In search of healing

Nehad Selaiha wonders if theatre is a reflection of reality or an antidote to its horrors
For days after 11 September I moved around like a finely-programmed android. I acted the same as usual, doing and saying what was expected of me and coping with new, distressing tasks -- like trying to help and console the two anguished American guests of CIFET, stranded at the Cairo Sheraton and feeling trapped, or tracking down my brother who works at the UN in New York and whose silence for two whole days after the appalling disaster of the WTC made my ailing mother hysterical with worry. There were also some friends in New York I needed to make sure were still alive. I went about everything quietly, methodically, but soullessly, like a well-geared machine. It was as if one's imagination, which had been long straining under the weight of so much senseless, unnecessary suffering, so much insane violence and bloodshed, had suddenly snapped. I felt nothing, like someone drained of all life and hurled into a void. But the void was infested with horrible images; they kept welling up from somewhere inside my head and wouldn't go away however many pills I swallowed -- mutilated bodies, weeping children, piles of corpses in mass-graves, crumbling towers, wailing women rummaging through the rubble and debris of what were once their homes and babies with the wrinkled faces of old men and bellies like little, inflated balloons. It was as if the 11-September American nightmare had pressed a secret button in my brain, releasing all the images of horror I had stored up over half a century on this planet and merging them, regardless of the where and when, into one infernal vision. Be it Palestine or Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia or Afghanistan, New York, Algeria, West Jerusalem or Southern Sudan, the suffering and the horror were the same. It seemed to me that ever since the moment I could grasp the meaning of things, the world has been nothing but an ever-widening vicious circle, always drawing in more corpses, more pain and hatred and more blood. And though the leaders of this macabre merry-go-round keep changing their masks (from ruthless totalitarian regimes, rabid military autocrats and greedy foreign invaders to self-righteous, bigoted ideologues, sanctimonious charlatans and fanatical spiritual leaders), their victims are always the same: the young and innocent, the weak and helpless, the poor and ignorant, as well as the tolerant, rational and fair-minded.
During those days (how many were they? I don't remember), I could not go anywhere near a theatre, even flinched from the mere idea. The world had suddenly become a stage presenting a monstrous revenge tragedy of unprecedented enormity, swiftness and magnitude, and with more corpses than all the plays in the world put together. Others would follow, very soon, we were promised by the media, and would, no doubt, be performed with the same grim determination, meticulous attention to timing and cold-blooded efficiency. "Blood will have blood," I remembered Macbeth saying; but in this ultra-modern, hi-tech revenge play, the ethical underpinnings were far more tangled, ambivalent and teasing than in the most complex Shakespearean tragedy. To unravel them, to trace the roots of evil, one would have to go back hundreds of years and subject the history of many civilisations to a grueling moral inquiry. But that was a job for a culture historian, I thought, not a drama critic. Was I even that, a drama critic? I wondered. More to the point, what good was a drama critic in this demented topsy-turvy world?
Now as I begin to recover from my mental inertia and robot-like existence, I find myself trying to hang on to my faith in the value of theatre. But what exactly is this value? I ask myself. And, curiously, as I think about it, I begin to see the good of a drama critic; it lies in just posing this question in moments of crisis, in rethinking and, perhaps, reaffirming the value of theatre when reality threatens to overrun it and usurp its place.
As for the "good of theatre," it depends on what each of us means when we use the word and what we expect from it. Theatre is many kinds, and functions in different ways, on various levels. Its value, therefore, is always relative, that is, relevant to each person's immediate context and urgent needs. For myself, I have never been able to formulate this value conceptually or phrase it intelligibly; for one thing, it keeps changing; for another, my awareness of it is largely intuitive. When pressed to put it in words, I invariably find myself waxing lyrical, saying silly, abstruse things like concrete thinking, the ephemera of life made manifest, or, better still, an intense awareness of being in the present underlined with an acute sense of absence and transience. You wouldn't catch me doing that now however, not after my visit to Iran last year, a whole year of the Intifada, and certainly not after the 11-September terror -- a prime, example of what concrete thinking can do if it runs in an evil vein.
Now, more than ever, I have come to believe that the only way one can communicate one's own sense of the value of theatre is to point out a performance that, at the moment, happens to embody that value for one. And this is exactly what I did when I was grappling with this issue and fighting to regain my belief in theatre: I asked myself which of the 20 odd performances I watched in CIFET I would want to keep with me and revisit? I tried not to think; I just closed my eyes and watched the images that flowed in. I saw an actor on stilts, wearing a skull head, a voluminous black cloak and stalking menacingly in the Opera grounds, behind the open air theatre, waving a huge black flag over the heads of the audience who gathered round on three sides, as well as the heads of the four or five actors on the ground. They looked pathetically small compared to him, and rushed around in terror. The same harassed actors were repeatedly chased around with whips by two hooded actors, also on stilts, in sleeveless leather vests, fastened to their bare chests with a strap at the back; they were made to stand in a line, take off their clothes and march helplessly through a forbidding black metal gate, flanked by two gruesome towers, which closed ominously behind them. What lay behind that sinister gate was anyone's guess. Hell? The trenches? A mass- grave? A torture chamber? A concentration camp?
When they emerged, they were completely broken in body and mind; they carried in some charred wooden crosses, draped the shirts they had taken off on them and set them alight in a silent ritual reenacting the horrors of burning at the stake. Equally vivid was the symbolic rape scene in which a thin, pale girl was ringed by drunken soldiers, sharing the same bottle, throwing it to each other and showering their victim with jets of booze and spittle.
When the gigantic gate and towers burst into flames at the end and slowly collapsed, bit by bit, hissing and crackling in the night air, some took it as a sign of liberation, some as a clear reference to the holocaust, but everyone thought it a spectacular stunt and thrilling coup de theatre. This and the previous images belonged to the Polish Carmen Funebre, billed as "an exploration of the war in Bosnia and, by extension, other ethnic conflicts round the world." It won the best scenography award from the international jury, rave notices from the critics and rapturous applause from the audience; but, would I want to keep that forever? I watched Carmen Funebre on 9 September and found all that whip-cracking and fire-raising somewhat facile and a little too sensational for my taste. The show did nothing, I thought, except replay in a different key the recent horrors in Bosnia and elsewhere and offer them to the audience at a safe aesthetic distance which made them a source of diversion rather than horror. People needed this after the harrowing war experience, I argued with myself then; it was a kind of therapy, group-street- therapy in this case. Nevertheless, it somehow dismayed me to see people cheer and tingle at the sight of roaring flames and human torture. A young student of mine told me before the show he was seeing it for the second time. "It's got fire, whips, stilts, everything," he rattled excitedly. As I listened to him, I little thought that 2 days later the show that had delighted him so much would seem to me like an awful prediction -- a terrible apocalyptic vision.
The next flow of images belonged to 10 September and the Odin Theatre's The Castle of Holstebro. Curiously, a human figure with a skull head was here too; but this time in black tails, gloves, a white embroidered shirt and a red silk scarf round his neck -- a very elegant gentleman indeed, with a name (Mr Peanut) to boot, and definitely far from dead, notwithstanding the skull. He talked, sang and danced, embracing the lovely Julia Varley in his arms and nestled in her bosom like a baby. But Mr Peanut, as his biographer (Varley) tells us in the play's programme, had not always been like that. He had once walked on stilts like the skull man in the Polish Carmen, and looked "'strong, hard, militaristic" and quite frightening; and before that, he "was a big heavy hanging skeleton carried during the first street parades in 1976, then a child's skeleton attached to a drum." When Julia took him over in 1980, he started "to wiggle his hips and be funny," and developed into a sophisticated, cynical clown with a full repertoire.
In The Castle of Holstebro Eugenio Barba and Julia Varley salvage from the grave-diggers scene in Hamlet the freshly buried corpse of Ophelia and the skull of Yorick, King Hamlet's long-dead jester, and revive them visually on stage. They come to life through Julia's body, which is transformed into an ambiguous, paradoxical entity, or, rather, a living space where opposites are reconciled, a site where life and death, reality and art, male and female, the self and the other merge in a mystical union. And in this union, , with whom she has travelled everywhere for the past 15 years, manage to elude reality without losing touch with it; they transcend it not by soaring high above it in disdain, but by sinking into its depths, far below the surface, to discover its secret magic fountain. It was there, in the hidden depths, that they discovered, in Barba's words, that shipwrecks were not always "synonymous with destruction" but could mean mutation, a miraculous metamorphosis. The mystical union of Ophelia and Yorick, Julia and Mr Peanut, is celebrated with a special wedding march, a song from the play of reconciliation par excellence, The Tempest, Ariel's "Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made;/ Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade,/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange."
When Hamlet picks up Yorick's skull he, like the Polish Carmen in the face of death, sees nothing but a "quintessence of dust"; but Julia Varley, Prospero-like, transforms it, with the help of Ariel and her puppet, Mr Peanut, into a performance of great beauty and profound wisdom -- something truly rich and strange, and, what's more, deeply healing.
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor