Nehad Selaiha applauds the English Department Cultural Society's choice of play for their end of year performance Sa'dalla Wannus's Al-Feel Ya Malik Al-Zaman (The Elephant, O King of All Time!), English Department Cultural Society, Cairo University, the theatre of the faculty of law, 12. 5. 2011. In a popular, Arab folktale, probably of Indian origin and sometimes attributed to Goha (a famous character in Arab folklore with many anecdotes), we meet an idiosyncratic king who chooses of all animals an elephant for a pet. Such a fanciful choice of pet is not actually as rare as one might think. After all, the Romans kept lions as pets while some ancient Egyptians favoured snakes. In England, in the late 18th Century, Lord Byron's uncle, a morose misanthrope, had a passion for crickets and preferred their company to that of humans. Newstead Abbey, his home, literally swarmed with them. When his nephew succeeded to his title and estate, he seemed to have inherited with them his odd predilections. While at Cambridge, the great English poet kept a bear in his rooms as a pet. When asked what such a nice animal was doing in a grim place like that, he answered: "Reading for an MA." Goha's elephant, however, is not as docile and well behaved as Byron's scholarly bear is reported to have been. Its interests and pursuits are of a ruder, wilder and more barbaric nature and mainly consist in trampling, crushing and tearing apart whatever comes in its way, generally wreaking havoc wherever it wanders and terrorizing the king's subjects day and night. Using this gentlest of all gigantic beasts as a symbol of brute force and political oppression, the popular imagination has produced a delightful cautionary tale about the disastrous consequences of fear and submission. When the king's subjects reach the end of their tether and, prodded by the bravest among them, finally go to the palace to complain to the king about his pet's daily rampages and implore him to keep it in check, their courage gives way at the crucial moment. Awed by the king's august majesty, the dazzling splendour of his palace and the fearsome mightiness of his guards, they falter and are struck dumb. Faced with king's wrath and his insistent demand, on pain of death, that they explain why they have disturbed his repose, their leader, having repeatedly failed to rouse them and disgusted by their cowardice, realizes that the cause is lost. To punish them and show them what fear can do, he tells the king that since all the citizens love the elephant, they sent this delegation to implore him to provide a mate for it to alleviate its loneliness and allow it to multiply and fill the earth with its offspring.. In 1969, this deliciously witty, politically perspicacious, and tragically ironic old fable found its way to the stage. Still shocked by the defeat of the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the 1967 Arab/Israeli war, which left the Golan Heights, the West Bank and the whole of the Sinai peninsula under Israeli occupation, and increasingly believing that fear and political oppression were at its root, Syrian playwright, Sa'dallah Wannus (1941-1997), dramatized it in a one-act play called Al-Feel Ya Malik Al-Zaman! (The Elephant, O King of All Time). Sticking closely to the original tale, except for the finale, and opting for a simple, traditional structure of beginning, middle and end, Wannus divided the story into 4 scenes: the first introduces the problem, details the terror and destruction suffered by the poor citizens at the hands of the king's pet, and suggests a solution through the rebellious Zachariah (the only character that has a name in the play), which the citizens accept after much reluctance and hesitation; the second shows them rehearsing the plea they are to make to the king in chorus under the guidance of Zachariah, who repeatedly urges upon them the importance of speaking firmly, in unison, as one person and one voice; the third shows the crowd in front of the king's palace, parleying with the fierce and intimidating guards and pressing their demand to see the king; and the fourth and last takes them inside the palace, into the king's presence, where their fear gets the better of them and brings the trip to its ironic, calamitous end. Wannus, however, leaves his audience with a faint glimmer of hope at the end. When the king finally withdraws (or, rather, falls silent, since in all the productions I have seen of the play, including the one I will shortly come to, is only represented as a booming voice, though Wannus does not suggest this in his stage directions), the actors line up front stage and directly addressing the audience say: "This was just a story, And we are only actors. We performed it for you to learn with you the lesson it teaches. Do you know now why elephants exist? Do you know now why they multiply?" But this is only the beginning. When the elephants have sufficiently multiplied, another story will begin. It will be bloody and violent And we'll all perform it together some other evening." Apart from pointing the moral of the play and underling its allegorical nature, didactic drive and non-illusionistic, Brechtian technique, these last lines clearly prophesied more than 40 years ago the revolutionary spirit that has recently swept over the Arab world. The elephants Wannus warned against have indeed kept multiplying since the time he wrote his play; and just as he predicted, one day, many of us Arabs, in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Syria, to name but the countries in the fore front of the revolutionary march, were miraculously transformed into actors on the Arab world stage and have since been earnestly performing, with different degrees of violence and blood-spilling, the 'bloody and violent' story he foresaw. Grasping the shatteringly accurate prophecy coached in the last lines of Al-Feel and realizing how it directly and clearly bears on the present, the wonderfully dedicated, creative and tirelessly enterprising members of the English Department Cultural Society (EDCS) chose to stage it this year for their annual end-of-year performance. Dina Amin, who directed the performance, told me it was an all-student choice, and what a happy choice it was, and not only on account of the play's relevant content and prophetic message. Eschewing realism and careful character delineation in favour of an openly theatrical, non- illusionistic form and Brechtian techniques, Al-Feel requires no convincing realistic acting, sets or lighting. This makes it perfectly suited to student and amateur, small-budget performances. Its large cast and chorus is also an advantage, since it can involve in the acting more members of any group undertaking it than other plays. Having chosen the play, the EDCS student- members proceeded to make themselves at home in it and make the play at home in Egypt by rewriting the dialogue in their own familiar linguistic idiom, in this case colloquial Egyptian Arabic, and having Mareez Qilada, who took on the costumes and make up, dress them as contemporary Egyptians of different classes. Rather than a betrayal of Wannus's text, these alterations were inspired by the author's advice to directors to do whatever is necessary to make his plays more congenial to performers and more accessible and relevant to audiences. Going a step further in making the play their own and stressing their view of it as a prophecy of the Egyptian revolution, five members of the cast (Noran Raga'y, Abdel Rahman Nasir, Dalia Ebeid, Fadi Mohamed and Omneya Gamal) wrote monologues about their personal experience of and feelings about the Egyptian revolution and delivered them after the closing lines of the play; the rest of the cast (Ahmed Meleigi, Diaa Fu'ad, Nada Suliman, Salma Al-Naqqash, and Ahmed Isma'el) stood beside them silently while they spoke and, in between monologues, voiced a rousing chant written and put to music by the multi-talented Noran Raga'y, The performance was simple, sincere and highly entertaining. While Abdel Rahman Nasir, as Zachariah was serious and passionately earnest throughout and Noran Raga'y alternated straight acting with melodious singing, the rest of the actors were keenly alive to every possible hint of comedy that could be detected in the dialogue and, as professor Huda Guindi, who sat next to me, whispered bemusedly, seemed to relish and make a comic feast of every gruesome detail. But hilariously funny as the performance often was, it never lost sight of the play's direction and serious intent. Indeed, director Dina Amin made the play's warning even grimmer when, going against Wannus's stage direction that Zachariah's suggestion of a mate for the elephant be delivered 'lightly and brightly' and had it uttered under mimed physical torture. It's a crying shame that to stage its annual performances, including this delightful one, the EDCS, currently among the most culturally active forums in Cairo University, has either to beg around for a theatre or sacrifice a big slice of its modest budget to rent one. Shocking as this may sound, the plain truth is that the Faculty of Arts of Cairo University has no theatre of its own, in fact, has never had one, and that the few theatres belonging to other faculties, such as those of law and commerce, are badly neglected, poorly equipped, shabbily maintained and expensive to rent. To get the theatre of the Faculty of Law for this production, the EDCS had to LE3000 for just one night. With theatre always at the bottom of any governmental list of national priorities in the reign of Mubarak, shouldn't our youth-inspired glorious revolution be more alive to its value as a collective, democratic activity and valuable forum of free expression for the people? Dare we hope that in future more performance spaces will be available in and outside schools and universities and that, in the course of time, the Faculty of Arts of Cairo University will be given its own sorely needed and long awaited for theatre?
