My favourite rat

Youssef Rakha seeks theatrical rodents
Last Thursday and Friday -- at the Mashrabiya and El-Warsha's office on Sherif St, respectively -- "experimental theatre" made a brief, unobtrusive appearance in the context of Nitaq. The two performances in question -- "Rat" and "Layali El-Warsha" -- were authored, respectively, by Sayed Ragab (with Islam El-Azzazi) and Hassan El-Geretly (with members of El-Warsha).
The latter performance -- all that El-Warsha has had to offer since its theatrical take on the Hilaleya epic, Ghazl Al-Amaar -- is little more than a forum for (individual) story-telling and (group) singing episodes by troupe members, conceived originally as part of the troupe's "work in process" but eventually developed into a more or less fixed repertoire item sufficient for a variety of performances under the same title (Layali means "nights") -- always different yet always, ominously, the same. It is worth noting that both Ragab and El-Azzazi retain affinities with El-Warsha: El-Azzazi is a former member of the directorial team; Ragab, one of the troupe's more celebrated actors, even participated in Friday's "Layali" as a story-teller. Yet rather than comprising an intra-troupe splinter, however distinctive from other Warsha fare, "Rat" (which could, in theory, have been incorporated into "Layali") stands out as a rivetting mini-drama in its own right.
Ragab's impressionistic, colloquial Arabic account of the many different occasions on which a rat made an appearance in his life, and the ways in which he might compare himself to a rat, had initially evolved following El-Warsha's mashahed hayatiya (life scenes) exercise, in which troupe members were asked to recount anecdotes from their personal history and everyday life, to be shaped into short-story-like texts and eventually one-man performances. Ragab took the exercise further, however, producing a partial autobiography based on a single, pregnant image: a frightened rat scurrying on the ground. The oppressed working-class child, the political activist (and humiliated prisoner), the lover (and husband) emerge beautifully as variations on the theme of an observant, humorous and ultimately moving human rat. "I knew that the rat screams once then dies, and I could scream many times but live," he concludes wryly.
El-Azzazi's mark is evident in the way Ragab has increasingly shed the garb of the story-teller -- his most prominent role in El-Warsha -- and employed the tools of the actor: the characters are more sharply defined, the pace is more dramatic, the setting is evoked more vividly and the action is more gripping. As the story progresses, the anecdotes turn out to be convincingly real-life.
In one scene, the flat is being searched by the secret police and the narrator is about to be taken in by the authorities when his wife begins to scream: there is a rat in the house and she is scared. "Don't take the man and leave me the rat," she pleads hysterically. Reassuring her, the officer begins to orchestrate the capture and murder of the rat as if he was organising a delicate paramilitary operation. Ragab's rendition of the exchange, apart from being hilarious, captures the spirit and the tone of a whole cast of characters.
Though advertised as "new" the episodes making up Friday's "Layali" were mostly repeats of well-rehearsed stories, songs and scenes. One notable exception was Bassem Adli's impersonation of a conventioanl Coptic widow from Mallawi, Minia, Umm Emad -- a complex character portrait that had the audience squealing with laghter. Ahmed Kamal performed his almost classic "Film Hindi", comprising a mad screenplay writer reading from his Indian film script, while Hamdi El-Tonsi told the story of a religious man's encounter with alcohol, how alcohol for him becomes associated with roumi cheese (the mezza he learns to eat with it) and how he begins to get drunk on the latter alone -- a minor achievement in its own right.
Unfortunately, many of the songs (Sayed Darwish's Ya Halawet El-Donia being the most obvious example) were ineptly performed by the group: much of the singing was either garbled, tuneless, or both. And while Medhat Fawzi performed two delightful shaabi songs by Shaaban Abdel-Rehim, one couldn't help wondering why Shaaban himself had not been mobilised for the task. El-Warsha's popularity resulted in the space being overcrowded and noisy. The performance was badly organised, the episodes inadequately presented, the overall impression disappointing.
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