Heaven and earth

Nehad Selaiha gets a tentative preview of the hereafter
Years ago, I read somewhere that an agnostic French thinker, about to kick the bucket, told his friends: "Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut- etre'(I'm on my way to look for the great perhaps). A short cut for him would have been watching Rasha El-Gammal's recent play, Under the Tree and, I dare say, it would have given him plenty of reassurance. Rather than Sartre's neant or nothingness, Dante's Limbo, or, indeed, the scary, traditional view, widespread in Egypt since the rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1970s, which tells you that from the moment you give up the ghost till doomsday, you get no peace, spending the whole time in the cold grave being savagely tortured for your past sins by angels too vengeful to give you any reprieve or too impatient to wait for the day of judgement, the play projects the other world as a peaceful oriental garden where humans spend the time reflecting upon their former lives, exchanging experiences and achieving greater tolerance and wisdom.
Like Caryl Churchill's restaurant in the first act of Top Girls (which inspired director Effat Yehia and her Caravan troupe in their Desertscape in the late 1990's) and Lisa Loomer's hospital in The Waiting Room (directed by Tori Haring-Smith for the AUC company around the same time), El-Gammal's garden is a timeless stage which brings together people from different ages and far-flung places. But human's are not the only inhabitants of the garden; side by side with Hamza (Sa'id Mustafa), a poet at the Abbasid court in Baghdad, Safiyya (Inji El- Gammal), an Andalusian courtesan from Granada, Om El-Hana (Sarah Nur El-Sherif), a thrice-married housewife from the Ottoman period, and Kamel (Karim Mansour), a mother-dominated young man from the Cairo of the 1920's, we find a mischievous, Puck-like spirit called Ilham (Inji El-Shabrawi), a soft, magical creature of infinite beauty (Dina Ayesh) who drops pearls instead of tears every time she weeps for humans, an inept Mr Nizam (Yehya El-Diqin), a kind of metaphysical detective, who is supposed to keep a record of every thought, word and action both in heaven and on earth, and two talking songbirds (Zeinab Sa'id and Dina El-Fer'ouni) who assist him and act as news reporters.
Visually, the performance unfolds on 2 planes simultaneously: upstage, on a raised level, against a backdrop representing a garden scene, slightly adapted from a painting in Aga'eb Al-Makhluqat wa Ghara'eb al-Mawgudat (Wonderous Creatures and Strange Beings) -- a 13th Century book by Zakareya El-Qazweeni (1208-1283), a judge and geographical historian nicknamed the Herodotus of the middle ages and the Arabs' Pliny -- we see the denizens of the garden, in their sumptuous historical or fairylike costumes, mulling over the past, sifting through their memories, discussing human relationships, arguing and occasionally bickering. On one side, a step below, a sad, middle-aged man, in a humble suit, sits slumped, patiently waiting under a cardboard tree of the kind we find in children's illustrated story-books. The question whether he should be admitted to the garden or not triggers a review of his life on earth which takes the form of short, quick sketches, performed downstage, close to the audience, in contemporary costumes, with minimal props, and in an openly theatrical manner reminiscent of a cartoon-strip.
The story of Mr Abdel-Dayem (Mohamed Shahin), a stereotype of the conventional, harassed civil servant, with a fat, good-natured, ignorant wife (Nermeen Sa'id) and two marriageable daughters, is quite ordinary, even banal. As in folk tales, the two daughters, one strong and shrewd, the other naïve, and confused, find rich suitors and settle down in comfortable, bourgeois homes. But, unlike in fairy stories, it is only the crafty one, Fayqa (Yara Atif) who lives happily ever after; the other, the artless, docile Ahlam (Nevin El-Ebiari), meets a violent death when her filthy-rich, psychopathic husband (Beshir Shousha), who imprisons her and treats her like a cherished doll while physically abusing her on a regular basis, hurls her down the stairs while pregnant. But why should Abdel-Dayem be blamed for that? Because, as the elder sister, Fayqa, tells him and us, he and his wife knew all along, or at least suspected, what was happening and deliberately shut their eyes because they coveted the husband's money and his influence. When Ahlam came to them for help and pleaded for protection because she feared for the baby's life, they trotted out the old, hackneyed clichés about a wife's duty and keeping the family together whatever the cost and sent her back to her death.
Conjugal and family relationships also figure prominently in the memories of the garden people and their individual stories. The two levels, however, heaven and earth, remain teasingly separate, moving parallel to one another without any real interaction. At best, the memories of the dead and their comments on the drama on earth they witness (but never judge) provide variations and points of comparison rather than antithetical components that could point in the direction of some kind of new synthesis. The final message, if one may sum it up, seems that it takes all sorts to make a world and that poor, frail, erring humanity will keep on making the same mistakes over and over again. The only wise response is tolerance and forgiveness; but in this case, and since everyone, the sinner, Abdel-Dayem, as well as his sinned against daughter, Ahlam, are equally admitted to the garden, isn't tolerance carried to the point of complete moral indifference? The Persian tapestry at the back, however, points in a different ethical direction -- towards philosophies which regard good and evil in a different light, as part of a larger, inscrutable design in which they are, in the words of Wordsworth, "olled in earth's diurnal course with flowers, stones, and trees."
Judging by her previous works, the unforgettable The Spirits of Hamza and Fatma (1995) in which the paintings of the late Abdel-Hadi El- Gazzar provided mood, theme, design and reference point, The Merry Jungle (1996) and Baheya The Mute (1998), Rasha El-Gammal, a trained and talented painter, set and costume designer, seems to be in her real element with legend, myth and folklore. She blithely combines them, together with her knowledge of Islamic art and architecture (she got an MA in that area from the University of London in 1996) to build her own original, humorous and stunningly colourful theatrical world. Whatever the topic, the thesis or message of the play (and they are usually inspired by Arab culture and Egyptian daily life), the spectator is sure to find costumes of the finest design and fabric (a rare treat in the contemporary Egyptian theatre), inspired, memorable sets, a childlike, refreshing view of the world and an authentically Egyptian delight in difference, multiplicity and the variegated pageant of life. With more young artists like Rasha and her newly-founded Guild troupe (all AUC theatre graduates who seem to share her zest and imaginative rebelliousness), I would feel more hopeful of the future and less fearful of any small or great 'maybes'.
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