Dramatic ventures

Eight forays onto the stage: Nehad Selaiha takes stock
In the 1960's almost any human activity in Egypt became heavily politicised; and theatre was no exception. Indeed, more than books or newspapers, and to almost the same degree as cinema, radio and television, it was regarded by the new regime as an invaluable propaganda organ for disseminating the new socialist ideology to a largely illiterate population. It could also serve as a kind of political forum or, more to the point, a safety valve for dissenters to let off steam (and allow the regime to keep an eye on them into the bargain). Not surprisingly, it enjoyed the assiduous patronage of the state who sought to enhance its media effectiveness by setting up a number of TV theatre companies to provide a steady stream of appropriate plays for the small screen.
For the majority of writers and journalists, the temptation of nation-wide viewing, immediate feedback, and overnight, far-reaching fame, not to mention the attention of the people in power, was irresistible and far outweighed the very real danger of having those much-dreaded, notorious "dawn- visitors" (as the secret police were euphemistically referred to in those days) materialize at their doorstep. Almost every one of them attempted drama at least once, and the phenomenon persisted well after the dismantling of the TV theatre troupes and even survived Egypt's defeat in the June war. Indeed, after 1967, and despite the intensification of censorship (with more plays being banned more frequently than ever before), writers, like Mahfouz, who had stayed clear of the stage in the heyday of Nasser's regime, disdaining to jump onto the theatrical bandwagon, and content to thrash out their ideas and air their views in essays, novels or short stories, seemed to feel the need for a more dialogic, immediate and popular form of expression and turned to the theatre. In 1969 Mahfouz published a new collection of short stories, Under the Umbrella, which included five one-act plays: Death and Resurrection, The Legacy, The Rescue, A Draft Proposal and The Task. The same year, director Ahmed Abdel-Halim successfully staged the first three in a triple-bill, at El-Hakim theatre, with Sanaa Gamil, Galal El-Sharqawi and Ayda Abdel-Aziz in the leading parts. The combination of a strong cast and Mahfouz's literary reputation guaranteed good houses and the production lasted for two months -- a substantial run by Egyptian standards in those days.
Death and Resurrection is a thin political allegory which makes a show of debating the urgent issues and fateful choices facing Egyptians after the June defeat. In a series of encounters the nameless hero (who is curiously flung onto an almost empty stage from the wings in exactly the same way as Samuel Beckett's hero in Act Without Words) meets first his girl friend, then a fatherly giant, a bearded doctor and a blind beggar -- all equally nameless; but though the dialogue is engaged with arguments about life and death, peace and war, democracy and dictatorship, individual freedom and public duty, the text comes across as a straightforward morale-booster, advocating armed resistance and self-sacrifice. It ends with the corpses lying in the background, in the shadow of a pharaonic tomb, coming to life and marching off to battle with the hero at their head.
Written in the mode of expressionism, the play is loud in tone, full of patriotic declamation and lacks plot and characterization in the traditional sense. The hero is the author's mouthpiece; the woman represents the life-force which tries to hold him back; the giant is a transparent symbol of the US; the aggressive, gloating mocker laughing in the wings is obviously Israel; and the plague which infests the city is a clear metaphor -- in the tradition of Albert Camus' La Peste -- of a national malaise, in this case, Nasser's dictatorship, symbolised by the new head of the charitable institution from which the blind beggar (the ordinary citizen) escapes. The beggar's ironical description of this new head is amusing and sparks off some comedy in an otherwise uniformly humorless and grimly earnest text. "'Tis true, he was honest, fair and kind," he says, "but too damned keen on discipline. It was almost an obsession with him and he enforced it with astronomical precision -- and no questions asked... You ate according to schedule, drank according to schedule, went to the toilet, begging your pardon, according to schedule and slept according to schedule. I nearly went mad... Even the luxury of feeling rebellious was denied me, for how could one rebel against an honest, just and kind man? My conscience wouldn't let me."
Unlike Death and Resurrection, The Legacy and The Rescue have not dated and could still appeal to audiences today. Fortunately for them, Mahfouz relinquished expressionism, opting for the more popular form of the realistic thriller, charging it with a strong sense of the absurd and adding a symbolic dimension. The Legacy centres on the conflict between religion and scientific progress which has obsessed Mahfouz throughout his writing career and ends without resolving it. The biblical story of the prodigal son, ironically inverted, provides the starting point. The protagonist, a pimp who runs a tavern, comes home with his mistress, lured by his father's promise of a legacy, but finds the house empty and his father -- a wali (holy man) -- mysteriously vanished. A boy servant, however, leads him to his father's treasure which consists of a pile of old books and stacks of money. He ignores his father's command to read the former before touching the latter, whereupon a police detective suddenly materializes, telling him that his father has been murdered and accusing him of the crime. Instead of arresting him, the mysterious detective knocks him down, ties him to a chair and bolts with the legacy. The following morning, an architect walks in to buy the house, which the son is quite willing to sell to make up for the loss of the treasure. There is one problem, however: the architect is the spitting image of the false detective. The question whether or not he is the same man is left unanswered and the play ends with the son putting aside his deep suspicions and selling the old house -- symbolically his cultural and religious inheritance -- to be pulled down and replaced with a factory for electronic equipment.
Mystery and suspense equally underlie the construction of The Rescue -- a play which ironically contradicts its title. It begins with the teasing question: who is the woman who has forced her way into the flat of a strange bachelor to escape the state security police and what has she done to send them after her in such force? -- and ends with the woman dead, still keeping her secret. But between the beginning and the end, a more significant revelation builds up. As the flat-owner tries to ferret out the truth about the woman, he draws closer to her, ultimately falling in love with her, and the relationship gradually reveals to us that he too, and everyone in the building, the neighbourhood, and, indeed, the whole country, is threatened, hunted, and in the grip of fear. By the end of the play, we are no longer interested in the initial question; the reality of fear -- represented as the ineluctable mode of existence in police states -- is all that matters and no facts, no amount of rational reasoning can dispel or explain it away.
The last two plays in Under the Umbrella have never been tested in performance. A Draft Proposal is a funny satirical skit, in the burlesque tradition, on the manners and morals of the theatrical profession. In a theatre-manager's office, an author, a director, a critic and two leading actors meet to discuss a new play. The discussion develops into a heated argument which parodies the attitudes to theatre prevalent in the 1960's -- the disgust at the commercialism of modern theatre and its star-system, the conflict between dramatists and directors, the narrow-minded vanity and self-centeredness of actors, the obstinate self-righteousness of authors and the pomposity and pretentiousness of critics. The new trends in writing are also satirised, particularly the impervious ambiguity and obfuscating symbolism of avant-garde plays like Mahfouz's own. When the actress, who is notorious for her many lovers, is caught kissing the author behind the back of everybody, including her lover, the actor, a farcical fight erupts in which every one gets a share fare of blows, including the actress. When a glib reporter prances in looking for news of the new production, he finds the company prostrate and is told, by way of explanation, that they had just finished a rehearsal. Mahfouz should have laid down his pen at this point. The final romantic scene in which the actress begs the author not to leave her, or the company, is sentimental, totally out of key and a terrible anti-climax.
Unlike the earlier plays, A Draft Proposal is realistic from beginning to end and completely free of symbols. The Task, on the other hand, begins in a deceptively realistic vein as a thriller, with a mysterious man tailing another for a whole day and even following him to a romantic date at sunset in a lonely spot. Gradually, however, the relentless pursuer begins to acquire sinister shades, reminiscent of Eugene Ionesco's 'killer' in Tueur Sans Gages. When he is joined by another ambiguous figure and the two subject their victim to a harrowing investigation, the play turns into a grotesque metaphysical/political trial and veers sharply in the direction of Kafka and the theatre of the absurd. Indeed, the final scene in which the two mysterious persecutors lash out against their terror-stricken prey vividly evokes a similar scene in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, where two mysterious callers, Mr. Goldberg and Mr. McCann, turn up at Stanley's secluded boarding-house at the edge of the ocean to harry him with nerve-racking, inconsequential questions.
After a lapse of four years Mahfouz produced another one-act play, The Chase, published in the short stories collection, Crime (1973), and in 1979, The Mountain and The Copper City (Or The Devil Turns Preacher) appeared in another collection, bearing the alternative title of the latter play. The Mountain is a political parable which takes a very grim and cynical view of armed political revolutions, seeing them as the root cause of all dictatorships and grounding them in the concept of elitism. Five young men set up what amounts to a revolutionary command council in a cave at the top of the Muqattam mountain, complete with a list of enemies of the people whom they go about liquidating. The violence is grotesquely portrayed, with a tinge of hysteria, and at moments becomes embarrassingly melodramatic. The Chase, on the other hand, is an absurdist drama, purely preoccupied with Time. Here, another mysterious pursuer chases two men through adolescence, youth, maturity and old age, always keeping them on the run and giving them no respite. The action consists of their attempts to elude him, which include many ruses and various disguises; they even marry the same woman to confuse him and exchange her for a younger one when she ages.
In The Copper City, Time figures once more and is the real protagonist. Inspired by a tale in The Arabian Nights, it shows two Arab merchants arriving at an enchanted copper city, thousands of years old, with an evil sleeping beauty for a queen. With the help of a bottled 'jinni' they undertake a trip back in time to see what the city was like before the curse and try to save it from its terrible fate and alter the future by changing the present. The queen, however, who covets the infinite power of the gods, insists on installing herself as a goddess to be worshipped by her subjects. The moment this happens, the city loses its one chance of redemption; time freezes, and everything turns to copper. Despite its fairytale setting and atmosphere, The Copper City is essentially a cautionary play -- a warning against Sadat's incipient autocracy.
Compared to his achievements in the novel, Mahfouz's plays are bound to look modest and limited in scope. But viewed in the context of contemporary Egyptian drama, they reveal many areas of interest. Like some of Tawfiq El-Hakim's plays, they are among the first attempts to introduce philosophical issues on the stage and debate them in dramatic terms. Many of them, too, reveal an awareness of the resources of the stage and effectively manipulate set, sound and movement to shape the situation and action of the play and invest it with symbolic significance. In The Legacy, for instance, the traditional blackout is put to original use for theatrical effect. One of the scenes is conducted in total darkness, with not a single light on stage or in the auditorium, the stage-directions insist; this leaves the audience with only human voices, interspersed with silences, the sound of whimpering and two screams. It is as though Mahfouz was drawing on the resources of radio drama to communicate to the audience the atmosphere of the ancient, haunted house, and the characters' terror and anxiety. The intriguing oddness of incident and character in many of the plays, coupled with an air of mystery and suspense and an underlying sense of futility and alienation, is another interesting feature. Mahfouz's dialogue too, though in formal classical Arabic -- a medium rarely used in the theatre in the 1960's except in verse drama or translated foreign texts -- is generally economical and, at its best, rich in images and expressions from the vernacular and shot through with flashes of wit.
Whatever the faults of Mahfouz's plays, they have at least attempted to dramatise, often with reasonable success, not only his own dilemmas, perplexities and frustrations, but also the emotional and intellectual turmoil of a time of national crisis, when the Egyptian dream lay in ruins and every Egyptian, whatever his station or walk in life, felt a stranger in the world and an alien in his own country -- like a redundant actor divorced from her setting.
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