Nehad Selaiha encounters a lovely Shakespearean collage in body language at Bibliotheca Alexandrina Actors have been known to attempt humorous run- throughs of Shakespearean texts in the space of less than an hour. I remember a company in Britain (I forget what it was called -- Shakespeare Without Tears perhaps?) which made a specialty of this type of show. In Egypt, such irreverent treatment of the bard is not unknown and director Khalid Galal, in particular, seems to have a penchant for it. In his Shakespeare One, Two, he managed to cram as many as three tragedies, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, plus Romeo and Juliet in a little over two hours and followed it, a couple of years later, with a diminutive Hamlet, performed at breakneck speed, then treated us to a hilarious 40-minute version of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year. Indeed, A Midsummer seems to be generally viewed, especially by young people, as a prime candidate for this kind of approach and keeps surfacing in a variety of adumbrated forms in amateur and university productions. To enjoy a show of this kind, one assumes, requires foreknowledge of the original text -- which, in the case of Egyptian directors who address an audience with a limited knowledge of the bard, necessarily curtails their choice of plays. Unless they are targeting an exclusive audience of Shakespearean specialists, they cannot safely wander outside the four main tragedies and three or four comedies at the most -- namely A Midsummer, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew and, perhaps, at a pinch, Twelfth Night. And even in such cases the audience will mostly recognise basic situations in the plays rather than individual lines. Such adumbrations of the bard come across as clear parodies which invariably teeter on the edge of farce -- not surprisingly in view of the galloping rhythm at which the events unfold and the drastically abridged scenes succeed each other. In fact, farce can be a definite asset in such cases since, unlike parody, it can be relished on its own, without need for prior knowledge of any ulterior text. Not all Shakespearean adumbrations, however, take the form of reductive parodies which aim for nothing beyond being good entertainment and pure fun. In some cases, Shakespearean texts are sketched in brief outlines into a performance with a view to intertextuality rather than parody. Themes and characters are picked up from one or (rarely) more plays, projected in a new setting, from a different perspective, or in a different emotional key, and used to create works with a serious intent which embody a certain state of mind or existential condition, or to offer a particular reading of history or contemporary reality. In one instance, Mahmoud Abu Doma's Dance of the Scorpions which he wrote and directed, a telescoped version of Hamlet, was projected in grotesque, surreal terms and used to expose the power-politics underlying autocratic regimes and military dictatorships. In another, the same Khalid Galal I mentioned earlier went out of his way to produce a non-parodic, thoroughly serious, almost grim half- hour Hamlet which overplayed the element of grotesque to a weird pitch and presented a nightmarish vision of a police-state overrun by terror and infested with delusions. The most recent non-parody show to draw on Shakespeare for material and inspiration is Karim El-Tonsi's Shakespeare: An Encounter at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. More adventurous than most, it ropes in characters, scenes and lines from as many as seven plays and, using the bodies and voices of 12 actors -- all members of the Actors Studio, the one- year-old Bibliotheca Alexandrina resident theatre troupe, juggles them into an intriguing pattern of parallelisms and contrasts. The initial triple sequence serves as a kind of prelude. The first shows the actors, barely visible in the dim light, locked together on the stage floor in a heaving, swirling, octopus-like mass then disengaging themselves, one by one, to roll away into the wings (a familiar El-Tonsi choreographic item which featured in other shows). In the second, they reappear in white shirts and black trousers and walk in circles round the stage, threading their way through four screens at the back (which provide the only set), with each pausing briefly in turn to introduce themselves by their real names. In the third, the actors suddenly come to a halt and freeze in dramatic poses, in small pools of light, and deliver, first singly then in unison, a variety of familiar snatches from Shakespeare's plays: Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Ophelia's words about beauty and virtue, Lear's invocation of heavenly wrath on his daughters in the storm speech, Brabantio's ominous: "Look to her Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:/She has deceived her father, and may thee," and Macbeth's moral agonising over the thought of murdering Duncan, to mention only the ones I remember. Not quite original, this introduction, however, amply demonstrated the vocal competence and physical control and suppleness of the actors (all beginners, with a modest experience in theatre and none in dance) and their blessed freedom of the usual inhibitions. As the show progressed, other Shakespearean characters and scenes were introduced: Lady Macbeth reading her husband's letter; Cleopatra's last speech before she puts the adder to her breast; Ophelia lamenting the mental deterioration of Hamlet; the Merchant of Venice lashing about with a whip in rage; Portia at court lecturing him on the quality of mercy; Antonio and Bassanio comforting or consulting with each other (with a subtle hint at homosexual love); Othello in an agony of jealousy, with Iago at his shoulder, egging him on, then strangling Desdemona; Laertes fighting with Hamlet over Ophelia's grave and, for the first time in an Egyptian Shakespearean collage, the Iago-like villain, Aaron, Timora's slave and lover in Titus Andronicus, boasting of his evil deed and simulating a sexual encounter with his mistress. I was surprised to find Aaron, a figure from a play virtually unknown in Egypt, among this bunch of familiar characters. The idea of including him must have come from Sarah El-Hawwari during the improvisations out of which the show developed. After intensive training sessions in movement and dance, El-Tonsi started exploring Shakespeare with his actors. Some of them had taken part in Mohamed Abul-Seoud's production of Titus Andronicus at the Bibliotheca in May last year: Nirmeen El-Bureedi, who impersonated Ophelia, Desdemona and Lady Macbeth here, had played Lavinia while Sarah El- Hawwari superbly tackled Aaron. It could be Sarah is still under the spell of the villainous dark slave and, therefore, has added him to the dizzying array of Shakespearean parts suggested by her colleagues. As I watched Nirmeen and Sarah smoothly slipping in and out of characters and sensitively interpreting their parts, both vocally and physically, I remembered with profound gratitude Abul-Seoud's efforts and three months of continuous hard work to initiate them, and others, as performers and launch the Bibliotheca theatre troupe. El-Tonsi brought to the troupe his talents as gifted dancer, director and choreographer and built on the work of his predecessor, expanding their knowledge of art and culture and their understanding of themselves, honing their acting talents and body language and training them into the art of movement and dance. Judging by Shakespeare: An Encounter, he has done a marvellous job. The feelings and states of mind underlying the spoken lines were physically explored in a thorough way during the rehearsals and effectively translated in performance into complex patterns of eloquent, vibrant, non-mimetic movement. As one watched the characters surfacing, intersecting and disappearing, doubling, mirroring and flowing into each other, the medley of scenes vocally evoked by the actors on the empty stage, like echoes resonating in a dark tunnel, slowly acquired shape and coherence and a pattern began to emerge. The disparate Shakespearean fragments gradually fell in place and seemed to arrange themselves round the themes of love, death and violence -- appearing like successive, often simultaneous, variations on them. At the end, you find yourself in possession of a rich Shakespearean tapestry, exquisitely patterned and delicately, dexterously, lovingly executed -- a tapestry that makes you glow and should make the Bibliotheca Alexandrina very proud of its Actors Studio company and its second production.
