Nehad Selaiha enjoys a stage adaptation of an Egyptian vintage movie It is not unusual to see plays, local or foreign, transferred to the silver screen with varying degrees of success. This has happened in Egypt as in many other countries. Think of the string of films adapted from the plays of Naguib El-Rihani and Badie' Khayri, including their own film version of their 1940 comic hit Hikayet Kol Yom (An Everyday Story), rechristened Li'bet es-Sit (a teasing title which could translate as 'A Woman's Stratagem', or 'Her Plaything'), or of Tawfiq El-Hakim's 1931 A Bullet in the Heart, which he himself rewrote as a musical film in 1944, giving the play a happy end at the behest of director Mohamed Karim and the star lead Mohamed Abdel-Wahab. Other plays by El-Hakim that have been turned into films include Soft Hands and The Quiet Nest, and you can even find an Egyptian film version of Tennessee Williams's A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which transposes the action to rural Egypt but keeps the original title, though minus the 'tin'. Other examples exist if one cares to look for them, though not as many as you would find in the case of novels or short stories adapted for the screen. Still, the point is that using plays as material for films has become a familiar practice at which no one would bat an eyelid. Reversing the case, however, and adapting a movie for the stage is an unusual act that makes news in the same way that 'man bites dog' does. Until a couple of weeks ago, when the latest Comedy Theatre production, entitled (This is what People Like), opened at Fatma Rushdi's Al-Ayem (Floating) theatre, this had happened only twice before, as far as I know, and was on both occasions a commercial enterprise. The first time was in 1987, when director Hani Metawe' was commissioned by Ibrahim Amin Yusef Ghurab, the son of the well- known novelist who had written the story of Salah Abu Seif's 1956 masterpiece, Shabab Imra'ah (A Woman in her Prime), to prepare and direct a stage version of the film for his newly founded commercial theatre company and cast voluptuous belly dancer Fifi Abdou in the part the great Taheya Carioca had played in the film. The idea was to use the story the film had made famous as a vehicle for showcasing the spectacular talents of Fifi. Then, 12 years later, precisely in 1999, comedian Mohamed Sobhi sought to cash in theatrically on the abiding popularity of El-Rihani's film Li'bet es-Sit, with disheartening results. Of course Li'bet es-Sit was originally a play with a different name, as I mentioned above; but Subhi's performance drew largely on the film and kept its title. Soon after the opening of (which I did not attend, preferring to allow the performance at least a week to 'settle' and 'gel' before seeing it), word flew round that the new play, for which Ahmed El-Sayed and Akram Mustafa get credits in the bills as coauthors, was in fact an adaptation of the 1958 immensely popular romantic musical movie Shari' Al-Hob (Love Street). The discovery caused many eyebrows to rise, including mine. Some took it as a sign of creative bankruptcy, imaginative failure and the dearth of new dramatic talent; others thought it was yet another manifestation of the nostalgic mood that has lately permeated Egyptian drama, informing some of the most popular shows, including the box-office hit Qahwa Sadah (Black Coffee); while quite a few disdainfully dismissed it as a cheap, commercial ruse to lure popular singer Iman El-Bahr Darwish back to the stage after an absence of over 2 decades by dangling before him the irresistible temptation of playing the same character his idol, Abdel-Halim Hafiz, had immortalized on the screen nearly half a century ago. [Darwish's last stage appearance before was in 1989, opposite showbiz star Nellie, in Galal El-Sharqawi's memorable Inqilab (Upheaval) -- an experimental musical tragedy with a sharp political edge that had used cinema as an essential structural component.] As a passionate admirer of Love Street, which I first watched at the impressionable age of 13, and have since revisited numberless times whenever I felt depressed or overwhelmed by ugliness or vulgarity, I dreaded seeing This is What People Like, fearing it would spoil the film for me. Furthermore, I could not see the point of the whole exercise. Unlike Sobhi's stage version of Li'bet es-Sit, a film adapted from a play, has used for material an originally written screenplay and, therefore, could claim no distant roots in theatre. The film it adapted, Shari' Al-Hob , was co-authored by the late, prestigious writer Yusef Al-Siba'ie, who provided the story and dialogue, and, the similarly late and equally prestigious director of the film, Izz El-Din Zulfaqqar, who penned the final scenario. With the right mixture of comedy, melodrama and romance, a number of richly varied memorable songs, a star-studded cast led by the late pop idol Abdel-Halim Hafez and the enormously popular and bewitchingly glamorous Lebanese singer, Sabah, and featuring some of the best comic talents of the day, the film could not but capture the hearts and minds of the audience at the time and has retained its charm and appeal to this very day. What would this new stage version do with it? That was the question. Watching , I gradually realized that rather than seek to replace its source material, or offer something that could work independently of it, the play strives to create a dialectical relationship with the mother text, i.e., the film, and therefore requires a degree of familiarity with it on the part of the audience as a prerequisite for its functioning and the emergence of its meaning and message. Constant comparisons between the 2 vastly different worlds the works portray, with their respective ethos and social orders, were constantly urged, and as one made them, the sparkling comedy one remembered from the old film grew dimmer, acquiring darker shadows; elegance and beauty gave way to drabness and crass vulgarity, heroism became a mockery and the bubble of romance was burst. It was like a passage from innocence to experience, with experience in this case shorn of hope, wisdom, or similar saving graces. In the film, Abdel-Halim Hafiz, a young, struggling artist of humble means and origins, manages through his immense musical talent and great determination, the staunch and generous moral and material support of the simple people of the humble, artistic neighborhood where he lives and the constant encouragement and intensive musical coaching he receives from an old, impoverished musician who brought him up when he lost both his parents in early childhood, to work his way to the top of the musical profession and achieve love, fame and glory. The film openly glorifies the lower classes, celebrating their solidarity, neighbourly feelings, undefeatable spirits in the face of adversity and unabated joie de vivre, and credits them with natural kindness, human warmth and selfless generosity. Compared to them, the members of the rich upper classes seem vain, inane and worthless, trapped in dry, narcissistic shells and leading petty, arid and decadent lives. Their moral regeneration and existential salvation depends on their willingness to cross the gulf that separates them from the lower classes and their ability to embrace the ethics and value-system that governs the lives of these classes. And this is what happens in the film through the love story that binds the poor, conscientious artist with a beautiful, but frivolous and extremely shallow young woman from the aristocracy. The moral education of the heroine, which constitutes a major theme in the film, runs parallel to the theme of the artist's struggle to hone his talent, refine the art of singing and achieve public recognition. When the heroine's education is complete, the lovers are reconciled after a long estrangement and their union signifies the triumph of love and art over social barriers and brings together the best among the lower and upper classes. Central to the film is a valorization of art and true talent as revolutionary forces and a romantic belief in love as a force of moral regeneration and social reconciliation. Such a message was in perfect harmony with the new ideology propagated by Nasser's regime after the 1952 coup d'etat, especially his new brand of socialism which replaced class struggle with a call for the solidarity of all classes under his leadership, or, to use his own words, a call for 'the unity of all the people's working forces'. The current stage adaptation of this film sends a different message altogether and comes across as an embittered, almost cynical social and political satire that paints a truly bleak and thoroughly depressing picture of reality. Using the bare outline of the story in the film and some of the original, major characters, it rewrites most of the action and dialogue and introduces extensive changes in the characterization to communicate the new message, making the play seem at times as a cynical parody of the film. Whereas the film neatly divides the characters into goodies and baddies, with the former in the majority and the latter not past redemption, the characterization here dismisses such comforting, facile, black-and-white divisions, proposing instead the vulnerability and corruptibility of all humans under certain social, political and economic stresses. And while the film implicitly endorses the ideology of Nasser's new regime and embraces its idealistic (though sham) slogans, its stage adaptation explicitly denounces both Nasser's reign of terror and Sadat's consumerist, open-door economic policy: the former broke the spirits of the people and planted fear in their hears, turning them into hypocrites and cowards and the latter caused a social upheaval, creating a new, parasitic class of unprincipled businessmen whose power and influence spread to all aspects of life, including the arts and culture, impoverishing the peasantry and the working and middle classes and forcing huge numbers of them to migrate to the Gulf in search of work and decent wages. Those who could not leave had no choice but to die or meekly submit to the new order and its market ethics and sell their souls. Rather than a hopeful and enthusiastic young artist, the protagonist here (Iman El-Bahr Darwish) is a disillusioned, defeated and much older person who was forced to leave his country in pursuit of his artistic dream when he despaired of ever having the chance to realize it at home. He went abroad to some oil-rich Arab country where he worked for a number of years to save enough money to form and equip his own music band, but at the end of the day was cheated and robbed of the fruits of his labour by his employer, coming back home in the first scene penniless and empty handed. At the airport, where the play opens, he meets his closest and oldest friends who had shared his dream, Sa'id, Ali, Shafiq and Samia (respectively played by Nasir Shahin, Mohamed Radwan, Yusef Isma'il and Inas El-Masry), and discovers that in order to survive, they have had to give up their dreams, betray their ideals, sell out to the market and adopt its values. Back at the humble dwelling the friends share, we meet the new version of the old musician who, in the film, had brought up the orphan hero and was later discovered to have been in fact a great and famous composer and maestro who had chosen to live in anonymous poverty to escape the law after killing his unfaithful, aristocratic wife. This dignified character, masterfully impersonated by veteran actor Hussein Reyad in the film, is reduced in En-Nas Bet- hebb Kedah to a farcically spineless, terrified old man who was once imprisoned and tortured on account of his revolutionary poetry and has since become thoroughly demoralized, useless and helpless. When the heroine (played here by Hala Fakher, an actress much older than Sabah was when she played that role in the film) eventually appears on the scene, dragging in behind her father, friends, lovers and rivals in successive scenes, the difference between the rich upper classes in the old film and the new class of businessmen that supplants them in the play is strikingly revealing and deeply shocking. With all their faults and foibles, the old upper classes in the film had style and social grace, were polished and highly educated and had a great respect for culture and the arts. The new upper class in the play, however, is made up of nouveaux riches and social upstarts who come from the lowest ranks of humanity. Behind their expensive clothes and social masks, they are a bunch of bloodsuckers and sharks that batten on the blood of the people and their distinctive hallmarks are ignorance, greed, vulgarity and coarseness of mind and feelings. Not only have they corrupted the mores and morals of society, but also its arts and culture. In the kind of world the play portrays romance seems thoroughly out of place and harshly intrusive and is, therefore, confined to a few perfunctory scenes and relegated to end of the play. Whereas in the film love plays a vital role in saving the hero from the evil conspiracies of his enemies and helping him to realize his artistic dreams, the play argues that according to the law of the world it project, the only way he can do this is through trickery, pretence, lying and deceit. In other words, you have first to become a trickster and a rogue in order to be able to defend your rights and expose the enemies of the people. The cheerless somberness of this vision was eloquently expressed in the musical aspect of the show and informed Mustafa Darwish's lyrics and Iman El-Bahr Darwish's melodies. Even when the songs were meant to whip up the spirit of resistance, spoke of hope and urged holding on to one's dreams, the words rang hollow and failed to convince. As they echoed similar songs that belong to the past, they sounded like mournful elegies for a 'temps perdu', which is still remembered but can never be retrieved. In directing this intriguing play, with its many, swift scene changes, Isam El-Sayed was assisted by stage-designer Hazem Shebl who came up with a wonderful solution to the sequence of short, intercutting scenes near the end, mounting two sets, back to back, on a revolving disc and managed in another scene to create on stage a stunning realistic illusion of a car that crashed into a lamppost. For the rest of the scenes he provided simple and elegant convincing sets that left most of the stage free for the actors' movement and could be changed in a minute or two. His colour schemes were quite pleasing to the eye and unobtrusively reflected the different moods of the scenes to boot. As usual, El-Sayed's directing was characterized by speed, vitality, intelligent blocking, careful orchestration of the acting and interesting stage business. His management of the songs, which were mostly delivered in a spotlight from the avant-scene, the area outside the proscenium arch and closest to the audience, was particularly admirable and served two purposes: on the practical level, it allowed the stage hands to change the sets in the darkened stage behind the actors, unnoticed by the audience, thus saving time and dispensing with the irritating blackouts that interrupt the flow of the performance; on another level, putting the singers close to the audience and framing them in a halo of light made them visually more impressive and doubled the emotional impact of the songs. El-Sayed's casting too, even for the minor roles, was excellent. Iman El-Bahr Darwish acted naturally, sincerely, with passionate conviction and managed the scenes where he was required to draw out the audience and engage them as active participants in the show with graceful ease and smooth dexterity. Equally delightful was the ensemble performance of Nasir Shahin, Mohamed Radwan, Yusef Isma'il and Inas El-Masry as the hero's quartet of friends; it was witty, vividly detailed, carefully tuned and deliciously hilarious. Ahmed Mustafa as Aziz, the ruthless, fearsome, trigger-happy tycoon, Fu'ad Bayoumi as his cool, villainous assistant, Hamada Barakat as the heroine's effete and effeminate ex-husband and the actors who played Aziz's business rival and the old, former poet gave competent and highly satisfactory performances and Rania Yasin, as the vulgar, shrewish and ludicrously pretentious rival of the heroine, acted with zest and panache. Ironically, the only member of the cast whose performance I cannot fairly judge on the strength of that night's viewing is no less than the leading lady herself. Hala Fakher, an immensely gifted actress in all mediums and all genres, was at an obvious disadvantage the night I watched the play: she had sprained her ankle the night before, which made her limp and was obviously in pain and doing her best not to show it. It is a credit to her courage, endurance, sense of duty and artistic discipline that the show was not cancelled that night.
