Grapes of wrath

Nehad Selaiha ponders some theatrical responses to the Intifada
In times of war, artists are always called upon, or feel impelled, to put their art in the service of the battle. In most cases, the art produced on such occasions proves of little durable value and is promptly consigned to oblivion once the conflict is over or, alternatively, put in cold storage to be dug out, warmed up and dished out once more if a similar crisis occurs. At best, it can serve as a cathartic emotional outburst or an impassioned morale-booster; at worst, it can degenerate into crude, naïve propaganda, churned out for immediate local consumption at the behest of a usually specious authoritarian regime.
Luckily, the Egyptian theatre (and all theatre, I suppose) is notoriously tardy in this respect. Since the October war in 1973 and the storming of the renownedly invincible Barlev line by the Egyptian army, many critics, intellectuals and important people in the media have been wondering in dismay at the failure of the Egyptian theatre to rise to the occasion and record this momentous event in a grand and rousing heroic drama. Ironically, the best work done in theatre on this war has focused on its dark, conveniently ignored, side: the fate of the small soldiers -- the Woyzeks of this world -- who gave everything and when the time came to reap the fruits of victory, got nothing. In one such work, Hamdi Abdel-Aziz's An Egyptian Tale, or a Diary of the Plague, the simple peasant, Saber, who volunteers to fight the Israeli foe, returns to his village after the war to realise that he has been robbed of everything by the masters for whom he risked his life. When he complains, he is curtly hustled to the madhouse.
When Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out last autumn, theatre artists here felt they had to do something and started a feverish search for suitable texts. Any play dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict, however distantly or obliquely, or which could be altered to accommodate it, was unearthed, dusted out, and fitted with new songs and scenes to link it to the present Intifada. Rape, an adaptation of Antonio Buero Vallejo's The Double Story of Dr Valmi by the late Syrian playwright, Sa'adalla Wannus, was a prime candidate. Featuring the sadistic torture of Palestinian freedom-fighters at the hands of their Israeli jailers, it argues that no society can condone the practice of brutality against its opponents without itself becoming brutalised. The production presented by the Rafah Cultural Palace Company, on a make-shift stage, in a tent pitched in the Actors Union club a few months ago, dwelt on the harrowing torture scenes, highlighting the savagery and fanatical zeal of the torturers and bracketed the play with wistfully nostalgic Palestinian folk songs. It was a rough-hewn work, full of crudities and ham-acting; but for some reason, perhaps because the group came from Rafah and had first-hand experience of what was taking place next door in Gaza, the performance communicated an unbearable feeling of pain -- almost like a raw wound. One critic, however, took the company to task over their choice of text, complaining that it showed some of the Israelis as human beings, capable of self-questioning and having moral scruples and qualms of conscience. Fortunately, most directors are not deterred by such criticism and appreciate the play's fair-mindedness, dialectical force and human complexity. Two months after the Rafah company production, Sayed Khattab directed it for the Giza Cultural Palace Company and presented it at Al-Hanager in the context of the Arab Theatre Festival mounted by the Egyptian Society for Theatre Amateurs (ESTA) from 15 to 27 February. Indeed, the whole festival was dedicated to the Intifada and featured revivals of Che Guevara, by the late Palestinian poet and dramatist, Mu'in Bassisu, The Mountebank, by the Moroccan Abdel-Karim Barchid, The Clown, by the Syrian Mohamed El-Maghout, and The Gypsy by the Egyptian Bahig Ismail. All are political parables which blame the loss of Palestine on dictatorship and the fear, ignorance, and passivity it forces on the people; and all were adapted in some degree, in one way or another, to invest them with a sense of urgency, immediacy and topical relevance.
Other revivals are planned, some already in the pipelines. They include Alfred Farag's documentary drama, The Fire and the Olives, Mohamed El-Maghout's political cabaret, Your Glass, My Country, Mahmoud Diab's epic play, Conquerors' Gate (in 3 different provincial productions) and Yusri El-Gindi's chronicle play, The Lost Jew -- all from the 1960s. New texts, freshly penned, like Hisham El-Salamoni's The Enemy in the Bedroom and Sayed El-Imam's Blood on the Clown's Hand, are also announced. The Intifada was also instrumental in bringing to the stage one long neglected play. The Pound of Flesh, by the late drama scholar Ibrahim Hamada, based on The Merchant of Venice, premiered at Al-Salam Theatre in mid-February.
Most of the people behind these productions will tell you that they do them not just for their own satisfaction, as a form of self-expression and moral support for their Palestinian brethren, but, more importantly, because they feel it their duty to instruct the younger generations in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and make them aware of the threats posed by the Jewish state. Sadly, however, many of these nobly-motivated shows are sparsely attended and fail either to reach or attract their targeted audience. Is it lack of publicity? Bad artistic management? Or has television, with its vivid documentaries and live coverage, rendered such shows redundant and made them seem pallid and lifeless by comparison? Or could it be, as I sometimes feel, that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is so horribly tragic and so nightmarishly real that it seems almost obscene to sit quietly in the dark and watch it displayed, discussed or analysed and, worse still, expect to derive some aesthetic pleasure out of doing so? I frankly confess that I frequently suffer bad bouts of embarrassment when I watch such shows nowadays and often remember Wordsworth and acknowledge the wisdom of his definition of art as "recollection in tranquillity;" and the key word here is tranquillity. But with so much violence, so many young people, even children dying everyday and most of the Palestinian population living in dire straits and sinking below the poverty line, how can one have tranquillity?
The dilemma which inevitably faces any director keen on supporting the Intifada and fighting for it from the stage is how to do his duty by it without neglecting his duty to his craft or betraying the art form he works in. The most recent production dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict (currently playing at Al-Tali'a theatre) amply illustrates this dilemma. Under the Sun is a reworking by director Fahmi El-Kholi of a play called The Umbrella, written by Sameh Mahran more than a year before the Intifada. Mahran's text starts in a realistic vein with a middle-aged couple -- a smug but tetchy husband and an outwardly complacent but secretly sulky and disgruntled wife -- sitting on the sea shore in one of those posh villages on the north coast. The husband, we learn, has spent the best part of his youth abroad, working in some oil-rich Arab country to make his fortune, spending only one month a year with his wife. He is now back for good, has invested his money in a flat, a car and a chalet, and is finally ready to embark on the long delayed project of begetting an heir. When a rich family who own a villa in the same village invade the couple's privacy and force them to relinquish the umbrella for which they (the couple) had paid an exorbitant sum of money as part of the compulsory amenities that go with the chalet, the husband rushes in rage to complain to the village manager. In the course of their conversation, the play drops off its realistic mask, revealing itself as a political parable in which the rich family represents the super powers, or, more accurately, the United States, with the helpless manager as the ineffectual United Nations. When the thuggish family smashup the husband's new car to punish him for daring to complain, he literally goes raving mad. The wife is forced to lock him up in his room and the first act ends with him banging frantically at the door and ranting and railing against her. The play could have easily ended there and it would not have been a bad thing. But Mahran wanted to give the socio-political satire contained in the first act a wider significance by linking it, in a somewhat mechanical way, to the Palestinian nakba and the sense of alienation experienced by Palestinians in the diaspora.
In the second act, which could also stand alone as a self-contained play, a Palestinian male invades the husband's room or, rather, his mind, and leads him through a looking-glass, like Alice, on a journey into the past to discover the origins of their present misfortune. On the way, they meet a fortune-teller who only mystifies them with her ambivalent utterances. The journey ultimately leads them to the city of Shechem in the land of Canaan where they watch the biblical story of the rape of Dinah, (the daughter of Jacob and Leah) by Shechem, (son of Hamor, the Hivite, who was chief of the region), and the terrible revenge of her brothers (as told in Genesis: 34) reenacted before their eyes. Though Mahran substituted love for rape, making Dinah willingly surrender to her lover, the moral of the story is clear: there can never be peace between the Arabs and the Israelites and the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel has been disastrous for both Egyptians and Palestinians -- an awful mistake that ought to be corrected. Armed with this revelation and a spear, Issa, the husband, sets for that the head of a small surrealistic contingent of headless soldiers to wage war on the usurpers of his umbrella and the rights of his Palestinian friend and ends up in a mental ward.
Director Fahmi El-Kholi altered the structure and tone of the original text, introducing the Palestinian as a presence in Issa's mind from the very beginning, cutting out all the funny mad scenes, making the husband and wife a young, attractive, romantic couple, and the village-manager a sexy female, in a dark, tight leather suit, alternately cracking a whip and clicking her brass castanets while belly-dancing. The tragi-comic end was replaced with fervent patriotic declamation and, with the help of Hamdi Abul-'Ela's lyrics and Gamal Mustafa's melodies, the tone of the play became on the whole affectedly earnest and doggedly sentimental. But how on earth can one reconcile this anxious pursuit of seriousness and high emotionalism with the frivolous pink spangled salopette worn by the wife, the erotic presence and dancing of Abir El-Saghir as Miss UN, or (and that is the cruelest cut of all) with the ludicrous sight of grown, bearded men, freshly circumcised, walking with their legs far apart, while holding their gowns up and away from the sore spot and groaning loudly? The circumcision of the Canaanites on the suggestion of the Israelites (as a condition to their approving their daughter's marriage to Shechem but in reality a trick to incapacitate and easily kill them) is mentioned in the biblical story and was intended by the author to symbolise the political impotence of the Arabs inflicted upon them by their rulers' selfish whims. But however good the intention, it is incredible to assume, and expect the audience to believe, that the sight of such men could inspire the hero, or indeed anyone with patriotic fervour or a sacred passion for revenge.
Equally disconcerting was the constant invasion of the stage by a small army of hooded extras in black, carrying long mirrors and continuously moving round the actors. El-Kholi obviously intended the mirrors to break up the stage image into many reflections and create a visual metaphor for the confusion and fragmentation which dominate Arab politics and life. Effectively, however, his extras (who seemed genetically incapable of holding a mirror still even for a second) only succeeded in blinding the audience with the lights flashed by the mirrors and getting into the way of the actors.
It was ironic to think that El-Kholi's zeal to champion the Palestinian cause had made him blind to the elements which could have best served his purpose without pomposity or brashness, while his keenness to secure beauty and vitality for his show had landed him with facile and garish visual solutions. With the theme of madness removed, and with it all the comedy, the couple romanticised, and the cause sentimentalised, Under the Sun seemed hopelessly belaboured, oppressively affected and distressingly simplistic.
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See Intifada in focus
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