Nehad Selaiha reviews the artistic fare at The Independent Theatre Week at Al-Tali'a Judging by the public's and critics' response the Independent Theatre Week at Al-Tali'a has been a notable success. Whatever the shortcomings of the shows on offer, they more than made up for them in terms of variety. After Fragments of Diamond (reviewed last week), Nora Amin's La Musica troupe performed on two successive nights an abridged version of their earlier production of Marguerite Duras's psychological thriller The English Lover. The play, which revolves round the horrible murder of a deaf-mute young woman at the hands of her deranged cousin, and consists of two separate interrogation sessions with the self- confessed murderess and her husband, was first presented in toto at the Falaki Center of the AUC four months ago (see review on 27 February 2003). In the version we saw at Al- Tali'a, the husband's part had to be axed when Kamal Suliman, who played it in February, withdrew from the show at the last minute for reasons of his own. One expected the omission to cause irreparable damage; curiously, however, though the initial element of suspense surrounding the real identity of the culprit and generated by the husband's nervous prevarication and general air and conduct during the questioning was lost, as well as the image he draws of his wife before we meet her and the information he supplies about her background and their marriage (from his own point of view, of course), the play strangely seemed to gain in psychological depth. The focus was fully, exclusively, unwaveringly on Claire's tortured mind and the subtle sympathy that grows between her and the interrogator. It was obvious too that Maysa Zaki and Ahmed El-Salakawi had used the time since the last performance to hone their performances and master the intriguing, sudden shifts in the characters' moods and relationship. El-Salakawi's performance was more finely tuned and Zaki, confined to a chair throughout, used her rich vocal range and sensitive body language with stunning effect, holding the audience in a spell. Also from France, though in a heavily adapted version, was B M Koltes's La Solitude dans les Champs de Coton by Al-Qafila troupe, directed by its founder, Effat Yehia, and rechristened The Rhythms of Memory. First performed in 2000, the play still displays the same vexing, bewildering ambiguity I noted when I reviewed it on this page on 26 October of that year. Koltes's cruel dissection of the power conflict between two potential lovers, both homosexual, was replayed in a different, distinctly feminist key as a thrust-and-parry match between a man and a woman. Still, one could enjoy the original set and visuals and the lively performances of Shahira Kamal and Hamada Shousha. From world drama there was also a Cuban play -- Jose Triana's famous La noche de los asesinos (The Night of the Killers, 1965), translated by Fathi El-Ashri and performed by El-Ghagar troupe. Triana's adolescents locked in an attic or basement and playing out their fantasies of killing their parents, assuming in the process different roles, ranging from those of the other characters present, through those of the parents, to the roles of outsiders such as representatives of the law, were adequately played by Azza El-Husseini (the founder of the group who also directed), Sayed Fouad, Sumaya Ahmed and Yasmin El-Hawari. With two statues of the mother and father framing the stage on either side and towering above the actors, a table and some chairs for the trial scene, and a screen which showed the children impersonating other characters in silhouettes, El-Husseini and her actors pilloried the family establishment and its coercive power relationships and put across a forceful protest against patriarchy and all totalitarian systems arguing they can only breed terrorism. For those who prefer homegrown fare, the Week offered two new plays. The first -- Goha, Wife and Partners 2 (an expanded version of an earlier play with the same title which toured the provinces as part of a women's empowerment and consciousness-raising campaign sponsored by an NGO) -- was collectively written by El-Misaharati troupe and directed by its founder Abeer Ali. This is the fourth female director and troupe founder I mention in a row and let me remark in passing that the strong presence of talented, creative women in this Week was one of its most exhilarating and positive features. Loosely modelled on the old Italian Commedia dell'arte and the more modern political cabaret (first introduced in Egypt in the 1960s by Nabil Badran's Some Eat It Hot and in Syria by Mamdouh 'Udwan's Cheers, [or, Your Health] My Country!), and drawing extensively on the rich resources of folk humour and popular comedy, including puppets and shadow plays, it consists of a cluster of short, fast-paced satirical sketches of modern Cairene life, developed through improvisation on prearranged synopses involving familiar formalised characters and stock situations. Every stock situation, however, is given here a sharp, original ironical twist which jolts the characters out of their familiar frames, breaks the audience expectations, gives the scene a fresh look and sparks off a new progressive counter message. The general tendency of the show is agit-prop and the message is predominantly feminist and, as such, deeply political in the broad sense of the word. Personal matters like love, marriage and sexual cravings and frustrations, as well as moral questions of good and bad, sin and virtue are aired and robustly debated with refreshing outspokenness and viewed in a socio/ideological context that makes them into burning political issues. Indeed, the familiar feminist slogan "the personal is political" informs the show at every step and it is a credit to Abeer and her magnificent, richly gifted 14 performers that it never palls. The inherently didactic bent of Goha is cunningly camouflaged with layers of light, frothy comedy and other of lusty humour and the show progresses like a rollicking comic romp. No wonder the audience who packed the Salah Abdel-Sabour hall at Al-Tali'a on the two nights it performed, with many standing or sitting on the floor, adored it. Even the critics, some of whom would rather be seen dead than laughing, were seen rocking with laughter. If, like myself, you find a laugh increasingly difficult to manage in these grim days, try to catch Goha when it surfaces again at Al- Hanager in the Independent Light Comedy Festival during the first week of July. Three Stories of a Dead Man is also an original text written by Adel Mansour for Mohamed Abdel- Khaliq's Theatre Atelier troupe. Despite some technical weaknesses, it shows talent, wit and imagination. It features a corrupt journalist, a hardened opportunist and shameless political timeserver, who suddenly recovers his conscience when faced with the cataclysmic 1967 defeat. When he decides to write the truth and reveal the real dimensions of the calamity and its causes to the people, he is promptly shot by the regime which had pampered him. In the nether world he pleads for another lease of life to make up for his past sins and his wish is granted. No sooner is he back on earth, however, and about to embark on a new, honest career than a ghost of a dead member of the regime is sent after him to hustle him back to the kingdom of the dead. The final scene (or story) shows him restored to life and his former job; but rather than reform, he behaves unscrupulously -- just as he did at the beginning -- and shamelessly tries to coach a young, bright- eyed, upright journalist into the arts of villainous venality. The message is clear and deeply sardonic: under military dictatorship (which the play argues is still very much with us) moral probity is impossible even in the other world and death itself cannot put you beyond the reach of the long arm of the regime's agents. The play unfolds in a series of brief, often crisp and witty scenes, drawn in quick, sharp strokes with no psychological shading of any kind so as to leave you in no doubt about the meaning. Most of the comedy is provided by the hapless assassins -- two frightened, bungling idiots, reminiscent of many comic duos. We next see them in hell, doomed to standing up eternally as punishment and they tell the startled hero that they themselves were liquidated in turn, together with many others, to hide any traces of the crime. The two country yokels (performed by the same two gifted comedians) who greet the hero on his return to life also contributed a lot of mirth. The other parts were acted with plenty of enthusiasm but lacked technical competence and sureness of touch while both the set and lighting left a lot to be desired. A pity that such a promising text should have looked so drab and lacklustre in performance. Of technical polish and sophistication, however, you got plenty in Al-Warsha's production of Tawfiq El-Hakim's A Bullet in the Heart. Written in 1931, following his return from a five-year spell in Paris, it was a conscious attempt by El-Hakim to introduce romantic high comedy to the Egyptian stage, then wallowing in farces, vaudevilles, musicals and melodramas. Paris had weaned him off his earlier fondness for these forms. In The Prison of Life he wrote: "At the time, theatre was dead ... There was nowhere I could present the kind of plays I was writing at the time. The only serious groups were the amateur ones, like Jam'iyat Ansar Al-Tamthil (Acting Champions Society) ... I wrote A Bullet in the Heart especially for them ... I wanted it to be different from the general run of comedies, mostly adapted from foreign texts, which presented caricatures rather than characters and relied on verbal jokes and farcical situations and surprises ... I wanted a comedy which depends for its whole effect on dialogue between real people, and on that alone." For a theme he picked the age-old conflict between love and friendship, idealising both through the self-sacrifice of the hero and playing on the old romantic belief in the power of true love to reform rakes. Mohsen, an attractive, happy-go- lucky playboy, living wildly beyond his means and constantly chased by debtors, glimpses rich, beautiful Fifi outside Groppi's eating ice-cream and is suddenly and hopelessly smitten with love. It soon transpires that she is the fiancée of his closest friend, Sami, a hard-headed niggardly opportunist and social-climber who covets her wealth and family name. Predictably, Fi i, who combines intelligence with beauty, sees through Sami and gravitates towards the good-natured, prodigal Mohsen who shares her generous nature. When she offers him her love he rebuffs her; though he knows his friend does not deserve her, he is unwilling to betray their friendship. El-Hakim does not mention why the Acting Champions did not go through with the production, only saying that "the group were soon infected with the general apathy." Maybe they deemed its sparkling, witty dialogue, elegant atmosphere and subtle, refined humour unsuited to the vulgar times. In any case, the failure of the project was one of the reasons which led El-Hakim to abandon colloquial Arabic (a great pity), champion "closet drama", and declare in his introduction to Pygmalion that his plays were intended for "a theatre of the mind". Apart from a popular musical film version for which El-Hakim wrote the script in 1944, giving the play a happy end at the behest of director Mohamed Karim and the star lead in the film, Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, the play didn't find its way to the stage for a very long time. When it finally did, in 1964, both the theatre and its public had become too loudly politicised and grimly socialist to tolerate, let alone appreciate, its central moral interest, surface playfulness, wispy beauty, studiedly cool surface and delicate shadings of suave irony. Predictably, the 1964 production was a flop and militant critics considered the play reactionary. The April 2000 revival by director Hassan Abdel-Salam, though it kept the original sad end, was more a revival of the film version of the play than of the original text. Abdel-Salam knew very well that every member of his audience had seen the film and that a comparison was inevitable. So, rather than try to avoid it (a futile effort he shrewdly judged), he openly embraced it, heavily underlining the sections of El- Hakim's dialogue immortalised by Abdel- Wahab and Raqia Ibrahim in the film, as if to nudge the audience's memory and urge them to project what they remember on what they see, to superimpose images upon images and watch the present in the reflected glow of an elegant past. Comedian Sami Maghawri (as Dr Sami), on the other hand, did his comic best to drag the past, as idealised in the movie, into full view and subject it, together with the present and our sense of nostalgia, to a shower of gentle mockery. The result was a liberating sense of playfulness, a faint aura of faded glamour and an affectionate celebration by Ali El-Haggar and Angham not just of El-Hakim or Mohamed Karim's old movie, but of the whole art of manufacturing images and fabricating illusion. In the recent Al-Warsha production which graced the Independent Theatre Week, Hassan El-Gretly and his cast and crew (an independent group just like Ansar El-Tamthil for whom El- Hakim had written the play and on whom he had pinned so many hopes) have finally managed to give A Bullet in the Heart its definitive stage production and free the text from the bedevilling shadow of the film version. With meticulous attention to the text and stage directions, including El-Hakim's introduction of a sexually suggestive French song by Josephine Baker in one scene, masterful orchestration of tone and rhythm with exquisite control and manipulation of pauses, carefully thought-out sets -- initially austere and muted (Sami's clinic), then elegant with a touch of abandon and flamboyance (in Mohsen's flat) -- El-Gretly maneuvered Botros Ra'ouf, Vanya Exerjian, Ahmed Mokhtar, with Medhat Fawzi and Ramadan Khater alternately playing Abdallah, the caretaker, in an intricate tonal dance which made the text glow like a sheet of crystal shot through with the colours of a blazing sunset. The romantic idealistic thrust was there, but was never shallow or facile. It came across as idealism bought at a tremendously high price. Mohsen, as delivered by Botros Ra'ouf under El-Gretly's direction, is no soft, sentimental, platonic lover. The centre piece in the set representing his flat is a reproduction of a famous erotic painting by the quintessential Art Deco portraitist Tamara De Lempicka -- the woman who was quoted to have said: "I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the margin." For her famous La Belle Rafaela (1927), which El-Gretly and his set-designer Amr El-Rakshi picked out to add a new dimension to Mohsen's character, she had used for a model a seductive women of the street and the London Sunday Times Magazine had described the painting as "one of the most remarkable nudes of the century" because Tamara had captured the lust in her subject. In the dialogue between Vanya and Botros one distinctly felt this overpowering lust in the form of an erotic undercurrent slowly building up though carefully suppressed. It momentarily erupted in oblique ways, in seemingly haphazard gestures -- like Vanya involuntarily consuming chocolates, Botros adding a few loving touches to his voluptuous Rafaela, or the two sitting back-to-front in the twin red lovers' red seat, so close, but with each facing in a different direction, intimating the sad end early on in the play. In the final poignant scene, the stage is completely empty; Mohsen's furniture has been publicly auctioned and removed in a grotesque sequence despite Fifi's desperate efforts to stop the sale; a cracked 1930s record of a sad song by Umm Kulthoum fills the hall while the light picks up Vanya in profile at the back, looking pensively and longingly at Botros up front, while he resignedly, hopelessly puffs at his cigarette. Framed in a cloud of smoke, with the gilded, red- velvet-lined cabinet he used to call "the submarine" where he used to hide from his debtors behind him, but now with the back of it knocked out, revealing a black emptiness behind, one remembers the rich beauty of voluptuous Rafaela, the promise of love and fulfilment in Baker's frisky song and that warm, inviting auctioned-off red lovers' seat and an anguished sense of loss, of missed chances sets in. With so much artistic variety, panache and debonair inventiveness, one cannot but hope that the Independent troupes will prove a real asset for the future of the Egyptian theatre.
