Young, unpretentious, free: The Wardrobe touches hidden springs and forbidden areas, writes Nehad Selaiha Small children, in my experience, are attracted to any enclosed space that can hold them inside -- cupboards, cabinets, crates, or underneath a table with the cloth draped to the floor. Wardrobes, however, particularly those of parents, seem to hold a special fascination for them. Is it the thrill of secretly invading a forbidden adult space? All those big, empty shoes, the clothes hanging down limply from the rail like fearful, disembodied apparitions, but faintly breathing familiar, reassuring smells? Is it a feeling that for a time you have all those grown-ups -- alternately loved and feared, needed and resented -- all to yourself, without rivalry, distractions, or the rigours of discipline, in a world more secure and less confusing than the one outside? The sight of a solitary wardrobe standing on the empty stage of the Small Hall at the Opera House as we waited for The Wardrobe to begin triggered these musings. It never stops to amaze me how, once on stage and properly framed, even the most ordinary and mundane of objects seems to spring to life, acquire a magical potency and becomes a Protean sign. Even before the lights came on that silent wardrobe, which I recognised from an earlier Walid Aouni production (Tahia Halim I think), started working on me. A memory from the very distant past suddenly floated up -- a conglomerate of sounds, sights, smells and painful childish emotions vividly recreated in the present. I remembered how my youngest sister used to hide every morning in my mother's enormous brown wardrobe when she first went to school. After two days her hiding place was an open secret; but though she was invariably discovered, dragged out of it, and bundled off to the hateful place in floods of tears, she never changed it. It was for her own good, they blithely said; but this didn't make the pain any less or alleviate my shameful, guilty sense of utter helplessness in the face of terrible oppression. This went on for a year. Then, suddenly, one day, she stopped hiding altogether and never went near that wardrobe again for years. Why she obstinately stuck to the imaginary sanctuary though it failed her every time and why she suddenly dropped it and didn't seek another puzzled me for a long time. When I asked her years later, she only laughed and said: "What can I say? Plain stupidity I guess." But was it that? Or do we need a psychiatrist to solve this riddle of the wardrobe? The nine young performers (Heba Fayed, Sayed Ali, Ahmed Abou-Zeid, Karima Bedeir, Ahmed Abdel-Ati, M. Mostafa, M. Mostafa Zein, Samah Said, and Mostafa Haroun) who choreographed and put together The Wardrobe came up with a similar wardrobe riddle, equally teasing, but more profound and formally sophisticated. Notwithstanding what they say in the pamphlet about the theme of the "incomplete crime" and the figures of Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie -- a conscious throwback to Walid Aouni's work and possibly a sign of gratitude for having been given this golden opportunity to exercise their creative imagination as artists -- the riddle that ultimately confronts the audience, though larded with mystery, was not a detective one. It is true that the brief, startling final scene which ends with a murder tends (is intended?) to make what had gone before appear in retrospect as a kind of explanation, a visual playing out of all the hidden emotional forces and sexual motives and prejudices behind it; nevertheless, it ultimately remains a purely formal device, at once forced and reductive, a concession to narrativity and intelligibility. It consists of five actions: Walid Aouni and Karima Nait walk in arm in arm, in formal evening dress; they stop centre-stage where he suddenly bends her backwards and kisses her on the lips; she slaps him and walks to the wardrobe stage-left where she bends down to pick up something while he remains centre-stage; she turns to face him, pointing something, which turns out to be a pistol, at him and shoots him; he falls down while she freezes in the same posture. End of scene. What had gone before, however, cannot be contained in a narrative. It had sought to 'detect' a different web of relationships and explore their psychological effects and shifting implications: how the human body relates to space, to other bodies, male and female, and to different, including gender- specific, garments; how garments define or erode identity, character-type and social role. Left to themselves to improvise, with no directorial authority to guide or curb their body memories, and with five music albums by Tarek Sharara, the young performers spun their movements out of their memories, dreams and desires, giving free reign to their imagination. Basic to the structure of the performance they finally came up with was a complex dialogic relationship between the small, enclosed space inside the wardrobe and the open, empty space outside it -- which comprised the whole stage. As those gifted, vibrant, highly-trained performers moved between the two, in varied numbers, moods and guises, offering a wide spectrum of human interactions, emotions and states of being, subverting traditional norms and treading forbidden areas, they set in motion a dialogue between the two spaces. It was a physical, musical dialogue, in the archaic language of the body, and it addressed us at a level deeper than any verbal language can reach save poetry. As it developed, generating a series of paradoxes, it transformed both the wardrobe and the empty space outside into richly ambiguous metaphors. Alternately, the wardrobe became a womb and a tomb, a home and a prison cell, a playhouse, a public toilet, a sardine can, an actors' dressing-room and, ultimately, that repository of all that is repressed in the process of growing up and conforming we call the unconscious. Similarly, the empty space outside was successively an open, free space, a lonely exile, a playground, a sphere of violence, a street in a red-light district, a boudoir, a dormitory and, of course, a stage. To be able to hear this dialogue one has to listen with one's whole body, with one's whole being; for to each of us it will tell a different story. The story it told me had no detectives in it, not even in the sense in which we sometimes describe Oedipus as a detective who finally discovers that he himself is the murderer. It spoke to me of the instability of identity and meaning and of why people were so keen on fixing them eternally. It argued that since the notion of fixed identities and functions was no more than a socially-constructed fiction, and signifiers were ever sliding and signifieds forever deferred, we should celebrate the fact and use it to resist stratification, liberate creativity and, in Julia Kristeva's words, to "open the norms towards pleasure". It also spoke to me of my childhood, its joys, terrors, and vague feelings of guilt; of those forgotten archaic memories of our link with the maternal body and the trauma of birth which threw us out into the world, lonely and naked; of the vague sense of loss which settles upon us and continues to haunt us as soon as we are old enough to be sucked into those arbitrary, tyrannical sign-systems, where difference is the presiding principle, and those ideological/ socio-economic structures where power is the only ethic. In the name of culture, they cripple and tame us, then either train us to run in the rat race, or drill us in the art of war to murder each other and become fodder for cannons. Perhaps my sister's tenacious clinging to her wardrobe, despite daily evidences of its ineffectuality, was not a sign of backwardness, excessive shyness or inordinate spoiling as people judged at the time. Naïve and mulish as it looked, it could have been an unconscious ritualistic protest against what coming out and growing up entails. But she had to come out, and like those wonderful performers planted into the company and nurtured by Walid Aouni until they flowered, find through art a new mode of protest, a more effective way to elude the tyranny of systems and a route back to the space she loved: inside a wardrobe spun out of fancy and the free play of the imagination. My experience of The Wardrobe was at once intensely personal and artistically exhilarating; and judging by the response of the audience during the show on the two nights I saw it -- the sense of excitement building up in the auditorium by the minute and infecting everybody and the rapturous applause at the end -- I knew it had touched hidden springs in most of them and released many secret fantasies and buried tensions. Just as it had set free the imaginative energy of the performers and the memories and longings of their bodies, for the audience it proved an act of liberation.
