A zany 50-minute adumbration of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides an unusual Ramadan treat, writes Nehad Selaiha Anyone who has had first hand experience of Cairo's sweltering summers knows that, rather than Eliot's unfairly maligned April (whose only sin is breeding "Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire"), August "is the cruellest month". Its sultry, scorching days, limp and parched evenings and heavy, humid nights are the nearest you can get to a taste of purgatory, minus the hope of expiation. What was Khaled Galal thinking of calling his latest production, an abbreviated version of A Mid-summer Night's Dream (on at the Creativity Centre, in the Opera grounds till the end of Ramadan), A Mid-August Night's Dream? What a repulsive title, suggesting at once the lurid ravings of a deranged mind in the grip of fever and long, sleepless, steaming and sweat-drenched -- typical August -- nights infested with elusive anxieties, disturbing hallucinations and persistent nightmares. No wonder I stayed clear of the play when it was first performed for a brief spell last September. But it being Ramadan, a month marked, among other things, by extreme theatrical dearth, and after 10 days of not so much as the shadow of a play to be found anywhere, I humbly concluded that, as the old adage says, beggars cannot be choosers. And so, one evening last week, I overcame my August phobia, quelled my deep- seated revulsion at anything remotely reminiscent of that fearful month, and allowed myself to be lured into the elegant, new Creativity Centre where a huge, colourful poster at the door sported the abhorrent title amid twinkling lights. Two nights later you could see me at the same venue, laughing my head off at the pranks and antics of the actors. Though familiar with Galal's effervescent style of directing and his quizzical, tongue-in-cheek approach to the classics, particularly Shakespeare, whom he adores and keeps revisiting, growing more irreverent and affectionate every time, I had not expected to enjoy myself so much. A great champion of the slogan "Shakespeare without tears", he believes that the quickest way to befriend the Bard and the shortest cut to his world lie through good-natured irony, parody and burlesque. In his previous Shakespeare One, Two, performed a couple of years ago at Al-Tali'a (and reviewed on this page at the time), he took on three of the tragedies, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello, as well as Romeo and Juliet, stripping their plots to their bare outlines, galloping through their scenes at break-neck speed, and finishing them off -- all four of them -- in under two hours. It was a dizzying experience, extremely funny at times and strangely perceptive at others. The speed, the stunning leaps, the torrent of fleeting images and flashing insights, the cinematic fragmentation into significant still frames of certain scenes, and the startling transpositions and surrealistic doubling, trebling and merging of characters in others, left one gasping for breath and feeling thrilled to the bone. It was obviously the work of a young person, for only the young can have such audacity and imaginative daring. Needless to say it did not please everybody and positively enraged the deluded, false worshippers of the Bard who insist on regarding him as a snow-bearded sage, locked in an ivory tower, dropping pearls of wisdom. Galal prefers the image of the lively, jocular actor, the gregarious, worldly-wise man and the master craftsman and entertainer who is not above using burlesque, slapstick farce, bawdy humour and melodrama if it suits his purposes or the mood of his audience. It is from this image that Galal draws courage and inspiration whenever he approaches the revered plays, and it is to them that he owes his belief in the value of dynamic stage imagery and the free-play of both the director's and the spectator's imagination. Those who do not share this belief, or regard any interference with the text as sacrilege, would do themselves a favour if they steer clear of Galal's dabbling with Shakespeare; the liberties he takes with the plays could permanently damage their nerves, or, in extreme cases, cause a heart attack. This warning is particularly apt in the case of his current A Mid-August Night's Dream. Judging by what I saw, it was probably conceived one sizzling night last August when Galal's baby girl, his first born Nur, was particularly exasperating and kept him awake. How else could Titania have been reduced to a tiny, swarthy doll, with pink hair, swaddled in a tiny sheet of paper, carrying a childish drawing of a forest in one scene, then to a shadow of a formation of squiggles and doodles, cast by the light on the floor of the stage in another? Of the four plots, only two were kept, in a drastically abridged form -- the lovers quartet and the Oberon-Titania-Puck trio. The third, the Theseus-Hippolyta duet, was completely axed and the fourth -- the Bottom and company rehearsal of The Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe -- hovered over the production, like a strong though impalpable presence, informing mood, structure, visuals and overall style. The Athenian woods, to which Hermia and Lysander escape and are followed by Demetreus and Helena, become an empty, white circle, marked with a string of tiny, coloured bulbs on floor level and bordered, beyond that line, with a wild medley of props and accessories, including a huge number of inflated plastic toys, baby changing-mattresses, a vase of artificial flowers and some tree branches, four outsize feeding- bottles with towering rubber teats, two deck- chairs, a fishing rod, an enormous beach ball and lots of gaily coloured and shiny party hats of the high, conical type. The sight of this empty white circle, faintly shadowed with shapes of leaves and branches and heaped round with those bright, playful objects puts you in the mood for a party at the outset and you are not disappointed; the performance proceeds or, more precisely, unfolds in the same spirit and manner as the mechanics' performance of the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe at Theseus' wedding. The six actors (Mohamed El-Desouqi, Sayed El-Roomi, Mohamed Ali, Asmaa Yehya, Dina El-Saleh and Sameh Hussein), armed with primitive drums, cymbals, castanets and rattles and impersonating an itinerant company of ham actors intent on treating, or, rather, mistreating us to a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream -- or at least selections of it, make a boisterous entrance. More startling than the noise, however, is their appearance. Dressed like toddlers, in printed cotton dungarees and socks, they wore on their heads fantastic hats and the weirdest-looking multicoloured wigs you can imagine. They lined up on their chairs, on one side of the circle, pouting and waiting for their cues, which the leader pompously announced, not always accurately, by jingling a bell. Alternately, they stepped into the ring, singly or in pairs, bespectacled (as the inept Oberon and lackadaisical Puck were) or vainly brandishing their mobiles (like the baby lovers), and got down to business in earnest, declaiming some lines, forgetting most, and covering up by extensive, often ridiculously erratic adlibbing, and all the time fiercely hectoring and stage-directing each other. Time flew as the white circle changed colour, becoming red, blue, green and purple in turn, and the actors pranced or scurried around, helping themselves to the varied props while lisping tattered fragments of the dialogue, in between squealing, squabbling and throwing violent tantrums and, generally, making short work of the scenes. For those willing to laugh at Shakespeare the performance became a wild, rollicking romp through his text on the merry horse of mimicry and a zestful carnival celebration of the spirit of mockery and caricature. The wonder of it, though, is that despite the stripping down and hacking of the text and all the rough-and-tumble tomfoolery and horseplay the theme of the transience and fragility of love endured, and was even fleetingly pathetic, and so did the metaphor of the world as a stage populated by ephemeral shadows.
