The power of silence

Nehad Selaiha cheers a new female director
For Manal Ibrahim, becoming a stage director was a long uphill struggle. Like many artists of the fringe, she was not formally trained in theatre -- a frivolous craft, her family argued, which did not guarantee a decent job. Coerced into joining the Faculty of Commerce at Cairo University, she spent her undergraduate years working actively in the university theatre and by the time she got her B.Com. she knew much more about making theatre than business administration. With some friends and colleagues, she founded an independent theatre troupe, which she hopefully christened The Talisman, and put together a production of Athol Fugard's A Place with the Pigs.
It was to open during the third (and last) Free Theatre Festival in 1992. By that time, however, and very unluckily for Manal, the festival which started in 1990 as a democratic forum for independent artists fighting for a place under the sun, had been taken over, after an ugly power struggle, in a kind of coup d'état, by a self-appointed organising committee (or board of directors, as they pompously called themselves), with pronounced authoritarian tendencies. They quickly compromised the venture, selling out to the government, and turning the festival into a stuffy, semi-official event. Disenchanted with the movement, the best and most serious troupes left and those who remained found themselves having to put up with a harsher and more rigid kind of censorship than one could find at the most conservative state theatre company. In their zeal to curry favour with the authorities and prove themselves worthy of being solely entrusted with the dispensation of the meagre subsidies and performance spaces granted by the Ministry of Culture, the new organising clique instituted themselves as artistic, moral and political judges, scanning every performance for any dissident, seditious, or subversive elements and rejecting anything that smacked, however faintly, of opposition or rebellion.
As a newcomer to the festival, Manal knew nothing of this; she presented her work before the organisers, confident it would be accepted. But despite its artistic merit, as the members of the committee themselves conceded, A Place with the Pigs was declared politically objectionable. It was deemed too radically "anti-war," condemning it wholesale, without excepting the wars waged for just causes and, therefore, advocating pacifism. It was a terrible blow, all the more shattering because it came, not from the public censor's office, but from the least expected quarter, from within the ranks of the free theatre movement itself. The Talisman Troupe did not survive it, notwithstanding its name, and Manal found herself alone among the ruins of her dream. But she is a tough young woman (though you wouldn't guess it to look at her small, unimposing figure) and soon enough she started picking up the pieces and embarked on a new course. She looked for an opening in the professional theatre and wisely decided that El-Tali'a (the Avant-garde) Theatre -- at the time, the most liberal and adventurous state company, with mostly young directors -- was the best place to try. Without a degree from the Theatre Institute and no previous professional experience, she couldn't hope to get a licence from the Acting Professions Union to join the technical or artistic team of any professional company as a regular, full- time member. So she offered her services to the Tali'a as a freelance, independent artist, any time they wanted, in whatever capacity they could use her and for as little money as they were willing to pay. It was an irresistible offer for a theatre with a very small budget and chronically short of technical staff. Within a very short time, she had made herself indispensable and some directors wondered how they had ever managed without her. As assistant or executive director, she always ended up doing the jobs of props-master, stage-manager, public-relations officer, publicity agent, secretary, clerk, wardrobe mistress, set and lighting adviser, as well as errand-boy, psychotherapist, confidant and peace-maker. She knew she was grossly exploited, of course, but she loved every minute of it and never grumbled; she was buying experience and knew it never came cheap. No wonder she was soon nicknamed (fondly rather than disparagingly) 'Manal-Do-All' in avant-garde and fringe theatre circles.
For the next nine years, Miss Do-All devoted herself completely to the theatre, making it her home, refusing to marry and have a family, unstintingly pouring her talent, youth and energy into works that did not bear her name and in whose credits she was sometimes forgotten. I saw her often, indeed, almost every time I walked into a theatre; for despite her many duties, Manal is an avid theatre-goer and rarely misses a show. I longed to ask her if her training, her hatching period, had not gone on a bit too long, if she had not tired of playing second fiddle, but I never had the chance. She seemed always in a rush, hurrying somewhere, would give me a small, friendly nod, a little half smile and disappear before I even had time to nod back. Finally, however, I got my answer. A few months ago, Manal decided that, at last, her apprenticeship was completed and embarked on her first venture as director.
Curiously, she chose to make her debut, not at El- Tali'a, or any of the other companies she worked with, as one would have expected, but at Al-Hanager Arts Centre, away from the professional state-theatre altogether. This puzzled me at first; was she too modest, afraid, perhaps, to present her first work to a professional company? Did the state theatre people think her presumptuous, getting too big for her boots and turned their back on her? Was it possible she had not yet got a licence after all those years? Was she trying, consciously or otherwise, to get even with the people (long gone off the scene now) who once banned her troupe from performing on that same stage, at Al- Hanager, during the Third Free Theatre Festival and fulfill an old, thwarted dream? Was she hoping to exorcise the painful ghost of the disbanded Talisman Troupe by reenacting their long frustrated wish? The answer, however, was much simpler than that. Al-Hanager happens to be the least bureaucracy-ridden theatre in Egypt; its director and staff are broadminded, enlightened people, anxious to help and not afraid to take risks; in terms of technical equipment, it is far superior to many a professional theatre venue; its clientele is predominantly young, exuberant and open to new experiments, and its cheerful, friendly, informal atmosphere bolsters the actors' morale and generates a warm sense of camaraderie between artists and audience.
For a script, Manal opted for August Strindberg's The Stronger, a play that had long fascinated her. Written December 1888-January 1889 on the model of the short, serious sketch, called quart d'heure, which had just come into vogue in Paris at the Theatre-Libre, and requiring only two actresses (the waitress who pops in for a second to place a cup of chocolate on the table is quite redundant), it was probably intended to supplement the repertoire of the ill-fated, almost still-born, touring experimental company Strindberg founded with his wife and leading lady, Siri von Essen, in March 1889. Like other plays of that phase in his career, it presents, in a realistic setting, a powerful, highly concentrated dramatic action in which two people are bound in an intense love-hate relationship and locked in deadly conflict. The two characters here, Mrs X and Miss Y, or Amelia, both actresses, are at once friends and sexual and professional rivals. But the really intriguing feature of this amazing skit is the absence of dialogue in the usual sense. The play unfolds like a dramatic monologue delivered by Mrs X at Miss Y who keeps completely silent throughout, except for one loud laugh. As she speaks, Mrs X gradually discovers things she had never realised, not even noticed before, and, at the same time, reveals her painfully divided feelings about Miss Y. She admires and envies her with such a burning, suicidal passion that she longs to annihilate her and take over her identity, destroying her own in the process. At the same time, she viciously gloats over Miss Y's misfortunes, taunts her with her professional and personal failures -- losing cherished parts and lovers, including Mrs X's own husband -- and revels in her own success and secure marital status.
As one reads the play, the question implicit in the title keeps popping up and at the end remains a teaser. Is Mrs X the stronger because she has the power of speech? Or does this power itself betray her into baring herself, making her, in fact, more vulnerable? And what about Miss Y's eerie silence? What does it conceal? What does it reveal? None of these questions can be answered in the study; only in performance can they be resolved, and even then, only temporarily. In other words, the answers can change with every new production, depending on what the director and performers make of the text, how they project it on stage, and what the audience read in it. Even Strindberg himself could not be sure which of the two characters was the stronger on the strength of the written text alone before it was performed. He cast his wife as Mrs X, which suggests he thought of her as the leading character and, therefore, the stronger. To a Danish newspaper, however, he said that the heroine of the play did not utter a single word.
But amusing as this conundrum may be for the reader, it can prove a nightmare for a director. Facing it in her first production, Manal Ibrahim knew she had to choose an answer and stick to it. She opted for the silent woman being the stronger of the two, and exactly because of all the faults and failings the talkative one taunts her with -- her untraditional way of life, her proud detachment, her dignified unhappiness and silent pain and her refusal "to learn from others, to bend and adapt." But such qualities were so subtle, so elusive and could be easily missed by the audience however competent the actress, Manal feared. They needed to be bodied forth, made concrete; but how? The answer came to her in the form of a Russian play she chanced to read at the time; it was Aleksandr Pushkin's 1831 poetic "little tragedy," as he called it, Salieri and Mozart. She at once realised the emotional and thematic link between the two plays, reading in the turbulent, murderous feelings of the older composer towards the younger one, as portrayed by the Russian poet, an exciting parallel/variation on the relationship of the two actresses depicted by the Swedish playwright. The problem was solved, she thought; she would superimpose the two plays on each other to foreground and heighten the artistic rivalry theme in The Stronger, would put Salieri with his piano and monologues on stage, side by side with talkative Mrs X, as her male counterpart; they would complement and illuminate each other. Miss Y would remain silent, but would incorporate the absent figure of Mozart who would speak for both of them through his music which should fill the theatre throughout. (Better get an expert to do the soundtrack, she thought. Ashraf Sweilam of course, who better?) The set would be neutral, neither Salieri's study nor a ladies' café, but the actors' meeting and rest room at some theatre. Salieri's costume would be 18th-century, indoor clothes and he would speak in classical Arabic to distance him in time, suggest he is a ghost from the past, while Mrs X would be using the modern vernacular and wearing contemporary clothes. This should universalise the passions they embody, suggest they are not limited to a certain age or sex. Miss Y could wear a simple skirt and blouse; it is her face that matters. Her movement and Mozart's music would do the rest. This is how I imagine Manal thought as she put down Pushkin's play and started working on her adaptation with dramaturge Yehia Fikry; my scenario, however, though fictional, is faithfully based on what I saw in the production.
The script born out of the Pushkin-Strindberg merger was called Too Late, a name as mystifying as The Stronger. Too late for what? For the good to be saved? For the bad to repent? But I won't dwell on this; I am tired of solving riddles. The text was there, anyway, and the real problem that faced Manal was not giving it a title but finding actors who could take on its three very demanding roles. Fortunately for her, Ashraf Farouk, Entesar and Ayah Soliman, all young, very talented, well-trained and highly disciplined, were at hand. They gave impressive, finely-tuned, well-coordinated performances which moved and delighted the audience and gave Manal credit as director. Ayah Somliman, however, as the silent Miss Y and the visible, female counterpart of the absent Mozart, stood out among the rest. Her very slender, graceful figure, small, finely chiseled face and huge black eyes made her look quite ethereal, as if she was about to melt into the music she danced to and float away. As I embraced Manal after the show I was so happy she had finally made it as director, and happier that she made it where she first knew the bitter taste of injustice and frustration.
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