Multiple ironies

Why, Nehad Selaiha wonders at a revival of Naguib Surour's Yassin and Bahiya, do plays written for the masses end up in the lap of the elite?
In 1964, after three relatively successful ventures into realistic drama, Youssef Idris (1927-91) produced a curious new play which seemed, on the surface, to break new ground and effect a complete rupture with inherited western forms and familiar theatrical conventions. Al-Farafeer (Small Fry or Underlings) was intended, it seemed, as a practical illustration of the ideas he had passionately advocated a few months earlier, in 1963, in a series of articles published in Al-Katib magazine, entitled "Towards An Egyptian Theatre." The articles represented Idris's thinking on the origins and directions of the Egyptian dramatic tradition at that juncture in his career, and its core was a plea to renounce the European model and look for a more culturally authentic alternative among various "theatrical" social phenomena -- from street brawls and religious rituals to ceremonies at funerals and weddings -- which have been an innate part of Egyptian life for centuries. He ended his argument by suggesting that the samir -- a popular form of semi- improvised communal entertainment which features dancing, singing, clowning, juggling, story- telling and satirical sketches of daily life -- provided an exemplary vehicle for evolving an indigenous theatrical medium.
Ironically, Al-Farafeer was staged by director Karam Mutaweh (1933-1996) not in a barn, a street marquee, or a village square -- as most samirs are (or, rather were, as they have since become defunct) -- nor even in a theatre-in-the-round, with the audience surrounding the stage, as Idris had insisted in his detailed stage-directions, but in a traditional Italian box theatre, and the National at that. Although Mutaweh planted some actors among the audience and did his best to demolish the invisible fourth wall to achieve a degree of spontaneous interaction between stage and auditorium, the solid architecture of the theatre, with its pronounced European provenance, as well as its clientele, clashed sharply with the author's intentions. The bourgeois audience and critics were amused, even thrilled by the novelty of the experiment, but it would take an inordinate degree of myopia to claim that it had anything of the look, spirit, feel or atmosphere of a real samir, had laid the foundation for a true popular theatre or dramatic form, or was anything more than a brilliant aesthetic formal exercise.
The irony multiplied when in November the same year, within weeks of the opening of Al-Farafeer, another experiment at creating an authentic Egyptian drama, away from the European model, written by a peasant, about peasants and, seemingly, for peasants, and openly drawing on an old popular ballad by way of invoking the folk oral tradition of storytelling, was staged at the new highbrow and elitist Pocket Theatre by the same Italian-trained director. Naguib Surour's Yassin and Bahiya was written in Budapest in 1963 where the author, gifted poet of the new school of free verse, as well as a talented actor and director and a passionately committed socialist to boot, was working. More of a narrative poem (as it was labelled when it appeared in print in 1965) than a play, it seemed to challenge the very concept of what constitutes a dramatic text. In it, Surour (1932--1978) had wanted to achieve a kind of folk art akin to the tradition of the sira singers in which the bard would narrate the handed-down epic in rhythmic verse, interspersed with songs, wise proverbs and lines of verse, occasionally improvising dialogue in the passages of emotional tension. Surour knew that tradition well from his years in Akhtab village in the Daqahleya province where he was born and spent most of his childhood and teens. In those years, strolling story-tellers and sira singers were still familiar figures and he learnt his first lessons in poetry and performance from them before he ever laid eyes on an Arabic classical poem or read Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare or Byron -- the poets to whom he pays homage in the prologue of the play. But the predominantly narrative form of Yassin and Bahiya was not the only aspect that triggered controversy. Surour had used the title, the main characters and the basic conflict in the old ballad; but instead of a village in Upper Egypt at the beginning of the century, or even earlier, he set his drama in contemporary Bohoot -- a village in the Delta where a peasant revolt against the feudal lords had erupted and been brutally quelled a few years before the 1952 revolution. The memory of that bloody incident was still fresh in the minds of people in 1964 and was often trotted out by the new regime and its supporters to justify land reform laws and the wholesale confiscation of property and businesses.
Within such a frame, the old ballad was used as a method of intensified political expression in a contemporary setting and the emotional and linguistic centre of the work shifted away from the old romantic interest in favour of fervent ideological statement. Here, Bahiya ("the radiant", as the name means) was no longer just a village beauty and Yassin's sweetheart who is coveted by the lecherous Pasha; in the foregrounded conflict between exploited and exploiter, oppressed and oppressor, she grows into a symbol of Egypt and the story of Bohoot and its struggle for freedom and social justice takes precedence over the tragic-love story which becomes both a vehicle and a symbol of that struggle. While some critics, like Mahmoud Amin El- Alem, complained of the liberties the poet had taken with the original "old, Sa'idi popular epic," wondering why he did not choose other names for the hero and heroine as he did for the setting, others, like Mohamed Mandour and Amin El-Ayouti, tried to defend its form in terms of the practices of the ancient Greek dramatists, who had used narration, a chorus and well-known stories and legends to discuss contemporary issues, and the theory of the epic theatre propagated by Bertolt Brecht.
It was a horrendous irony and one wonders how Surour felt about it. It seemed as if the harder a dramatist tried to break free of the European dramatic tradition the more deeply (in the eyes of critics at least) he became entrenched in it. It had happened with Idris whose Al-Farafeer, with its master- servant central theme, was variously traced back to the old Roman comedy, the Commedia dell'arte, the medieval Everyman and Moliére and compared to Pirandello's theatre and even to Beckett's two tramps in Waiting for Godot; and now it was happening to Surour and his Yassin and Bahiya.
However much critics may controvert the origins of these two experiments or dispute their merits, few will deny their sincerity or far reaching influence on subsequent generations, from Mahmoud Diab and Shawki Abdel-Hakim to Saleh Sa'd and Hassan El-Gretly. They both represent, each in its own way, the earliest critically conscious attempts to revitalise modern Egyptian (and, perhaps, Arab) drama by drawing on primitive sources, releasing the energies of an old, long despised popular dramatic tradition, and attempting, particularly in Surour's case, to evolve a language that has seemingly pre-literary qualities -- a language that has the vigour and flexibility of the vernacular, its primary colours, crude and homely images, earthy rhythms and tough lyricism. In this, to add one more irony, they remind one of Yeats's hope for a popular theatre which, as an art form, could reach back towards "a time when (theatre) was nearer human life and instinct, before it had gathered about it so many mechanical specialisations and traditions."
The analogy with Yeats is particularly apt in the case of Surour, since both were poets, with strong political allegiances and a firm sense of national roots. Like Yeats, who cites the revitalising influence of the ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge in his Explorations, Surour believed that a new, more authentic and more dramatic kind of poetry could be achieved by reaching back to an earlier, less literary language -- a living speech with a distinct pictorial and sensuous force which took its rhythms from the pulse of living people and its themes and diction from daily life. Towards this end he set out on a perilous coarse in his dramatic debut, mixing prose and verse, the lyrical and the coarse, classical and colloquial Arabic, and narration with dialogue, song, comment, and direct address to the audience.
The critical response was equally mixed and often puzzled. The language of Yassin and Bahiya was unprecedented; no one had heard the like of it on stage before (and rarely off it); and the novelty was giddying and not infrequently exasperating. To describe its impact, or, at least, what it was trying to achieve, one has, again, to return to Yeats. "Before men read," he says, "they loved language, and all literature was then, whether in the mouth of minstrels, players or singers, but the perfection of an art that everybody practiced, a flower out of the stem of life. And language continually renewed itself in that perfection, returning to daily life."
Yassin and Bahiya ends with the villagers' uprising and Yassin's death; but Bahiya lives on and continues to haunt Surour for years afterwards -- perhaps to the end of his life. His next two plays -- Ah Ya Leil Ya Amar (O, Night. O, Moon), staged by Galal El-Sharqawi at El-Hakim theatre in 1967, and Oulu li 'Ein Al-Shams (Tell the Eye of the Sun), directed for the National by Tawfiq Abdel- Latif in 1973 (both of which take their titles from popular folk songs and feature an active chorus, though not a narrator), trace Bahiya's progress from Bohoot to Port Said and Suez, from youth to old age, and from hope to bitter disillusionment. Her journey, which ends with the 1967 defeat, records, in the form of a theatrical parable, Surour's reading of contemporary Egyptian history and the whole trilogy represents a painful document of the poet's growing disenchantment with the new regime and his final frantic despair as he foresaw what the future held.
Of the three plays in this trilogy Yassin and Bahiya is the least frequently performed -- understandably, perhaps, in view of its unusual form and the demands it makes on the performer who takes on the role of the narrator. It was, therefore, something of a surprise to hear that Rolla Fattal, a young Syrian director, had decided to stage it at Hanager. The irony of the choice of venue was not lost upon me; Al-Hanager is currently performing the same function as the Pocket theatre of the 1960's. Like Mutaweh, I thought, Rolla had seen this text (which its author, himself a director, had thought of as quite simple, needing no gimmicks) as primarily a challenge for a young, daring, experimental director. Quite predictably, therefore, and as was the case in the first production, though more drastically this time, the text was severely cut -- a task she wisely entrusted to Yusri Khamis who managed to keep in most of the significant lines and pivotal themes and images. Her choice of narrator, however, was less fortunate. Magda El-Khatib, though an excellent actress in realistic parts, is quite out of her depth when faced with classical Arabic or any kind of verse. She lacks both the ear for it and the necessary training. She shouted the lines at the audience in a monotone, at a disconcertingly erratic tempo, stumbling over the words sometimes and occasionally coming up with the most original declensions. El-Khatib is at her best with highly- strung, slightly neurotic characters, in tense, dialogic situations, with few words and plenty of eloquent silences. Here she was given too much to say, and ruthlessly left to say it alone and she sank under the load of words.
Unlike the original production in which the characters in the story were enacted by the chorus of listeners surrounding the storyteller in a circle, so that they constantly moved in and out of the parts, bridging the past and the present, this one rarely allowed the characters and narrator to share the same space and seemed to make a point of visually separating them. Most of the time Magda El-Khatib looked pathetically lost and isolated in the huge empty space facing us, while the rest of the characters were walled (or, rather, holed) up in an elaborate, three storey structure at her back, made up of little cells, seemingly supported by the trunks of palm trees and lined and padded with straw mats. In these rooms/ tombs, they uttered their lines standing, sitting or reclining, and if they moved at all it was either horizontally, from one box to another, or up and down the different levels; but, except for Yassin and Bahiya, they were never allowed to step outside the forbidding structure which in one scene housed the tombs and corpses of the dead as well. The ideas of death and incarceration were of course intended and diligently applied. Indeed, the visual composition of the stage, impressively designed by Mahmoud Mabrouk, was meant as a concrete metaphor of what Rolla wanted to tell us through her production.
By breaking up the originally intended circle of the samir, which signifies the communal sharing of the past in the present, and relegating the characters visually and temporally to an imposing but tomblike past in the background which, at the same time has the look of a modern block of flats, Rolla seemed to be saying that not only the past but also the present have become museums and mausoleums, that our cities, with all their blazing lights, are not very different from Bohoot where, in the words of Surour, the darkness of the grave shrouded everything unless the moon came to the rescue. Watching from the back of the auditorium the second time, the stage looked to me like one big, black box stacked up with a lot of small boxes, and the actors appeared like moles bumping about in dark little burrows. But listening to the opening lines of Surour's prologue, delivered (atrociously, one might add) in a voice over at the beginning and end of the show, accompanied by Basem El-Attar's stirring music, while far at the back of the stage, one of the little rooms, on the ground level, showed a silhouette of a desk with a typewriter on top and an empty chair, I felt a sharp stab of pathos. Rolla had wanted to say something about our times through this production for sure, and she did; but at that moment I also realised that she had meant it as both an elegy and a tribute to a fellow artist who was also an unusual human being -- a man who loved his people not wisely, perhaps, but too well.
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor