Point counter point

Nehad Selaiha watches the old war of the sexes taking a new and surprising turn in Lenin El-Ramli's Adam and Eve
Extramarital shenanigans and unlawful sexual escapades are not uncommon in Egyptian theatre and cinema. More often than not, when the eternal triangle, essential for working out such themes in terms of plot and narrative, involves a wife-snatcher, the dramatic treatment plunges headlong into melodrama, splashing the audience with inky sermons and acrid moral tirades and ending in gloom and doom. If the home-wrecker is a female, one could still end up with a harrowing tear-jerker, or, alternatively, the plot could veer in the direction of comic intrigue, masterminded by friends or servants of the family intent on bringing the errant husband back to his nest and his faithful, saintly (and usually deadly dull and thoroughly boring) wife. In both cases, however, there is always a happy ending and, more significantly, a marked softening in the tone of moral indignation. If the adulterous husband falls prey to preaching, the sermons are usually remarkably free of the virulent fire-and-brimstone quality that characterises those addressed to a woman in a similar quandary. The reason for this is obvious; apart from the traditional lenient view of male philandering, not restricted to Egypt, Islam sanctions the right of men to have more than one wife at the same time. While Egyptian theatre and cinema rarely condone and never encourage polygamy (and seldom feature it except as a butt for humour), male adultery is never regarded as a mortal sin, a tragic moral fall, or an irrevocable social stigma.
The breakdown of a marriage through the husband's adultery is the focus and generative matrix of Lenin El-Ramli's latest play, Adam and Eve, currently at Al-Rihani Theatre. And here, as in many of his previous works, El-Ramli displays his amazing knack for taking up ordinary or conventional, even hackneyed, themes, stock situations and characters and reworking them in novel and unpredictable ways to transform them into vehicles for fresh and disturbing insights. The adultery theme is cunningly suppressed at the beginning, and the stage is occupied by a televised public debate on the issue of the equality of the sexes. The debaters are a pompous, pontificating male lawyer and an aggressive, warlike female champion of women's rights with a doctorate in law. The debate is heated and often violently and hilariously acrimonious, and the audience are constantly drawn into the performance, urged to express their opinions, cheer or boo and generally play the part of the fictional audience of the fictional debate.
To support their arguments, each of the debaters treats the audience to a short, live representation of the status of oppressed husbands and wives, enacted in a highly exaggerated farcical style, like a strip-cartoon or a silent movie. The two sequences stand in sharp contrast, but the antithesis does not represent a clear ethical polarity between deception and truth; the author champions neither, holding them in equal balance and leaving the audience to make up their minds. Each sequence foregrounds a set of received ideas and conventional opinions concerning marriage and highlights the power relations embedded in it which pivot round sex and money. In other words, the power conflict between the two debaters in the public arena, which takes the form of each trying to impose his/her own reading of reality on the world, shifts in the stories they enact to the private circle of the home and a more intimate level.
This prepares the way for the next thrilling revelation: the two debaters are in fact a separated couple. At this moment one understands the reason for the bitter sarcasm, the ironic digs and the vengeful hostility which have characterised their exchanges so far. The revelation is dramatically motivated by the desire of the female debater, Dr Hafiza, to rout her opponent by exposing his moral hypocrisy and shaming him before the world. The venerable lawyer and pillar of society is an adulterer. After a love marriage which lasted for 20 happy years, producing two lovely children and leading him to a brilliant career, he went and had an illicit affair with his secretary who is 20 years younger than himself. Rather than tell us the story, Dr Hafiza reenacts it before our eyes with the help of the husband and his secretary.
One cannot but admire El-Ramli's timing in introducing his adultery theme. Without the previous scenes, Hafiza's story would have come across as mundane, sentimental and even banal. But those scenes had created a special context for perception and reception which shunned any simplistic, one-sided view of reality, suggesting it was more problematic and relative than the dominant ideology and its discourses would have us believe, and put the audience in a critical, inquiring and sceptical frame of mind. Inevitably, within such a context, there is bound to be another side to Hafiza's story; and her husband, Dr Haseeb, is allowed to reenact the same events from his own point of view. As with the sketches which illustrated the debaters' opposite views at the beginning, the stories of the husband and wife stand in sharp contradiction. And, likewise, the question raised by the contradiction is not which version is true and which is false; it is, rather, whether truth is at all possible, whether a faithful recounting of events from one point of view qualifies as the truth. Each story enacted in the play claims to tell the truth, but each one of them is formally perceived as, literally, a theatrical fabrication, prompted by the desire to dominate and impose one's own narrative. What one tends to call the truth is revealed as a fabrication and its production as thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
In this light, sexual relations, within and outside marriage (a thorny and sensitive subject, never handled with such frankness and directness before on the Egyptian stage) are reconsidered afresh without preconceived ideas. Thus, marital infidelity could appear at once as a moral sin, a betrayal of trust and the road to salvation and self-fulfilment, while sex within marriage could become a commercial transaction, a form of female oppression and exploitation or of wielding power over the male and dominating him. In a memorable scene, in the husband's account of the collapse of the marriage, the domineering wife, having discovered her husband's impotence, trots out mechanically comforting phrases, then proceeds to make a list of material demands (changing the furniture, buying a piece of land, ....etc.), triumphant in the knowledge that his humiliation has given her power over him and that in his broken state he would not dare oppose her. It was a nauseating form of blackmailing.
The play ends with a startling twist which reveals the moral hypocrisy of both husband and wife, destroying their credibility and raising the question of whether they, themselves, believed their own stories. When the daughter rushes in announcing she is going to marry one of her father's rich cronies, 20 years her senior, because he will pamper her and shower her with gifts -- just as we saw her father doing with his secretary, and the son declares he is in love with a girl of modest means and intends to marry her and build a love marriage of the kind we heard his mother describe, the mother and father at once switch attitudes, exchanging positions, with the mother, the ardent militant feminist, inveighing against her wily, devious sex, and the father, who had defended sexual pleasure as a life-giving force, railing against the immorality and obscenity of lewd, old men seducing young women to gratify their sexual cravings.
Adam and Eve had very little money to go on. The stage design was severely simple and functional, consisting solely of a number of painted flats and a few bits of furniture which were moved around to indicate scene-changes and suggest different sets. But with a play like Adam and Eve, structured round the ideas of theatrical fabrications and role-playing, the essential requirement is good, virtuoso acting. Director Mohsen Hilmi put his trust in the eternal triangle, choosing for Hafiza the superb and versatile Abla Kamel who enchanted everybody with her charismatic presence and her staggering technical and emotional range; her husband, Haseeb, was the nimble, effervescently witty and hugely popular comedian, Mamdouh Muwafi; and the beautiful, richly gifted and highly disciplined Rania Farid Shawqi was the secretary in both versions of the adultery story. They formed an explosive trio, giving a sparkling performance, infecting everyone with their liveliness and vitality and sending waves of energy into the auditorium. I walked out of the theatre thinking that El-Ramli had finally thrown down the gauntlet in the face of the dominant bourgeois ethos and the ideological discourses which sustain it, and wondering if the people who saw the play would ever be able to perceive themselves in relation to their marriages and daily practices the way they did before.
For performance details, see Listings
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