A play for today

A brilliant young director, the Egyptian premiere of Brecht's The Life of Galileo: Nehad Selaiha finds things to celebrate at Al-Hanager.
On 10 January, 1610, Galileo Galilei, in his humble study in Padua, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, announces triumphantly: "Today mankind can write in its diary: Got rid of Heavens." Trembling with fear, his friend Sagredo, who had spent the night with him, being shown celestial phenomena that irrefutably confirmed the Copernican system, exclaims: "Where is God in your cosmography?" To which Galileo responds, echoing the words of Giordano Bruno, another astronomer who 10 years earlier had been burnt at the stake for propagating the same ideas which had become "subject to the express anathema of the church": "Within ourselves or nowhere." A scene later, in this riveting dramatisation of the crucial years of Galileo's life, Brecht follows the great Italian scientist to Florence where he has become court mathematician to the Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici -- a boy of nine.
Desperate for time to dedicate to his research, he had sought the job, not heeding Sagredo's warning that it was a court "run by monks." In a stormy confrontation with a trio of university gentlemen -- a theologian, a mathematician and a philosopher -- who have accompanied the duke to his house to "test his newly-discovered so-called Medicean stars" and who, feeling their authority threatened, refuse to even look through the telescope, brandishing the authority of "the sacred Aristotle" in his face, he simply declares: "Truth is born of the times, not of authority."
Things come to a head on 5 March, 1616, when "the Inquisition puts Copernicus's teachings on the Index," as the caption prefacing scene seven says. In this masterful, centre-scene, an ingenious piece of dramatic writing, the ugly face of authority slowly reveals itself under a mask of urbanity and against a background of a ball at Cardinal Bellarmin's house in Rome. Flush with victory after Father Christopher Calvius, the chief astronomer at the Papal College, has confirmed his observations, Galileo walks into the party and is greeted with applause. The host, together with the suave Cardinal Barberini, subsequently Pope Urban VIII, engage him in a kind of affable bantering. But underneath the smooth, genial surface, one detects a mounting tension, an undercurrent sense of threat, of terrible danger. The presence of two clerical secretaries eavesdropping on the conversation and taking down notes makes the seemingly smooth, friendly encounter all the more spine-chilling. At the end, Barberini comes out into the open, but without giving up his playful manner: "He is a terrible man," he exclaims, laughing. "He cheerfully sets out to convict God of the most elementary errors in astronomy. I suppose God hadn't got far enough in his studies before he wrote the Bible; is that it? My dear fellow..." This sinister combination of threatening and cajoling ends with Cardinal Bellarmin warning Galileo that the Holy Office has declared Copernicus's theory of a heliocentric universe "foolish, absurd, heretical and contrary to our faith" and, therefore, should be abandoned, and with the more sophisticated, worldly-wise Berberini advising him to find himself a mask; for "poor Galileo hasn't got one." Galileo should have come disguised as a good orthodox thinker, he laments. "It is my own mask that permits me certain freedom today," he tells him confidentially. "Dressed like this, I might be heard to murmur: If God didn't exist, we should have to invent him."
From then on the conflict is no longer one of Galileo against the formidable authority and might of the Roman Catholic Church at a certain point in history, or even of science versus religion -- for this can somehow be conceivably resolved, as has happened sometimes; it is rather one of reason against the tyranny of tradition and inherited texts, of freedom of thought against political oppression and the constraints of any authoritarian system. This is what invests the play with so much power and makes it so relevant to our progressively dogmatic and repressive times. It also explains its tremendous impact on Egyptian audiences. Night after night they fill the auditorium of Al-Hanager and sit in the dark, in silence, listening to Brecht's explosive dialogue, watching the magnificent Sami Abdel-Halim, as Galileo, defying the most awesome of taboos and all the time experiencing a rare and thrilling sense of liberation. Nothing like this, nothing half as audacious has ever been uttered on the Egyptian stage. No wonder the play has had to wait for nearly half a century for its Egyptian premiere, and this despite the craze for Brecht in the 1960's and his abiding popularity and widespread influence since. The fact that Galileo is forced by the prospect of horrible torture to recant his views, abjure his teachings, cursing them as "errors"' and "heresies" does not diminish the electric excitement of that giddy, terrifying glimpse of freedom; if anything, it accentuates it. A triumphant Galileo would not make any sense to an Egyptian, would seem utterly divorced from reality -- a facile fabrication of wishful thinking. His tragic descent from bright optimism to disillusion, from proud defiance to servility and humiliation and from honourable courage to cowardly betrayal is an experience too familiar to many Egyptians not to touch a raw nerve somewhere. Even his "new ethics", as he sarcastically refers to them are not completely alien to the Egyptian ethical lore of survival, born out of centuries upon centuries of foreign oppression and autocratic rule. As his student, Andrea, sums it up in scene 14 (which the current production sadly, but, given the style and overall directorial vision, understandably omits), it boils down to this: "When there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be a crooked one." No Egyptian can fail to sympathise, at least partially, and however reluctantly, with Andrea's justification of his master's public capitulation. "You were hiding the truth," he says, "From the enemy... Like the man in the street we said 'He'll die, but he'll never recant.' You came back: 'I have recanted, but I'm going to live.' -- 'Your hands are stained,' we said. You're saying: 'Better than empty.'... You sold another man's telescope to the Venetian Senate. And I saw you put that instrument to immortal use. Your friends shook their heads when you bowed to that boy in Florence: science gained an audience. Even then you used to laugh at heroes. 'People who suffer are boring' you said. 'Misfortune comes from miscalculation.'... So in '33 when you chose to recant a popular point in your doctrine I ought to have known that you were simply backing out of a hopeless political wrangle in order to get on with the real business of science... You gained the leisure to write a scientific work which could be written by nobody else. If you had ended up at the stake in a halo of flames the other side would have won."
To many Egyptians, particularly intellectuals and their disciples, such an argument would sound too disturbingly familiar. But though they would feel grateful if anybody trotted it out in their defence, most would be inclined to confess, with old, broken Galileo, that "they (the enemy) did win" and that their defection and betrayal were not wisely planned, but simply prompted by fear of physical pain. Fearing bodily torture and death by burning, or any other equally savage means (think of hungry hounds mauling at you) is only human; but it is not the stuff heroes are made of. And in our thoroughly unheroic age, Galileo comes across to us as an old friend, a co-sharer of our sorrows and lost dreams of heroism. It is often said that Brecht wrote something of his own plight in Galileo's situation. Of our plight too?
To smuggle Galileo's last work, The Discorsi, written in secret under house arrest, out of Italy, Andrea needed great devotion, reckless courage, resourcefulness and considerable imagination. The ardour of a young, passionate scientist was needed too. Tarek El-Deweri, in his debut as director, happily displays the same qualities. In his production of this difficult, risky, long and willfully neglected play -- a project that cost him over two years, he seems to have been guided by Galileo's words to the two papal spies, at the chessboard in Bellarmin's house during the ball. The old-style chess was cramped, he told them. "Nowadays the play is to let the chief pieces roam across the whole board...That way, you have enough space and can plan ahead... If you live grandly enough, you can afford to sweep the board. One has to move with the times gentlemen. Not just hugging the coasts; sooner or later one has to venture out."
And El-Deweri has truly ventured out in this audacious production with all the ardent recklessness and dedication of a young, passionate and intensely involved artist. But there was also patience and meticulous calculations. Like Galileo with his telescope, El-Deweri spent more than two years poring over the text, sifting through many translations, constructing his own reading of the story, searching for the right actors within his limited budget, and consulting with a group of talented artists (set and costume designer Medhat Aziz, choreographer Walid Amar, sound and music designer Haytham El-Khamisi, and video-film-maker Akram Farid) in order to substitute long verbal stretches with visual and sound effects. The result of all those long nights of arduous work was a vibrant, fast-paced and poignant performance, realistic at the core enough to grip the hearts of the audience, but without being quite so closed in as in realistic plays, and expressionistic in its outer framework without diluting the emotional and intellectual crisis at the heart of the play. His use of the other auditorium as a backstage (Al-Hanager is designed as a traverse stage with an auditorium on either side, though it is rarely used in this capacity) is quite ingenious. Through the lighting and the video screen, it provided plenty of space, like the infinite spaces revealed by Galileo's telescope.
On the screen, side by side with the scenes of horror, the trial, torture and general devastation, the space-craft Galileo, launched in 1989, was seen orbiting the planet Jupiter in absolute heavenly serenity. As the characters receded into the background, they seemed to drop out into a void, a dark chasm of oblivion. This set off Galileo, in his quasi-realistic setting, in sharp contours, as a vivid, irrefutable, concrete reality. But the sight of him, his students, daughter and housekeeper against that vast, dark void triggered a sharp sense of deep, mysterious sorrow and anxiety. Perched on the edge of eternity or nothingness they seemed. The terror and exhilaration of his image of the universe, its superficial security and stableness and real insignificance and hazardous contingency were made a tangible, searing reality on stage. Hovering on the edges of that seemingly vast, shadowy, ambiguous space, like a subliminal vision of Galileo's truth, or our vision of the haunting and teasingly elusive beautiful, good and just, was Miret Michel, in her white gown and graceful, ethereal wanderings. Instead of the last scene of the play, which shows Andrea outwitting the border guards and smuggling his professor's manuscript out of Italy -- the positive note on which the play ends -- we see Miret guiding the great scientist along a path paved with light into the dark distance where the screen, showing the craft named after him, is seen circling Jupiter.
For a first venture in directing, Tarek El-Deweri's sense of rhythm and feeling for motion, tone and colour are truly amazing. Long conversational scenes were cut into what looked like film shots by his dexterous manipulation of movement and lighting. All his omissions were wisely calculated and compensated for. The ball scene at Ballarmin's house was transformed, in a concrete visual metaphor, into a surrealistic chess game, with a larger than life board and pieces. As the dancers barged in and out, the sinister conversation, highlighting the points of most dramatic interest, was punctuated by moving the chess pieces with the sound of gunshot.
But more amazing than anything else, was El-Deweri's orchestration of the actors. To persuade a master like Sami Abdel-Halim, a Charles Laughton in the making, to work with a novice director for a petty stipend, was the first step. His presence is enough to ignite anyone around with a divine, thespian fire. But Sameh Fikri, as his pupil, Andrea, was a wonderful match. With no love interest, the most significant relationship in the play is between teacher and student. And Fikri's slender figure, transparent, sensitive face, and infectious warmth made his scenes with Abdel-Halim among the most moving and memorable I have seen on the Egyptian stage. Watching him for the fourth time running screaming at Galileo, "Unhappy the land that has no heroes," and taking in his teacher's response: "No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed," I found myself wondering how many students teachers like me have disappointed? Nor can one forget Mohamed Shuman as the Procurator of Padua University and later as one of the mulish professors in Florence. His style of acting was a compound of grotesquery, immaculate caricature depiction, shot through with flashes of menace and humour.
In the hands of Tarek what has seemed to many a harsh, dry, intellectual play, has proved a deeply moving experience of terrible beauty and intolerable pain. But making such a marvellous beginning is always a terrible ordeal. Will the next show be as bold and daring? Will it have such pristine clarity, poignant sorrow and terrible beauty? We just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, one has to remember Hoda Wasfi, that brave manger of Al- Hanager. Without her at the head of that centre, I doubt Brecht's would have ever seen the light in this corner of the world.
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