, the paradox of Nagui George. His second wife and mother of his two sons, Eva, a beautiful actress, was there to receive the honours. I remembered his first wife, director Leila Saad. Like Nagui, I met her only once, on a brief visit to Cairo in 1975. I had an appointment to meet Samir El- Asfouri, the director of Al-Talia Theatre then, and as I walked into the foyer I saw this magnificent presence -- an enchantingly beautiful, tall, blue-eyed woman in slacks and a T shirt engaged in a rowdy, high-pitched conversation with stage hands. We didn't even exchange a word of greeting, but she still haunts my memory as a wonderful vision. She was assisting El-Asfouri then, as he told me upstairs in his office, and had married Nagui a year earlier. A year later she would be directing Nagui George's Inni Aatared (I Object) at his theatre-café in Ataba Square. In 1977 they divorced and Leila departed for the States for good. It had been a tempestuous love story, Sayed Awwad later told me, and like all tempests it had ended as suddenly as it had begun. Sayed Awwad vividly remembers the wedding, in a church in Al-Maasara, on account of a prank Nagui played on the priest. He had asked Awwad to give him his identity card upon entering the church. Extremely puzzled by the request, Awwad had complied; his long friendship with Nagui had taught him to put up with his friend's whims. When Nagui presented him to the priest as one of his two witnesses, or the groom's two best men, Awwad didn't know where to hide himself for embarrassment, as he said. The priest was predictably furious at this monkeying but both Nagui and Leila played innocent, arguing there was nothing in the scriptures to prevent a Muslim being a best man for a Christian groom. "We are all Egyptians, you know," Nagui said, winking at the priest. At the door of the Floating Theatre painter and stage designer, Samir Ahmed, was in tears. Why a member of the upper middle-classes was being honoured by the Mass Culture Organisation, albeit upgraded to the Cultural 'Palaces' denomination, was still beyond me. Later that year, 2002, I watched a performance of Al- Gawab (The Letter), Nagui's first venture into theatre writing. It is possible that he wrote it in 1967, just before he became a political prisoner, and it received its first public airing in a regional town in the Delta, Al-Mahala Al-Kubra, after his release, at the hands of director Raafat El-Dweiri, under the auspices of the Mass Culture Organisation. In the autumn of 2002 Amir Salaheddin, a gifted Nubian director, staged it with a group of amateurs at the French Cultural Centre in the course of a festival for young, creative talents in theatre. The production was among the prize-winners and for the second time I was stunned by the freshness of Nagui's dialogue, its wit, compactness, directness, and its weird way of forging beyond the topic in hand to rope in contrary perspectives. In a small village around Al-Kharja Oasis, at noon, Sweilem, a railway worker on sick leave with an infected, puss-swollen foot, receives a letter. Illiterate, he calls on Shafiqa, his daughter, for help. She regularly receives letters from her fiancé, the teacher at the local primary school who is spending the summer vacation with his family in Assiut. It transpires that Shafiqa is equally illiterate. What about the stories she keeps relating from the letters then, he asks. "The paper is blue and soft and the writing so beautiful," she answers; "I just gape at the squiggles and they tell me everything." Asked to gape at the squiggles in her father's letter, she draws a blank. The only person in the village who could read is Abul-Enein (in Arabic, 'father of eyes'), the blind imam of the village mosque. There are of course the village kids, the pupils of Shafiqa's fiancé; they, however, declare that without pictures they cannot read. From then on pictures, the visual aspect of letters and how people recognise them by relating them to objects familiar in daily experience become the point and the substance of the pathetic, but nonetheless hilarious dramatic action. After hours of intense, farcical labour, the company succeeds in deciphering only one word, Assiut. When the drunken local vet arrives, Sweilem and his daughter learn the bitter truth: he has been sacked from his job for exceeding his leave of absence (for which he had paid twenty-five piasters as a bribe to the doctor's assistant) and Shafiqa's blue, soft letters were no more than abusive, jilting missiles. The play ends with the village imam urging people to learn to read and write. But the impact of the play, its well-drawn characters and evocative dialogue go well beyond the message. The realistic, well-rounded characters carry the play beyond the content of The Letter, transforming that piece of paper into a poignant, intriguing symbol of the unknown. Last week Amir invited me to a performance he was staging at El-Sawy Cultural Centre. The title, What Do you Think of That? He who Understood Said Nothing, was enticing but did not betray anything as to its origins or subject matter. It turned out to be a performance knocked out of two one-act plays by Nagui George: Qahwet Al-Muaalem Abul- Hool (Sphinx Café, or, more accurately, The Café of Master Abul-Hool) and Al-Qadiya la Tuda fil Naphthalene. The performance, passionate, innocent and simplistic, captured something of the feel of my first experience of Nagui's brand of theatre back in 1990 -- a combination of fascination, irritation and perplexity. After the performance I rushed straight to Samir Ahmed and Sayed Awwad crying for help. The enigma of Nagui George had to be unravelled and the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fitted together. This is what I culled from both. The only child of a wealthy Coptic family, Nagui was brought up in the lap of luxury and taught in French schools before joining Cairo University to study commerce. Originally from Assiut, his grandfather, Nessim Yanni, had moved to Alexandria to become the first Egyptian director of its Customs House and his father, George Nessim, later moved to Cairo, where Nagui was born, to become a famous pediatrician with a thriving practice. Despite a strict, orthodox upbringing, Nagui developed socialist ideas as he grew up, imbibing them during his many visits to France perhaps, and eventually joined the Egyptian Communist Party while still in college. In 1968, when he was barely 22, he was arrested, charged with communism and spent a few months in prison. After his release he restricted his revolutionary activities to writing, starting a theatre-café on the French model in Al- Mukhtalat Café in Ataba Square, opposite the National Theatre. The idea was to reach new audiences outside the traditional theatrical venues, tackle topical issues and make political points in an indirect, amusing way. It opened in 1970 with a performance of Sphinx Café, directed by Mohamed Fadil, now a well-known TV director. Rather than a revolutionary endeavour in the service of a cause, however, Nagui's theatre- café was regarded and celebrated by leftist critics as an experimental venture, a novelty, and discussed in purely aesthetic terms. Despite enthusiastic reviews the experiment did not take, whereupon Nagui attempted to invade the bastion of mainstream theatre with a full- length play, Monkeys Farm ; the censor, however, soon stepped in to put a stop to this venture. The text of Monkeys Farm is lost; Nagui never bothered to publish it though it was riveting, as Samir Ahmed, who was commissioned by Al-Hadith (the modern) Theatre to stage-design it, tells me. It was Nagui's second failed attempt to invade official culture. In 1968, shortly after his release, a play of his, Mercedes, was accepted for television screening. At the last minute, however, it was deemed politically inappropriate and cancelled. In 1976, two years after he had married Leila Saad, Nagui revived his theatre-café, writing a meta- theatrical virtuoso piece for comedian Abdel- Rahman Abu Zahra with Leila as director. As in Sphinx Café, the setting of Inni Aatared (I Object) is once more Al-Mukhtalat Café and the action revolves round a dispute between a rich landlord and an impoverished tenant. As a lawyer's clerk Abu Zahra takes upon himself the defence of both cases at once, in the presence of a farcical panel of judges representing the right, the middle and the left. After Objections Nagui stayed clear of theatre until 1984 when he wrote Al-Qadiya la Tuda fil Naphthalene. Predictably, it was banned by the censor and found favour only with amateur and provincial theatre groups. Some time later Nagui collected his five short plays in one volume which he published privately. The tattered copy of this volume which Amir lent me (he bought it in a second-hand bookshop) carries nothing in terms of dates or name of printers or publishing house. Nagui deserted theatre after Al-Qadiya, turning his hand to humorous political writing of which he contributed a weekly article to Al-Ahali for many years under the rubric Diary of a Civil Servant. Collected by his life-long friend, Sayed Awwad and published in two volumes by the Cultural Palaces Organisation, these articles are as provocative, amusing and profoundly humane as his plays. El-Sawy Cultural Centre did well to host Amir's production of Nagui's two plays, and to its founder, Mohamed El- Sawy, to Amir Salaheddin and all of Nagui's friends I am indebted for their generous help in my efforts to solve the Nagui puzzle. That it has not been solved is no fault of theirs.
