Nehad Selaiha hails Frank Bradley's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters at the AUC and wonders why the play has been neglected by the Egyptian theatre It is not exactly known when Anton Chekhov's works began to arrive in Egypt. But that they did through a third language, usually English, and in one or two instances French, is quite certain. Before the 1960s, when Egypt turned socialist and began to send students to Russia and Eastern Europe rather than to the West, nobody spoke Russian. The very few who knew anything about Russian literature had read it in English or French, usually in the course of their studies at the departments dedicated to these two languages at Egyptian universities. The earliest Russian plays to appear on the Egyptian stage were Gogol's The General Inspector and two one-act plays by Chekhov -- The Marriage Proposal and The Jubilee (or Anniversary, as it is sometimes rendered) -- which Rashad Rushdi (1912-83) translated and adapted for an amateur troupe called Al-Tali'a (Avant-garde) between 1942, when he first joined the troupe, and 1945 when he left for the university of Leads in England to read for a doctor's degree in English literature. Upon his return in 1950, Rushdi became the first Egyptian head of the English department at Cairo university and in the following years, he actively encouraged the study of European drama, including Chekhov's plays, and infected his students with a passion for Russian literature, particularly Chekhov's short stories. When he took up playwriting in 1958, becoming one of the leading dramatists of the next decade, it was obvious how much he was influenced by Chekhov's dramaturgy. As editor-in-chief of the monthly Theatre magazine from 1964 till 1967, he had his early translations of Chekhov's The Marriage Proposal and The Jubilee published in its 6th issue, in June, 1964, together with a new translation by one of his students (Samir Sarhan) of The Bear, another Chekhov short play. He then had all three plays staged in a triple bill by director Ali El-Ghandour for the 1964/65 season of Al-Hakim theatre company, which he had helped establish the previous year and became its head. The triple bill was a substantial success by those days' standards, playing 21 nights and drawing 3814 spectators. It was also thanks to Rashad Rushdi's initiative that the Egyptian premiere of Uncle Vania was performed the previous season (1963/64) at the National theatre. He had commissioned Mohamed Enany and Samir Sarhan (two of his closest students who worked with him both at the English Department and the Theatre magazine) to translate the play, using different English versions, and, as head of the theatre committee of the ministry of culture and information (a post he held from 1964 to 1966), fought to get it staged by a Russian director (Leslie Platon), assisted by an Egyptian one (Kamal Yasin). It was a magnificent production with period sets and costumes and a star-studded cast that included Samiha Ayoub as Yeliena, Sohair El-Bably as Sonia, Abdallah Gheith as Vania, Mohamed El-Dafrawy as Dr. Astrov, Mohamed El-Toukhi as Professor Serebriakov, and Mohamed El-Baroudy as Telyeghin, or 'Waffles'. Though Chekhov's name was virtually unknown outside intellectual and theatrical circles, the production was successful, drawing rave reviews and playing 36 nights with a total of 4500 spectators. For me, this Egyptian/Russian Uncle Vania, my first introduction to Chekhov in performance, was a revelation; I instantly fell in love with that rare Russian writer and with his world and my passion has not abated with the passage of time. But Rashad Rushdi was not the only campaigner on Chekhov's behalf, or the only dramatist to be influenced by his plays. The political, intellectual Left, which became active in the 1940s, spread knowledge of Russian literature and drama among its members and sympathizers. When No'man Ashour (1918-87), one of its members, who had also studied English literature at Cairo university and probably read Chekhov, Shaw and Ibsen there, as well as Shakespeare, wrote his first play Al-Maghmatis (The Magnet) in 1950, he renounced the traditional dramatic structure in favour of a Chekhovian one, and his second play, El-Nas Elli That (The People Downstairs) (1956), retained the same structure and was also palpably influenced by Gorky's play, The Lower Depths. Other champions of Chekhov at that time included Ali El-Ra'i, Mohamed Taher El-Gabalawi and Hanna Murqus who, together, wrote A Study of Chekhov's Theatre for the first season, 1962/ 63, of the newly launched Pocket theatre. Directed by Kamal 'Eid, this 'lecture/demonstration' included performed excerpts from The Three Sisters (translated by El-Ra'i), The Seagull (by Murqus) and The Cherry Orchard (by El-Gabalawi). The translations were later published in full. Like Rushdi, none of those three knew any Russian and all translated from English: El-Ra'i had read for his doctorate at the university of Birmingham in Britain and, like the other two, had studied English literature at university. Likewise, Mohamed El-Qassas, who translated many of Chekhov's stories in the 1960s for Dar Al Shorooq publishing house, did not know a word of Russian and work through a third language, this time French. The first Chekhov play to be done directly from Russian was The Cherry Orchard, which Naguib Sorour, who had studied theatre in Russia and Hungary from 1958 to 1964 and married a Russian colleague, translated and directed for the Pocket theatre's 1964/ 65 season. I saw a performance of this production, but, unfortunately, can remember very little of it -- only that the sets and costumes looked 'Russian' and quite elaborate; that Amina Rizq Played Madame Ranyevskaia and Sohair El-Murshidi was cast as Varia, her adopted daughter, and that the performance moved at a snail's pace and lasted over 4 and a half hours. I am ashamed to say that I dozed off several times during that performance, lulled, no doubt, by the slow rhythm and monotonous acting. In his zeal to give us the 'real' Chekhov, Sorour probably tried to be even more Chekhovian than Chekhov himself. Sorour's Cherry Orchard was nevertheless a modest success, drawing for its 38 performances a total of 1974 spectators. It was not until 13 years later that another Chekhov play appeared on the professional stage in Egypt. In 1978, veteran director Abdel-Rehim El-Zorqani directed famous actress Aida Abdel-Aziz and film star Farouq El-Fishawi as Madame Arkadina, the coquettish, middle-aged actress, and her son Trepliov in a production of The Seagull for the National theatre company . The translation used was probably the one Hanna Murqus had done for the Pocket theatre's Study. Since Samiha Ayoub, the artistic director of the National then, was starring in a play at the company's permanent theatre in Ataba square, The Seagull was housed at Al-Gomhoriya. Though Abdel-Aziz gave a very impressive Arkadina and El-Fishawi looked suitably romantic and pathetic, the play had a very short run. Indeed, the night I was there the auditorium was practically empty. Chekhov's short plays, particularly The Marriage Proposal and The Bear, intermittently surface in student productions at the Theatre Institute or at universities and his Swan Song, a sad portrait of an old, disillusioned actor, reduced to playing the clown in his last days and taking to drink to forget his loneliness and failing health , was especially adapted for actress Safia El-'Emary and produced by Al-Hanager centre in the 1990s and was later revived (in December, 2007), in its original version, by director Ahmed Ibrahim and staged at the small (Salah Abdel-Sabour) hall of Al-Tali'a theatre, with imaginative scenography by Ahmed El-Hawashi, and with Mahmoud Mas'oud as the old actor Svietlovidoff and Munir Makram in the part of the prompter. None of Chekhov's major plays, however, not even the ones that were successfully tried in the 1960s, has been attempted since the 1978 Seagull. More puzzling still, no Arabic translation of his Three Sisters has ever been performed in full. The story of the refined and highly cultured Prozorov sisters and their brother, who drag out a dull existence in a provincial backwater, constantly dreaming of returning to Moscow, a city remembered through the eyes of childhood as a place where happiness and fulfillment are possible, and have all their dreams dashed at the end, has failed to interest Egyptian directors. This is what has made Frank Bradley's production of Three Sisters at the AUC such a welcome Christmas gift, even though it was done in English. I had seen the play on stage only once before in London, when I was very young, and all I remember is that it had heavy sets, looked cramped and was dimly lit and depressing. I much preferred it in the reading and have read it so often in Elisaveta Fen's English translation that I almost know it by heart. Bradley's version of the Sisters, however, was a far cry from the London one. Presented in two parts with a short interval in between, rather than in the original four- act formula, and condensed in 3 hours, with no cuts that you would notice or miss, Bradley's production was not only beautiful (and I mean really beautiful ) to look at, even when the initially cheerful lighting began to change and acquire somber shades, or the scene moved from the bright and elegant Prozorov's estate parlour to the tiny bedroom with the low ceiling that Olga and Irena share in Act 3, where the windows there reflected nothing but the darkness and the red glow of the fire raging in the town, or to the leafless garden outside in the last Act, it also gave me a new insight into the play, which is a rare thing considering how well I know the text. Despite its many comic flashes, I have always regarded the Three Sisters as a heart-rending tragedy about the relentless attrition of time, about precious lives wasted, dashed hopes and failed dreams. Each one of us has their own Moscow, a time and place in the past or in the future, real or imaginary, that one longs for and often dreams about. That such times in the past can never be recaptured, can even be mere illusions, and the future rarely turns out as we hoped for make the longings of the sisters more poignant and universal. I can never reach Irena's moment of tragic realization -- when she exclaims in anguish: "Where.... Where has it all gone to? Where is it? Oh, God! I've forgotten.... I've forgotten everything ... there's nothing but a muddle in my head. .... Every day I'm forgetting more and more, and life's slipping by, and it will never, never come back. ... We shall never go to Moscow. ... I can see that we shall never go" -- without literally bursting into tears. Also, in my bad moments, I often remember the play and draw courage and comfort from its message, which seems to say that though true happiness and fulfillment may never be achieved on this earth, one must carry one's burden with dignity and fortitude and keep on working. This message would still hold were we to narrowly view the play as simply a reflection of "the decay of the privileged class in Russia" at the beginning of the 20th Century, the sense of "futility and despair" experienced by the members of that class and "the pervasive pessimism of its era", as some critics have done. It may be true, as Vincent Canby remarked in a review of a Moscow Art Theatre production of the play that visited New York in February, 1998, that, "the Russian future, in which Chekhov's 19th-century characters place such trust, has never seemed more bleak", that it "embraces a totally failed revolution, a diminished, impoverished political state, and economic and spiritual turmoil that, for the Prozorov sisters at least, would be as sinister as a life lived among money-grubbing provincials." Nevertheless, what can ordinary Russian citizens do today except try to carry on with as much dignity and fortitude as they can muster and keep hoping? I found this message in Bradley's production and also most of the poetry of the text, its different emotions and subtle mixture of pathos and farce. But I found something more. In directing his cast, Bradley opted for a style of acting generally cool and restrained, with well calculated and finely timed moments of passion, comedy and silence. This made the sisters sympathetic, but without sentimentalizing them, and also gave them an unexpected dimension. For the first time in my long acquaintance with the play, I was forced to notice the sisters' hard, self-righteous genteelness as I listened to Masha's scornful and superciliously mocking description of Natasha to the company she (Natasha) will soon join, or to Olga's personal remarks on Natasha's dress. For the first time too, as Olga bragged about her brother while he tried to withdraw in dismay, I began to wonder if in first pinning all their hopes on this shy, timid and feckless young man, who is actually "afraid of them for some reason or other" (as he says to the almost deaf Ferapont, the porter from the Council Office, in Act 2), then blaming him for their tedious, drab and empty existence when he fails them, the sisters had not first put a greater burden on him than he could reasonably carry, then exacerbated his own personal grief and regrets at his unfortunate marriage and lost career by making him also feel guilty on their account. One could understand why he shuts himself up in his room, playing his violin while the town burns down and takes to gambling. In fact, though Olga seems doomed to a celibate, lonely life, living in the school where she works as headmistress, Masha is forever separated from the man she passionately loves and has to put up with a kindly but dull and pedantic husband, and Irena leaves alone for a job as a teacher in another town after Baron Tusenbach, whom she had agreed to marry even though she only respected him, is killed by Solyony, his rival in her love, in a duel, at the end -- despite all of this, it is Andrei, utterly alone, with a petty job he despises, no self-respect and unhappily stuck with a bossy, greedy, vulgar wife who openly deceives him with his boss, who seems to have the worst lot of the Prozorov children and the most painful. Though the play is permeated with lyricism, spans three years, has no plot in the traditional sense, relies on inner action, with all the important events occurring offstage or between the acts and only perceived through the characters' reactions, and uses a kind of dialogue that often takes the form of separate, intersecting monologues or trains of thought, Bradley's production, with Bill Forrester's detailed, realistic, period sets and gigantic birch forest at the back, Jeanne Arnold's and Nadeen Lotayef's simple and well-matched period costumes, in colours that enhanced the characters, Stancil Campbell's sensitive lighting and Marwan Abdel Moneim's sound effects, never sagged for a minute and kept our attention intensely focused on the stage throughout. While keeping the classic feel of Chekhov's text, Bradley managed to capture and convey the autumnal mood of the play and its emotional complexity with great integrity and make its themes and characters relevant to his modern audience. Acting Chekhov is never easy; it requires the actor to keep a cool surface and at the same time hint at the emotional turmoil and pent up passions underneath. If this delicate balance is not observed with rigorous integrity, the effect would be sentimentalizing the characters and pitching the plays into melodrama. Bradley's main cast seem to have understood this well and gave on the whole credible, engaging, occasionally subtle and sometimes deeply moving performances. But while the female leads, Sara Shaarawi, Dahlia Abou-Azma El-Mallah and Berfu Nisan Turkmenoglu as the 3 sisters (Olga, Masha and Irena), were convincing as sisters and also as distinct individual characters, Nancy Nasser Al-Deen, as Natasha, failed to successfully negotiate the character's transformation from a shy, insecure and nervous outsider into "a sort of mean, blind, thick-skinned animal", as Andrei describes her in Act 4, and gave no hint of the sexual hold she has over her husband. Still, she wore a suitable hungry look throughout and effectively caricatured the shallowness and moral vulgarity of the character. A more skilled actress was needed in that demanding and very important role. The actors in the minor parts did a decent job, with Adham James Haddara, as the neurotic and darkly dangerous Solyony, Tusenbach's rival in Irena's love, and Mustafa Khalil, as Kulygin, the dull schoolmaster and Masha's patient, doting husband, particularly standing out. But the most appealing and convincing performances in this production came from Timothy Warren, as the eccentric, ineffectual army medic who is sick with guilt at his medical ineptitude, which kills his patients, and becomes a depressed drunkard, but nevertheless treats everything with cynical humor, Nezar Alderazi as the guilty, defeated but outwardly defiant Andrei, especially in his confrontation with his sisters in Act 3, Jason Will as the intelligent, warm and affable, but deeply unhappy and hopelessly in love Vershinin, Berfu Nisan Turkmenoglu as the passionate then desperately unhappy, then bravely resigned Irena, Mark Visona as the kindly, affectionate, modest and honest Tusenbach, and Dahlia Abou-Azma El-Mallah as the rebellious, embittered, sharp-tongued but extremely perceptive and deeply unhappy Masha. Indeed, El-Mallah's performance seemed to be guided by Masha's words when she says in Act 4: "When you have to take your happiness in snatches, in little bits as I do, and then lose it, as I have lost it, you gradually get hardened and bad-tempered. [Points at her breast.] Something's boiling over inside me, here." Her farewell scene with Vershinin at the end, though handled with extreme delicacy, economy and restraint, was shattering in its effect and simply unforgettable.
