Di and Doody meet Shakesy

Nehad Selaiha watches the Diana affair exhumed and turned into a satirical farce at Al-Hanager
After the Clinton/Monica affair which triggered two farces, it was inevitable that someone should want to cash in on the Diana/Doody scandal, their shocking, untimely death and the sensational conspiracy theory it sent flying around. But unlike the authors of The Blue Dress and My Wife, Monica and I (both reviewed on this page at the time), playwright Sameh Mahran made no bones about putting the protagonists of the real story on stage and making them enact his own lurid and somewhat whimsical version of it.
Obviously, as Doditello amply demonstrates, Mahran harbours no sympathy for either the princess or her paramour and does not believe for a moment that what brought them together was anything other than mutual self-interest. Diana, played by the fair and luscious Rehab El-Gharrawi, is portrayed as a vain, scheming, vengeful woman, out to get her own back on Charles and the royal family, while Tareq Abdel-Fattah as Emad El-Fayed seems no more than a spoilt, spineless milksop who does nothing but drool over her physical charms all the time while she coquettishly but firmly puts him off. It is for Queen Elizabeth and the Arabs, however, that Mahran saves his most savage wit and ruthless lampooning.
Adopting the conspiracy theory as a structural framework, the play opens with Queen Elizabeth I, impersonated by man (Hamada Shousha) in drag, ranting and raving at the mortifying prospect of her daughter-in-law marrying an 'Arab' and dragging down the royal family into the mud. She would stop at nothing to prevent that marriage and in her racist frenzy hits upon the fantastical idea of summoning up Shakespeare from the dead by means of cloning to dispose of the errant couple as he formerly did with Othello and Desdemona. She dwells gloatingly on the final scene of Othello, referring to the play as 'that delicious piece of virulent racism.' In this and subsequent scenes, Elizabeth I behaves more like a fishwife than a queen and is consistently coarse, vulgar and obscene; and the fact that she was played by a man, not bound by the conventional rules of modesty actresses are forced to observe to some degree, made the figure all the more bawdy and utterly grotesque. Hamada Shousha who has a natural flair for transvestite roles played the part with abandon and obvious relish, forming with Kamal Atiya (as the lord chamberlain) a zany, zingy duo.
The second scene moves from the British court to some unspecified spot in the Arab world where a trio of bearded, galabiya-clad buffoons (members of a secret Jihad organisation, it transpires) form, with the help of a headless dummy horse, a tableau vivant representing a knight on horseback with his lance poised over a prostrate figure, ready to stab. But this emblematic image of heroism is marred by one detail: the head and front part of the horse are human, supplied by one of the threesome. Apart from its comic effect, the distortion vividly evokes the Centaurs of Greek mythology and, in the context of the play which openly posits that 'East is East and West is West and ne'er the twain shall meet' (as one of the Arabs asserts, quoting Rudyard Kipling verbatim), may remind the more knowledgeable among the audience of the fierce fight between the Centaurs and the Lapithae which later became the subject of some of the metopes of the Parthenon where it symbolised the conflict between the Greeks and Persians. Such a reading may seem too belaboured and far-fetched, but it is not wildly implausible. Mahran is no run-of-the-mill writer; he is exceptionally widely read, particularly in literature, history and mythology, a member of academia with a BA in Hebrew, a PhD in drama and a fair amount of published research. Moreover, his previous writing shows a marked predilection for intricate allusions and elaborate metaphors. One can therefore safely assume that he deliberately planted the figure of the Centaur in this scene as an erudite visual metaphor to suggest a parallel in the past for the East/West conflict he depicts in the present.
The trio's clownish horseplay is interrupted by the arrival of their leader, a hissing, skulking figure, masquerading as a street-sweeper and armed with a broomstick. He tells them that the people at the top have changed their minds about Doody and his prospective deed; rather than a traitor who has betrayed the Arabs by wanting to marry a princess of the nation which formerly colonised their countries, he is now viewed as a hero who will avenge the Arabs' past wrongs by conquering a member of that nation's royal family, physically colonising her and bringing her under the iron rod of conjugal authority. Here, sex is implicitly defined as an act of violence, a form of aggression and subjugation and, indeed, the abuse of sex in both the East and the West is a major theme that runs through the whole play, often surfacing in the verbal dialogue in ribald puns and salacious innuendoes.
The leader who apes the manners and bigoted discourse of fanatics and petty-minded religious fundamentalists (acted by Khaled El-Kharbotli with overwhelming energy and exuberance) becomes the focus of the scene and the butt of Mahran's most savage satire. Pressed for a plot to get the queen out of Doody's way, he seeks inspiration in The Arabian Nights and finds the ideal solution in the story of the man who once, while eating dates and throwing away the stones, inadvertently hit the son of a giant jinnee, killing him on the spot, whereupon the bereaved father instantly killed him in return. Believing that the legendary jinnee is still around and functional (and why not since, as he instructs his disciples, the past lives on, quite unchanged, in the present), he decides to present the queen with a gift of the choicest dates of Arabia. Sooner or later, he hopes, she is bound to knock off some baby jinnee with a stone, and the rest can be trusted to his irate parent.
The next scene shows us Diana and her lover in a forest of photographers disguised as trees. The couple know they are there but do not let on and pose for them while pretending to act spontaneously. The two characters and their relationship are quickly delineated with a few bold strokes, unambiguously defined and firmly fixed. Neither they nor any of the other characters undergo any change and, indeed, one does not expect it in a farcical satire.
Scene four takes us back to Buckingham Palace (in the play, a bare stage with nothing but a modest, wide armchair on top of a platform with a few steps leading down, and three screens at the back on which coloured slides of Westminster, of Diana, of her and Doody in bathing suits, and of her funeral intermittently flash). There, the newly genetically-engineered Shakespeare, or Shakesy, as the queen nicknames him (acted with zest and gusto by Sherif Subhi), arrives fresh from the lab. Physically, he seems all right from the head to the waist; but from the waist down, he is badly deformed. The scientist who cloned him (Mohamed Haseeb), himself far from normal and palpably the victim of some grievous disorder of the nervous system, explains the reason: halfway through the operation, the funds set aside for it ran out. But Shakesy is not only physically deformed, but also a brainless, bleating imbecile who would only feed on fodder.
Interesting or funny as this travesty of the bard may be, it failed to attach itself to the play in any significant or functional way and remained till the end a redundant, dispensable adjunct. One can of course stretch a point and argue that its very ineffectualness is meaningful in that it exposes the impotence and bankruptcy of modern science and technology and of the modern civilisation which has put all its faith solely in them. This would implicitly assume that the play juxtaposes the past and the present, siding with the former against the latter. Such a juxtaposition is indeed suggested by the bigoted Arabs who live the past in the present and are loath to change and the queen's insistence on rushing the present into the future. But since both attitudes are represented by negative characters and are, therefore, equally ridiculed and dismissed, and since Mahran fails to present a positive alternative, a third way, a single sympathetic character or one which is more than simply a grotesque caricature, the interpretation I have volunteered remains extraneous to the play. It is possible that Mahran had it in mind when he decided to introduce the cloned Shakesy and the Othello interracial marriage theme; but if so, he has failed to integrate it into his play as an active force in the dramatic plot or a vital element in the structure of meaning. And the fact that he himself directed this text forestalls the throwing of blame elsewhere. Both in the writing and staging, Mahran seems to have been carried away by the galloping spirit of satire, and in its heady rush, it has managed to level everything in its way, sparing nothing and no one.
By the end of scene 4, halfway through the play, one distinctly begins to feel in what follows that Mahran's inventiveness has run out of steam and that he is at a loss what to do with the delicious and explosively funny travesties he has created. He lets them ramble for another hour willy-nilly, abruptly changing course and taking different directions for no apparent reason except, perhaps, to have something to do. When the Arab trio arrive at the court with the gift of dates, their leader materialises out of the blue to give them orders to change their target and join forces with Elizabeth against Doody. Why? is anybody's guess. What does this twist lead to? Nothing. Their planned ganging up with the queen against Doody boils down to their being present at his performance of Othello, with Diana as Desdemona. As for the leader, he keeps himself busy chasing after Shakesy in female disguise, insistently clamouring that he is the donor of the egg that caused this misshapen creature to come into the world and is, therefore, his mother. The reason is clear: the Arabs want to revive the myth that Shakespeare was in fact no Englishman but a North African Arab, like Othello, and to prove it true, they are willing to put up with his addle-brained, idiotic double. When things begin to drag, and nothing seems to be leading to a plausible, or even implausible end, the lord chamberlain takes matters in hand and prompts Shakesy to propose to the queen that Diana and Doody perform Othello. But just before the play-within-the-play, he suddenly turns informer against the queen (and don't ask me why) and warns them that she intends it as a kind of Hamletian mousetrap. In what way, is not explained or even hinted at. The penultimate scene replays the murder of Desdemona in a farcical vein with many changes. When Shakesy objects, Di and Doody fall upon him on the bed and give him a good beating while the queen withdraws in disgust. The final scene is a startling shift from Othello to Hamlet and is a pungently satirical inverted version of Hamlet's encounter with his father's ghost. The ghost here is Doody's; how or when he died, the play blithely ignores. He steps out of what looks like a shop-window, bordered with coloured, lighted bulbs (one of Harrod's during Xmas, perhaps?). El-Fayed, senior, faces him, vowing to do whatever he orders, but Doody has only one thing on mind and two words which he keeps repeating: THE BRITISH NATIONALITY.
Mahran may have slipped up here and there in the text, particularly in the second part, but his staging of the play (in his second attempt as director) was consistently lively, imaginative, well-orchestrated and nimble in pace and movement. With a modest budget, next to no sets and a predominantly young cast, many of whom lack experience and are non-professionals, he produced a work guaranteed to entertain all and provoke many. Its witty and reckless debunking of everything and poking fun at all, and its refreshingly bold risqué mood and humour are healthy and much-needed antidote to the heavy-handed moralising of many a play and the moral hypocrisy of others.
(For performance details, see Listings)
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