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Revisiting El-Doghrys
Published in Al-Ahram Weekly on 05 - 04 - 2001

Thirty-eight years on, Nehad Selaiha finds the lively members of No'man Ashour's Eilet El-Doghry doing well at the Wallace
The AUC's annual production of an Egyptian play in Arabic has become for many an exciting and cherished event. Over the years it has treated us to rare and memorable revivals of some of the best works in the repertoire of Egyptian drama -- plays like Tawfiq El-Hakim's The Sultan's Dilemma, No'man Ashour's Tannery Tower, or Saadeddin Wahba's The Road to Safety (all brilliantly directed by Mahmoud El-Lozy); and this year's choice was another Ashour masterpiece, El-Doghry Family, directed this time by Nivene El-Ebiari.
Written and performed at the National in 1963, El-Doghry Family (the name means in Arabic 'the straightforward') belongs to what is generally described as the most fertile period in the history of the Egyptian theatre (1952-1967), when a new generation of playwrights appeared and wrote for the stage on a regular basis (even though it was impossible for any of them to make a living with creative writing as a sole profession). Like the majority of plays which belong to those halycon days, it was produced within only a few months of its completion, by a prestigious state-run company, with adequate state subsidies, a redoubtable director (Abdel-Rehim El-Zorqani), and a carefully picked cast of talented, well-trained and highly disciplined and dedicated actors. It was an instant hit with the public, but its critical reception did not match its popular success.
Ashour's reliance on the comedy of situation formula, his use of comic stereotypes and colloquial language (features which link his dramaturgy to the earlier popular traditions of comedy in Egypt, particularly that of Naguib El-Rihani whose influence Ashour frankly acknowledged), together with the obvious lack of character development (though not of character revelation) and the absence of anything faintly resembling a firmly constructed plot came under severe critical fire. Despite the strong reformist purpose implicit in all his plays and their pronounced, underpining socialist ideology (Ashour was twice imprisoned on a charge of belonging to a Marxist underground party), the new generation of committed leftist critics were suspicious of any drama which seemed to hark back to older theatrial forms in pre-revolutionary Egypt, like El-Rihani's comedies, and it was felt that the comic exuberance of Ashour's plays, their rampant, bositerous humour, zestful delight in the vagaries of human nature and good-natured tolerance of its weaknesses and foibles softened their satirical thrust, made the audience love and delight in all the characters, including the 'bad' (read 'reactionary') ones and, consequently, diluted their serious political import and rendered them less effective as weapons in the battle for social change. Not surprisingly, such wrong-headed, narrow-minded criticism was uniformly blind to Ashour's delicate craftsmanship, particularly his subtle use of place or setting as active dramatic force and a unifying metaphor which informs the dialogue, provides dramatic focus and general atmosphere, generates conflicts and tensions and frames the deployment and orchestration of themes and motifs. In El-Doghry Family, the old family home is the real hero, at once the subject and generator of conflict and a symbol of an old way of life -- rapidly dispappearing and triggering ambivalent attitudes in the characters towards it. Indeed, in all his major works -- The People Downstairs (1956), The People Upstairs�(1958), El-Doghry Family (1963) and Tannery Tower (1976) -- this metaphoric use of space and setting is the operative formal principle and thematic matrix of the play. Each is built round a juxtaposition of places (and their social denotations) and the action takes the form of the characters' movement in and out of and between them, both physically and symbolically. The movement is at once horizontal -- between old and new, posh and popular, or rich and poor quarters of Cairo, and vertical --�up and down a building (suggesting the social ladder) from the basement to the top floors. Indeed, together, the four plays form a kind of tetralogy which documents in terms of spatial relationships and movement the impact on Egyptian society -- particularly the middle classes -- of the change from a form of feudal capitalist economy, via a form of socialism and state-control, to Sadat's laisser faire or open-door economic policy.
To add insult to injury, the same critics described Ashour's robust, vivacious and high-spirited dialogue as 'blunt and unattractive' and concluded that he 'did not succeed (or perhaps was not interested) in transcending the barrier whereby drama written in the colloquial could become enduring literature.' No wonder he bitterly inveighed against critics all his life. The popular success of his plays was largely attributed, not to any intrinsic artistic value, but to their brilliant casting. In the case of El-Doghry Family, the cast was indeed quite impressive; it included Shafiq Nureddin as the ruthlessly exploited, long-suffering destitute but unwaveringly loyal, patient and forgiving family servant whose name, El-Tawwaf (the wanderer), is a sign of his marginal, alienated status; the eldest son, Sayed, once a thriving, famous tailor, who withdraws into religion, becoming something of a mystic when he goes bankrupt, was played by Tawfiq El-Diqen, while Mustafa, the self-seeking, social-climbing middle one, was Kamal Hussein, and Hassan, the youngest, who failed to complete his education and took up football as a career, was Abdel-Moneim Ibrahim. The two El-Doghry daughters were Malak El-Gamal (as the uneducated, petty-minded, grumpy and officious Zeinab who resents being married to a small, impoverished civil servant and has the typical middle-class upward aspirations) and Ragaa Hussein, as the younger, sweeter Aisha who works as a physical training teacher and is confused by the family's conflicting views and interests. The rest of the characters were played by Nadia El-Sab' (in the part of Karima, the orphan and poor cousin of El-Doghrys who first marries Mustafa then, when he leaves her after getting his MA to seek a more socially advantageous marriage, his elder brother, Sayed); Salwa Mahmoud (as Mustafa's spoilt and selfish new fiancée); Ali Rushdi (as the niggardly Abdel Reda Shanen, the former accountant at El-Doghry Bakery who rose to fortune by shady means and hankers after buying the Doghrys family home); Ahmad El-Gizeiri (as Zeinab's timid, henpecked husband); and Abdel-Rahman Abu Zahra (as the dreamy, voluble and effusive Sami, Shanen's son, a civil servant with literary aspirations who studies Arabic literature at university, disdains all material interests and bourgeois conventions, courts Aisha behind his father's back, and mystifies everybody, including his would-be fiancée, with his vain, often inane, display of eloquence). The acting style, a mixture of realism, farce and caricature, was tailored to the characters as penned by the author, and, in the case of Abu Zahra (as Sami), the element of caricature was exaggerated since the character, who voiced many of Ashour's progressive views regarding love and marriage, was deliberately intended by the author as a self-mocking parody to guard against any hint of preaching or didacticism.
The memory of this captivating, effervescent 1963 production is kept green and transmitted to subsequent generations by a black and white video recording fitfully broadcast on television. This may explain why directors have consistently shied away from venturing upon a new production of the text and felt that the original one would be difficult to match, let alone surpass. That Nivene El-Ebiari has taken on El-Doghry Family for her debut as director and thereby dared where older and more experienced colleagues fear to tread, shows that she has guts, a genuine appreciation of good plays and a willingness to take risks to keep them alive on stage. But these are not her only assets; artistic precision, clarity and economy of detail, attention to mood and tempo, and the ability to guide and control her actors, to draw the best out of them while covering up their deficiencies, are others. With a young, non-professional cast of AUC students and graduates, some with no previous acting experience whatsoever, she managed to achieve a clean, uncluttered production -- lucid, fast-flowing and devastatingly funny.
However, the performances varied in flair, ease and competence. In some cases, the actors (namely, Mustafa Hashish as Hassan, Ala' Shalabi as Ahmed Effendi, Zeinab's husband, and Amir Badr as Sami) were more than a match for the characters they portrayed, inventively recreating them in their own images; in others, it was the characters themselves, particularly El-Tawwaf, Zeinab, Azhar and Shanen (respectively played by Mohamed Abdel-Rehim, Sarah Nur, Huda Mahran and Yehia El-Deqen), who did all the work, bearing the actors along and carrying them to safety -- which, by the way effectively disproves the old and persistent critical view that the play's success in the 1960s was due to the casting. For the rest, Tamer Mahdi as Sayed, Yasmin Seheem as Aisha, Mustafa Mu'nis as Mustafa, and Nermeen Abdel-Fattah as Karima, gave decent, credible and often sympathetic performances.
By putting El-Doghry Family to the severe test of a student production in 2001, nearly 40 years after it was written, Nivene El-Ebiari has vindicated its artistic merit and given fresh proof of its vitality, stage-worthiness, enduring relevance (even after the demise of socialism) and continued popular appeal. Furthermore, by sticking faithfully, almost fanatically to the text (save for a brief, nonsensical voice-over prologue which warns the audience on pain of death to switch off their mobiles, and the physical removal of Susu, Zeinab's teenage daughter, from the stage to the wings where the characters could still address her), El-Ebiari has once more disproved the fallacy propagated by the state theatre organisation which obstinately claims that no play of the '50s or '60s can appeal to today's audiences without some form of updating. This usually means alterations that could range from simple cutting to the amalgamation of scenes and characters, the rearrangement of the performance into two parts instead of the traditional three acts, and/or the introduction of completely new elements, like song and dance, sketches and commentaries, or slides and film projections (all of which Samir El-Asfouri did in his last year's revival of Mikhail Roman's '60s play, Isis, My Beloved).
At the door of the Wallace, I cynically thought that, apart from the few surviving television recordings of old plays, it was now up to the AUC to preserve for us and keep alive our national dramatic heritage.
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