Lenin El-Ramli's latest comedy at the National proves once more that he is the wittiest satirist in Egypt today, writes Nehad Selaiha Lenin El-Ramli has a knack for squeezing laughter out of the most serious, even tragic facts of Egyptian life. His sharp, incisive wit, always wildly original, is like a scalpel cleverly wielded to anatomise modern Egyptian society, revealing its festering wounds and the damaging, absurd contradictions that underlie basic cultural assumptions. He usually starts off with an urgent topical issue, an ordinary, mundane situation and familiar character types then cleverly injects them with odd or fanciful elements, in a brilliantly calculated process, which transform them into pungent, thought-provoking satirical parables. His recurrent theme -- from his earliest play, Inta Hurr (You Are Free) until his most recent Tehebb Teshouf Ma'sah?.. Bil Tab' La (Like to See a Tragedy? Of Course Not), currently at the National -- is the problem of weaving one's way through life amid the pitfalls of bigotry, ignorance, superstitions, inherited taboos and intellectual lethargy and cowardice; and it is always presented with intense urgency, passionate involvement and sardonic humour. In most cases, the battle is lost and the central figure is defeated. You almost never get a happy ending in El-Ramli's plays. But however sour the story turns, it is never short of side-splittingly funny. His latest comedy, Tehebb Teshouf Ma'sah?...Bil Tab' La, takes culture or, rather, knowledge, as its subject and makes of Einstein's theory of relativity the starting point and primum mobile of the action. Samer (Mustafa Sha'ban), a teenager and ignorant hedonist living in the lap of luxury, happens to read one day in a children's magazine he finds in the toilet that if you stand on the moon you see the earth above you. When he tells his friends this to show off, they ridicule him and to vindicate himself he hunts down the journalist (Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra), a penniless and cynical former political activist who spent half his life in and out of prison and helped found half the political parties in Egypt, who wrote it, and finds him in a seedy downtown bar with some intellectuals -- an existentialist critic (Mohamed Desouqi), a communist poet (Iman El- Serafi), an anarchist painter (Mohamed Alieddin) and a feminist novelist (Asma' Yehia) -- all dead drunk. When the journalist springs upon him the theory of relativity, his mind boggles and from that moment on he embarks on an epistemological quest under the tutorship of the drunken journalist. As a first step, he disowns his father, a rich, corrupt politician (Ahmed Fouad Selim), his vain, empty-headed cronies, and elopes with Masriya, the half-educated but sensible, astute and highly unconventional daughter of his nanny (Liqa' El-Khamisi), lives with her in sin, leading the life of a vagabond. The education process, however, though extremely hilarious, proves tragic; it takes him on a perilous, giddying trip through a caricature of the history of Western and Arab thought -- from Plato and Aristotle and Abul-Ala' Al-Ma'ari, through Marx, Spinoza and Rifa'a El-Tahtawi, down to Sartre, Albert Camus, Nasser and Salah Abdel-Sabour. Utterly confused and unable to digest anything, with nothing solid to cling to except those down-at-heel intellectuals who live in a constant alcoholic haze, sponging on the hard-working Masriya and perpetually spouting off slogans and quotations in the most ridiculous manner, he loses his bearings and keeps changing his allegiances. He goes through communism, humanism, Arab socialism, existentialism, adopting and shedding them in turn until, finally, utterly disillusioned and betrayed by his intellectual mentor, he turns to Islamic fundamentalism, joins a terrorist group and forces Masriya to wear the veil. But "the brothers" also fail him. In prison, after the police storm their hideout in a cemetery, he discovers that some of them were informers, while the rest, including himself, betray each other to save their skin. Even his love for Masriya begins to fade. In the end he comes to the conclusion that in this relative, illusion-infested, topsy- turvy world, the only certainty is death and so commits suicide by drinking rat poison. At this point the actors face the audience and tell them in chorus that if this ending does not please them, they could offer them another happy one and set about doing it in a farcical manner as a burlesque of old, melodramatic Egyptian movies. Samer is miraculously saved at the last minutes, the knavish father repents, the ineffectual, drunken intellectuals promise to reform, Masriya miraculously regains the love of Samer and all ends happily. If anything, this funny end has an acrid, stinging taste and deepens the tragic impact of the El-Ramli's ruthless analysis of the cultural crisis and intellectual confusion young people in Egypt are facing today. El-Ramli's masterful dramaturgy was matched by the imaginative zest of director Khaled Galal and the sparkling performances of his carefully chosen, vibrant and talented cast. The contrast between the seedy, middle-aged intellectuals (led by the inimitable Abu Zahra in his best stage appearance for a long time) and the blissfully ignorant young people (led by the dynamic Sha'ban and El-Khamisi) -- both equally lampooned -- was a constant source of joy, sparking off squibs of scintillating comedy and effervescent humour and Galal played them off deliciously against each other, drawing out their comic best without sacrificing the serious intent of the play or the human dimensions of the characters. But the really endearing thing about this production is that though no one is spared, and the vision it projects is truly bleak, one always senses an underlying sympathy with our human weaknesses, our failures, frustrations, confusion and muddle-headedness. There is some comfort in this, if in nothing else.
