Nehad Selaiha compares two American productions seen in Cairo last week In Brecht's pungent political farce, A Man Is A Man, the Chaplinesque hero, Galy Gay, a simple Irish docker in India who at the beginning of the play has no bigger ambition than to buy a small fish for dinner, unexpectedly gets embroiled with the invading British army and ends up as Jeraiah Jip, an army hero and "human fighting-machine". Ironically, the metamorphosis is set in motion by a good-natured act when Galy Gay, "a man who can't say no," agrees (though not without some kind of reward in the form of so many bottles of beer and boxes of cigars) to cover up for the absence of one of the crew of a machine-gun detachment and answer to his name during the evening's roll call to save his comrades from punishment. He naively accepts the vague explanation the soldiers offer for their missing member who, in fact, was left drunk, slumped on a palanquin, outside a native temple they had earlier burgled; his hair had got stuck in the tar judiciously smeared on the door lintel by the Pagoda bonze, Wang, leaving him with a tell-tale bald patch which was sure to damn them all. By the time the three men return with a pair of scissors to shave off the rest of his hair and elude the suspicions of their commander, Sergeant Fairchild (or 'Bloody Five, the human Typhoon', as he is nicknamed), he has been taken into the temple by Wang, doused with liquor, stuffed with steak and transformed into a mock-god for the benefit of the gullible worshippers whom Wang regularly fleeces. The process of metamorphosing the friendly, amenable, sober civilian Galy Gay, who can easily satisfy his appetites through his imagination, as he says when speaking of the elusive fish he never gets to buy, into a social bully and a voracious, drunken, chain-smoking lecherous military butcher who doesn't bat an eye at killing hundreds of civilians, reaches its climax in scene nine. Here, giving up the real Jeraiah Jip for lost, the trio of gunners, led by Uriah Shelley, decide (as widow Begbick announces in the interlude before the scene) to do a "reconstruction job" on Galy Gay and "remodel" him "like a car" into Private Jeraiah Jip. The tools they use are economic and instinctual: the lure of a big fortune (and the leap up the social ladder that goes with it) and fear of death. They trick their prey into a business deal which involves posing as the unnamed owner of "the supernumerary and unregistered Army elephant Billy Humph" -- and selling it. Billy Humph, however, the champion of Bengal, according to Uriah, is no elephant at all, but an obvious mockup: two men under a military map with a gasmask for a trunk and a muffler for ears. Dazzled by the prospect of lots of easy money, Galy Gay decides to suppress his doubts and turn a blind eye to the elephant's suspicious appearance. "An elephant is an elephant, especially if someone's buying him," he echoes Uriah to reassure himself; and "buying him" is what Widow Begbick, the owner of the beer-wagon who assists in the intrigue, offers to do. But, as soon as the deal is clinched, Galy Gay is dragged before a mock-court marshal to face the absurd double charge of theft (stealing and selling an army elephant) and fraudulence (selling a fake elephant to an unsuspecting customer); finally he is terrorised by a mock-firing squad into doubting then renouncing his personal identity "for all eternity" and adopting that of Jeraiah Jip to keep alive. Typically, in view of Brecht's recurrent ironical use of popular dramatic/theatrical forms (like farce, the music hall, the circus, and the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin) as vehicles for his political and social views, and his fascination with the grotesque cabaret sketches made popular by Bavarian dialect comedian Karl Valentin, whom he met in 1919, a year before he started on Galgei, as Mann ist Mann was originally called, the scene is farcically staged as a collection of "numbers", like a circus show, with each ceremoniously announced by Uriah Shelley, the author and stage director of the plot, in the manner of a circus ringmaster. In the third "Number" of this crucial, focal scene -- almost the equivalent in dramatic value and function to an Aristotelian peripeteia -- the counterfeit judges withdraw to consider their verdict and there is a momentary lull in the boisterous proceedings. All is quiet except for the faint murmurs of hushed voices in the background. As Galy Gay tensely strains his ears in suspense to catch what they are saying, one of the soldiers standing on guard casually throws a question at his companion in a nonchalant tone, as if to pass the time: "Has anybody found out who this war's against?" he asks; the other replies, sardonically revealing the economic motives behind most wars: "If they need cotton, it's Tibet; if they need wool, it's Pamir." In the recent AUC production, the premiere of the play in Egypt, director Frank Bradley inserted half a sentence -- the only liberty he took with the text -- making the soldier add: "and if they need OIL, it is....", before he is promptly shushed by the rest of the cast. Nevertheless, those few words had a bombshell effect, blowing up the barrier between stage time and auditorium time and between past and present. Suddenly, the performance took on the character of an awful prediction, as if it were a figurative chronicle of what the future holds. Gory images of American troops storming into Iraq to control its oil sources, as the US seems hell-bent on doing, destroying homes, schools and possibly air-raid shelters, killing thousands of civilians and losing thousands of poor, deluded American and Iraqi soldiers in the prime of youth, were superimposed upon the ridiculous escapades of the shabby representatives of the British colonial army facing us on stage. With one ingenious stroke, Bradley set in motion a chain of associations and the play, set in India in the year 1925, was imaginatively hauled into the Middle East and the year 2002, and invested with a new sense of urgency. It became an ominous warning -- not just against what Brecht identified as "the bad collective", or against imperialism and militarism in general and the dehumanising effect of the war machine on individuals, but also, and primarily, against a specific, concrete, immediate threat about to become a horrible reality. One couldn't help but read in the transformation of Galy Gay into a blind fighting-machine the fate of thousands of Iraqi and American young men who are going to be persuaded or forcibly conscripted, as the case may be, to take part in the imminent carnage and become expendable, exchangeable cogs in a gigantic, merciless wheel that crushes everything in its blind, headlong march. One was also tempted to detect in Galy Gay's brutal indifference to human life once he "tasted blood", and his tyrannical, exploitative treatment of his comrades, whose rations he regularly commandeers, exposing them to the danger of starvation, the makings of a future, ruthless military dictator, not unlike Saddam Hussein. Here, as in his previous Antigone, Bradley chose a world classic that could engage contemporary reality in earnest dialogue and address pressing issues in the present and projected through it, in concrete theatrical terms, his political reflections, existential questions and moral concerns. Whether he meant it or not, his stage version of A Man Is A Man -- evocatively designed by Scott Weldin (set), Jeanne Arnold (costumes) and Stancil Campbell (lighting), and accurately and robustly rendered by a competent, lively and well-disciplined cast, led by Karim Bishay (as Galy Gay), Diana Brauch, Luke Lehner, Ramsi Lehner and Michael Dwan (as the four machine-gun crew), Yara Atef as Widow Begbick, Mariam Ali as Wang and Ratko Ivekovic (as Bloody Five), with Ashraf Fouad on the piano to accompany the songs and provide sound effects -- came across as a candid political protest against the foreign policies of the current US administration, including its tacit condoning of Israel's bombing of Palestinian homes, destruction of refugee camps and wholesale killing of civilians. It is to his credit, however, that, despite all the grotesquerie, aggressive slapstick, pungent satire and forceful parabolic drive of the text, the energy of the political protest was often tempered with profound sympathy for the wretched specimens of humanity we meet in the play and sensitively shadowed with a pervasive, poignant awareness of what another German dramatist, Ernst Toller, once expressed as "the ineluctable pain that no political panacea can cure" and called it "the tragic element of life". By comparison, the other American production I saw last week, The Fantasticks by the Pegasus Players from Chicago, seemed pale and soppy. The elements of burlesque and clowning -- the main assets of the show, apart from the music -- were cleverly used to satirise the moonlit fantasies and romantic longings of the two starry-eyed, adolescent lovers. But when all the silly romantic bubbles of handsome bandits, chivalrous heroes and damsels in distress are effectively pricked, what the play offers in their place as positive, enduring values are no more than the typically American traditional and often sentimentalised ones of home and family. The play, a musical with some nice songs and catchy tunes, unfolds with the help of a kind of jinni- narrator and two down-at-heel wandering actors who live in a large chest of theatrical costumes. For the whole of the first part, which burlesques the story of Romeo and Juliet, it adopts a farcical style reminiscent of the play about Pyramus and Thisbe rehearsed by the mechanics in A Midsummer Night's Dream for Theseus' wedding, including a man who impersonates a wall. That part was delightful, and so was the sequence which satirised the way cinema, television and pulp literature falsify our awareness of the world, covering up its nasty realities under a veil of romance. The satire, however, soon fades, and with it the delicious spirit of parody. As the lovers pass from innocence and gladness into experience and sadness, the play runs out of inventive steam and grows mushy and stuffily parochial in outlook. At the end, true love triumphs, as it should in a typical American musical, and the parents' wishes are fulfilled; the prodigal son, who left to explore the world outside the shelter of books, home and family, discovers that it is a frighteningly alien and cruel place that ought to be shunned; like a wise boy, he goes back home to the faithful arms of his sweetheart and the kind bosom of his father. What a conclusion! And what an escapist, romantic illusion! In retrospect, one realises that the beginning was fake -- a mere bait; the satirical debunking and burlesquing of the adolescents' superficial, romantic view of the world was ultimately intended to consolidate an equally shallow, one-sided, black-and- white, so-called adult view of life and foster a narrow-minded, self-enclosed and inward-looking attitude which shuns the "other" as alien, and, therefore, a threat. It was too depressing a message.
