A provocative production of Wannus's last play, Countries too Small for Love, raises crucial gender issues for Nehad Selaiha Sa'dallah Wannus's last plays -- Yaomon min Zamanina (A Day of Our Times) and Munamnamt TarikhiyahI (Historical Miniatures) (1993), Ahlam Shaqiyyah (Anguished Dreams) and Tuqus Al-Isharat wa Al-Tahawulat (The Rites of Signs and Changes) (1994), Malhamat Al-Saraab (The Mirage Epic) (1995) and Al-Ayyam Al-Makhmourah (Drunken Days) (1996) -- are generally acknowledged as his best. Written in feverish succession, at a time when Wannus (1941-1997) was daily staring death in the face and had nothing more to fear, they are, perhaps, the most daring and outspoken in the history of Arabic drama. If his earlier plays assume that a better system of government, more freedom and democracy and a fairer distribution of wealth would create a better Arab world, the last plays, which savagely anatomize the traditions and conventions of patriarchy, call for nothing less than a thorough revision and fundamental re-evaluation of the cultural heritage of the Arabs and their way of life, including their attitudes to women, love, sex, marriage, and even homosexuality, incest and conjugal fidelity. In these last plays, one detects a certain anarchic impulse, a desire to sweep away all restrictive structures and surrender to the 'seduction of the abyss', in Wannus's own words, and a passionate celebration of the liberated body and its primeval drives and instincts. One can, perhaps, understand this. When the body is under attack from cancerous cells and is in danger of extinction, as Wannus's body was, it fights back and craves rejuvenation through awakening its natural appetites. In my experience, this can take the form of inordinate craving for food in women and for sex in men. Wannus's very last play, Bilad Adyaq min al-Hobb (Counties Too Small for Love), a dramatic, hallucinatory nightmare a la Strindberg's Dream Play and Ghost Sonata, brings this anarchic impulse to the surface as a force in the central conflict between the individual and society. Anarchy versus the system is indeed the larger conflict at the heart of the simple story of two lovers who elope, defying social taboos, and vainly search for a place in which they can be intimately together. Nabil, a middle-aged, distinguished writer and respectable family man, with terminal cancer, and Eva, a young painter, with a traumatic family background, and of a different faith, fall in love and decide to leave everything to be together. Their families and society at large will not, however, leave them alone and their nightmarish flight, which takes them to several places, then to the flat of a hypocritical and morally corrupt intellectual colleague of Nabil, and finally to a weird brothel, run by a grotesque pigmy, and exposes them in the process to endless humiliation at the hands of a mob of drunken hooligans, an extortionist taxi driver and the threat of an extremist Islamic morality squad, ends in separation, madness and death. Though significant in terms of Wannus's state of mind at his last hour and profoundly pathetic as such, Countries Too Small for Love has proved an embarrassment to Wannus's lovers and closest friends. It has been either tacitly dismissed as unworthy of Wannus or discreetly ignored. One of them has even gone so far as to deny for a while that he wrote it in the first place. And one can understand his reasons: imagine a drama which, on the realistic level, simply centers on the desire of a sick, aged man, with terminal cancer, to find a place to make love to an infatuated young woman, 30 years his junior! What can a young, reckless director like Tareq El-Dweiri make of such a play? Well, in fact, a lot. To get round the embarrassing subject matter, which Wannus tried to uplift through the dialogue into some sort of fated metaphysical bond, making Eva into a rather transparent symbol of the forbidden fruit and paradise lost, El-Dweiri first romanticized the lovers' sexual lust by means of Marwa Zein's, Fathi El-'Isawi's and Mohamed Fathalla's ethereal video projections of them whirling round in a dreamy dance, while looking deeply into each other's eyes, then invoked Zorba's life lust by making them recreate his famous dance in their direst moments, while 3 couples intermittently performed sophisticated erotic dances, choreographed by Izzat Ismael. But nothing would have worked had not El-Dweiri realized that the Arab, pagan legend of Assaf and Na'ela (two pre-Islamic lovers in Mecca who, for lack of a more secluded place, made love inside the holy Ka'ba and, consequently, by way of punishment, were turned to stone while nude and locked into each other's arms) -- a legend which the couple is persuaded to enact in the brothel, in a scene strongly reminiscent of the world of Jean Genet's Balcony, was the real focus and heart of this short dramatic piece. This play- within-the-play episode forms the subversive core of the play and crystallizes its central question: Do the gods bless love per se, or only when it is sanctioned by social conventions and legal structures? The brothel scenes in Wannus's text and El-Dweiri's production leave the age question behind. In the old legend, Assaf and Na'ela were the same age, and this, at least for a while, makes us forget the age difference between Wannus's hero and heroine. That the two lovers' flight is doomed to failure at the end is not so much a concession to realism or to social conventions, as a condemnation of the attitude to sex as only a means of legitimate procreation within capitalist, patriarchal systems, and not as a natural need and a live-giving force. El-Dweiri's cast, led by Ashraf Farouk, as the dying writer, Reem Higab, as his beloved Eva, Shihab El-Din Ibrahim, as the pigmy/brothel-owner and director of the Issaf/Na'ela play, Mohamed Farouq, as the pedantic, hypocritical intellectual and the hero's perfidious friend, and Naglaa Yunis and Seham Abdel-Salaam as the brothel's prominent members, clearly understood what El-Dweiri was driving at and convincingly projected the anarchic, subversive impulse behind the play. Much as I enjoyed El-Dweiri's reckless adventure, and I watched it 3 times, at Al-Salaam, in its early rehearsal stages, at Al-Arayes, in the course of the Experimental Theatre Festival, then at Al-Hosapeer last week, and much as I sympathize with the idea that sex can sometimes seem like an antidote to death, I cannot help wondering if this play would have worked at all, or come across as effectively as it has done in El-Dweiri's production had the hero been a woman. Think of Geraldine Page as Princess Kosmonopolis (the alias of aging actress Alexandra del Lago) and Paul Newman, as Chance Wayne, the gigolo/drifter, in Richard Brooks' 1962 film version of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth, or of Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Perkins in Anatole Litvak's 1961 film version of Françoise Sagan's Aimez Vous Brahms , released under the title Goodbye Again. In both cases, though vastly different, the older party in the love affair was a woman, and, in both cases, it was a forgone conclusion that the relationship was WRONG and DOOMED. If you reversed the roles in Wannus's play, would the outcome be the same? Why is it that no one objects to middle-aged Yves Montand in Goodbye Again having a string of affairs with his young "Maisies" .while Bergman's friends and business associates disapprove of her May- December romance? When a friend of mine, playwright Nehad Gad, married playwright Samir Sarhan, who was 7 years her junior, on his insistence, she had no peace. She was only 35 then, but was, nevertheless, maliciously accused of having seduced a man fit to be her son! When singer and film star, Sabah, married a man much younger than herself, she automatically felt she had to defend herself, humbly admitting, in a pathetic television talk show, that 'it was not easy.' In her play The Surest Way to Remove Stains, Rasha Abdel-Mon'im says through her heroine, a woman very much like 40-year-old Paula in Françoise Sagan's Aimez Vous Brahms?, that aging is not the same for men as women. When Wannus wrote his Bilad Adyaq min al-Hobb, he automatically took it for granted that cultured people would sympathize with his hero, even if the rabble doesn't. I don't think he would have thought the same had a woman written the same play, casting a woman in the role of his hero, Nabil. After all, history has taught him, and all of us Arabs, that old men, if they have power and wealth, can get away with wedding young women; the very young historical princess, Qatr El-Nada, the daughter of the Egyptian ruler Khimaraweih, who had hoped to marry the Khalif's young and handsome son, but found herself instead saddled with his Sire, was openly envied for her good fortune, and for her acquiescence, was rewarded with a magnificent trousseau and a legendary wedding celebration that lasted 40 days. Wannus's lover, however, was neither a Khalif nor a modern tycoon. He could neither check into a hotel for fear of being found out, nor rent a furnished flat for not having the means to do so. A May-December romance, however passionate, and even if the December happens to be male, does not have a chance in the Arab world unless the male has power and wealth. It is a credit to El-Dweiri and his cast and crew, particularly Ashraf Farouk and the enchantingly ethereal Reem Higab, that Wannus's swan song came across as a muted, lyrical tragedy about two kindred spirits, who met at the wrong time, due to a miscalculation on nature's part, and as an honest call for a dose of healthy anarchy. That this brave, inspired, complex and technically demanding production by Al-Hanager Centre found itself homeless in view of the closure of Centre's permanent venue for renovation and had to move from place to place until it finally got a two-week run at a rented space at Al-Hosapeer theatre, shows, ironically, that Cairo too, like the imaginary town in Wannus's play, can sometimes prove too small for love and real art. Poetic inspirations
