A long night's journey into light

Nehad Selaiha is dazzled and intrigued by Osama Anwar Okasha's debut at the National with The People on the Third Floor
I visited the National on three different nights this week and every time I was strongly reminded of the 1960s. It was not only the charismatic presence of Samiha Ayyoub at the head of the star-studded cast of The People on the Third Floor, the sight of all those people crowding into the theatre to fill the auditorium, balcony and boxes, even on the notoriously dead nights, much dreaded by actors, or that most of the audience were drawn to the play as much by the name of its author as by the cast (a rare phenomenon nowadays, though quite common in the golden 1960s); it was also something about the quality of attention the audience gave to the stage: a mixture of excited expectation, intent concentration, and intense involvement. This can be partly explained by the huge popularity of Osama Anwar Okasha's television serials which have made him a star in his own right; but, mostly, it is due to the daring political outspokenness of the text, which caused it to be banned for nine years, its clever detective-story formula which keeps the audience tingling with suspense and treats them to one sensational revelation after another, and its taut structure which strictly adheres to the classical unities, compressing the action in one night and one place.
Like J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls, of which I was strongly reminded, the action in Okasha's play begins with the arrival of an unexpected visitor during a family celebration; and just as Priestley's enigmatic Inspector Goole interrupts the engagement party of the daughter of the wealthy Birling family on the pretext of investigating a suicide, Okasha's police officer barges into the flat of a middle class family of modest means, disrupting and completely messing up the wedding night of the eldest son, Said (Abdel-Aziz Makhyoun), on the pretext of inspecting the flat for security reasons. It is a necessary routine measure, he explains, since the flat overlooks Ramses Square where a presidential motorcade in honour of some foreign head of state is due to pass the following morning. But rather than a routine inspection, this unexpected night call rapidly develops into a form of arbitrary, vicious prying into the secrets of the family and the souls and innermost thoughts of its members. Through probing, relentless questioning and gruelling mental and physical pressure, the police inspector (Riyad El-Kholi) drags out all the skeletons in the cupboard and forces the family to face them. His purpose in all this, however, is neither to heal nor reconcile, but rather to humiliate and mortify. Indeed, the inspector here seems to know everything not just about this family, but about all the citizens of the country and the investigation seems no more than a charade designed to tear the family apart, destroy their self-respect and trust in each other and crush their human dignity so that they may be easily coerced into falsely confessing to harbouring a terrorist in their midst. Such a confession would earn the officer promotion and perhaps a medal and for this he is willing to go to any lengths.
The damage caused by this harrowing invasion of privacy is thorough and irreparable. The family emerges from its ordeal tainted and battered; the mother, Wedad (Samiha Ayyoub) and the father's closest friend, Mohib (Rashwan Tawfiq), who moved in with the family after the father's death, are suspected of carrying on a secret love affair; the eldest son, Said (Abdel-Aziz Makhyoun), once a revolutionary, has finally succumbed to financial pressures and accepted to marry the cast-off mistress of his boss in exchange for a lucrative position; and the middle son, Wahid (Farouk El-Fishawi), is an unconscionable crook who swindles his sister and her fiancé, among others, out of their savings and cares about no one but himself. And even the innocent are not without some blemish or cause for private shame. The youngest son Hani (Sayed Shafiq) is a cripple, confined to a wheelchair; the daughter, Rabab (Afaf Hamdi) is an unprepossessing spinster; and the step-sister, Wasilah (Nirmene Kamal), the dead father's daughter by a secret marriage, is kept in the dark about her parentage and employed as a servant by the family.
Contrary to the inspector's expectations, however, the violent confrontations he triggers and the secrets he unearths, though shattering, have a cathartic effect and help the family to stand up to him and oppose his tyranny. They may be weak, cowardly, and selfish, or foolish, ignorant or helpless, but they can still say no. In a long, passionate tirade at the end, Samiha Ayyoub roundly declares that "people are stronger than bullets." And it is by no means the only loud slogan shouted from the stage; in fact, the play is liberally spiced with such slogans which are evenly shared out among the main characters. Though some of them are exhilaratingly bold and deliciously venomous, affording much vicarious satisfaction, they tend to pall after a while and give the play as a whole a garish tone. The marked absence of anything approaching subtlety, coupled with a tendency for melodramatic declamation and sentimental effusions, deprived the text of any deep, reflective quality and made it sound in places embarrassingly banal. I do not know if Okasha cared to revise his text after so many years before submitting it to the National; but as I saw it, it definitely needed some rewriting, if only to smooth out the crudities of the plot and awkward contradictions in the dialogue. As it stands, one cannot help feeling quite dazed by the number and sheer speed of the incredible discoveries sprung upon one in the last half hour without warning, or hope to make sense of the sudden and startling changes in character the mother rapidly displays in the final scenes. Such slips are incredible in a work by a proficient craftsman like Okasha, and I strongly suspect that he added new scenes to build up the mother's part when Ayyoub was cast for it; it seems the only plausible explanation, and however disconcerting the result, it at least allowed us to enjoy the presence of Ayyoub on stage longer than would have been the case otherwise, which is more than sufficient compensation.
It was a real treat watching Ayyoub on stage once more and feeling the full force of her energy flowing into the auditorium; and if Okasha had done nothing but persuade Ayyoub to come back to the stage, it would have been enough. But his fame and popularity were also instrumental in bringing together such popular film and television stars as El-Fishawi, El-Kholi, Tawfiq, and Makhyoun, and in their glowing presence, the relatively new or unknown actors, Shafiq, Hamdi and Kamal, could not but shine.
Amazingly, Okasha and Huda Wasfi, the National's director took the risk of entrusting the production to a young and inexperienced director, and how they managed to convince the stars to work with him is quite a feat and tantalizing mystery. But Mohamed Omar, whom Wasfi had tried out in a small production at the National six months ago, acquitted himself better than one would have expected. His movement and lighting designs were effective without being obtrusive, and, together with stage-designer Fadi Foukeih, created a setting at once realistic, functional and potently symbolic, visually suggesting a state of siege. In one detail, however, the head of the statue of Ramses which peeped over the sill of the backstage window, with part of the railway station building behind it, the set was ludicrously belaboured, naive and over-emphatic.
It was one more loud slogan, as if we did not already have more than enough. But whatever the flaws of this production, or may be because of them, The People on the Third Floor has a distinct 1960s flavour which gives it a strange, nostalgic appeal and enough popular ingredients to ensure its continued success with the public.
For perfomance details, see Listings
Recommend this page
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Send a letter to the Editor