Another all-student event at AUC: Nehad Selaiha is thrilled One mild afternoon last month, I was introduced, through the good offices of the Performing and Visual Arts Department of the American University in Cairo, to an intriguing new American playwright by the name of Will Eno. The occasion was an 8-day, all-student festival of one-act plays, curiously titled 'noTHEREthere' -- a title, which, if we interpret it as alluding to a dark void where nothing exits or can be seen, as I later surmised, could be said to link, in a vague way, the four plays it featured, showing them as variations on the darkness theme. Once more, as I confessed a number of times on this page when covering AUC productions, I was grateful to be enlightened as to the latest on the American theatrical scene and was reminded afresh of the valuable contribution of the AUC's Performing and Visual Arts Department to theatrical knowledge in Egypt in general and to my own theatrical education in particular. With so many new playwrights springing daily all over the world, where else could I have come to know the wonderful Eno? At first, his Tragedy: a tragedy, directed by AUC student Berfu Turkmenoglu, a competent and sensitive promising actress who recently played Irena in Frank Bradley's AUC production of Chekhov's Three Sisters and had played 'Jean' in Sarah Ruhl 's Dead Man's Cell Phone, also directed by Bradley for the AUC at the Gerhart Theatre in March, 2010 , seemed like a witty, hilarious parody of 24-hour television news networks, at once inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's book On Television, in which he criticizes the media's obsessive attention to spectacle, disasters and human interest stories and its tendency to sensationalism and fear-mongering, and by Jean Baudrillard's concept of reality as a socially constructed and mediated illusion -- as a 'simulacrum', which, rather than conceal the truth, is the truth which conceals that there is no truth. In the last analysis, as he argues, a complete understanding of reality is impossible, and when people are seduced into thinking otherwise by the media, they become drawn toward a "simulated" version of reality, or, to use one of his neologisms, a state of "hyperreality." On stage, the setting was a live television broadcast. At the centre, in a stationary spotlight, a newscaster sat at a big desk in some television studio, flanked on both sides by two correspondents, in similar, stationary spotlights, while a third, a legal advisor, moved in and out and occupied different locations. The event, or top and only news story of the night that was being feverishly covered was no more than the setting of the sun on that day and the coming on of night. However, all on stage seemed determined and keen to regard and present it as a local and global disaster that promised the plunging of the whole world in eternal darkness. The correspondents and their studio anchor, in their efforts to eek some portentous meaning out of the goings on, which were ridiculously very little and quite insignificant by their own reports, increasingly floundered in a sea of empty verbiage, hollow rhetoric and mundane clichés. This made the play hilarious to start with. However, the witty, comic veneer eventually begins to crack up; under the stress of work and over fatigue, the newscaster and his reporters begin, one by one, to lose their professional composure and showmanship and falter pathetically, revealing the real people behind the mask. As they become more and more nonsensical, a note of terror disturbingly creeps into their absurd prattle and they lapse into disconnected, crisscrossing lyrical monologues, made up of bits of memories and confessions that reveal the emptiness, loneliness and futility of their lives. As the play crosses this turning point, we begin to uncomfortably wonder if despite all the absurd chatter there isn't after all some truth in the top story of the night being reported, if the sun hasn't really set for the last time on this earth, if there isn't behind all the senseless, trivial prattle and inane clichés some awful apocalyptic vision. It was then, sitting in the dimmed auditorium of the Malak Gabr theatre on the windswept, desert- bounded and forlorn-looking campus of the AUC in New Cairo, that I suddenly remembered Byron's vision of the departure of the sun. The opening lines of his poem, Darkness, which I translated into Arabic years ago and got published in the now defunct 'Ibda' literary monthly that used to be issued by the General Egyptian Book Organisation, suddenly leapt into my mind and seemed to resonate all round me: I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came, and went and came, and brought no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this desolation; and all hearts Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light. Instead of the four men and one woman listed in the original dramatis personae, Turkmenoglu had her version of the play acted by four women and one man: Habiba Makhlouf as 'Joan in the Field', Noha El-Kholy as 'Fan in the Studio', Nora Mbagathi as 'Constance at the Home', Mushira Sabry as 'the Witness', and Ramy Othman, the only male in the cast, as 'the Legal Advisor'. Turkmenoglu's directorial handling of this tricky, farcical-tragical play, which involved some cuts, presumably to fit into the time slots appointed by the festival, was at once sensitive and intelligent, brining to the surface all the wit and parodic humour of the text without sacrificing its profound, poetic impact, bleak atmosphere and somber message. In this, she was magnificently aided by her actors, who, saddled with a difficult task that required meticulous attention to mood and rhythm, showed admirable discipline and were uniformly credible and effective. Another tough challenge in this festival was Fernando Arrabal's The Labyrinth, which Seif Abdel Salaam valiantly took on and happily executed to the audience's delight. In terms of its verbal text alone, leaving aside issues of interpretation and direction, The Labyrinth is a daunting play for the actors saddled with the parts of the siren-like, Micaela, and her mentor and abettor, Justin. Apart from the prospective, doomed victim, Etienne (played here by Ben McTigue), who mostly listens in wonder, dismay and growing apprehension to the long speeches delivered by Micaela, Justin and the judge in succession, occasionally protesting, the paralyzed, dying, repulsive Bruno (Omar Kamal), who does nothing but groan and ask for water while he is suffered to be on stage, and the grotesque and farcical Judge (Omar Madkour), who constantly nibbles at a sandwich, taking gulps from a wine bottle in between, the full verbal burden of the play fell squarely on the shoulders of Sara Shaarawi as the weird, character-shifting, alternately romantic damsel in distress and obscene whore, Micaela, and Adham Haddara, as her enigmatic, ruthless and thoroughly urbane father, Justin. Though, again, the play was pared down here and there, presumably for the same reason as Tragedy: a tragedy, what was left of their lines was quite substantial and required extraordinary feats of memorization and tuning. The play begins with Etienne and Bruno chained together at the ankle and dumped in a dark and dirty small latrine in a clearing at the centre of an extensive park turned into a veritable labyrinth by a forest of blankets hung on washing lines, and ends with Bruno committing suicide and Etienne churning out of fear a string of lies that finally become the noose that hangs him. He is sentenced to death for Bruno's murder by the absurd judge who was supposed to issue him with an exit permit that would enable him to leave the park and set him free. Though Arrabal never makes clear what his maze of a park stands for, or what his characters represent, by the end of the play, it is obvious that the labyrinth stands for all oppressive, political, social, moral, or bureaucratic systems that seem designed to embroil unwary individuals into their treacherous and tightly webbed meshes. Competently directed and performed, Seif Abdel Salaam's Labyrinth was delightfully teasing, grimly relevant and quite reminiscent of Kafka's world. Tom Stoppard's 1960 television play, A Separate Peace (TV 1960), another good choice by the festival, features a warm, likeable, middle aged person, by the name of John Brown, who abjures the world and decides to retire for the rest of his life in a quiet, secluded nursing home. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with him, no mental or physical illness that would justify his admittance there. He gets in under false pretences, describing his case on the phone as an emergency, and once inside, refuses to leave since he can pay for his stay and does no harm to anybody. Failing to understand his curious wish and suspecting his motives, the staff suffer him to remain until they can ascertain his identity, verify his probity, discover his history and possibly track down any family or friends he might have. They finally succeed; but just as his sister and her husband are about to arrive, he wilfully leaves, disappearing into the darkness out of which he materialized in the first scene. Through the dialogue between Brown and the nursing home staff, particularly Nurse Maggie Coates, with whom he becomes friendly, and the officious but well-meaning Matron, Stoppard gently reveals his hero's character and his malaise. A mild, sensitive man and a bit of an artist (he paints the English countryside on the walls of his room), Brown, we gather, is sickened by the chaos and brutality of the world outside, which he experienced, first hand, in an extreme and violent form, during the war, and by the constant intrusion on his privacy and interference in his life by well-meaning friends and relatives. Unable to conform and made to feel guilty for it, he takes refuge in the only place where he thinks he can find strict order, privacy, peace and quiet, and where he will be free of guilt since, except for obeying the rules, nothing would be expected of him. Soon enough, however, he finds out that, like all hospitals, the main job/sacred mission of the Beechwood Nursing Home is to make 'unhealthy' individuals, who drop out of the rat race and fall on the road side, fit enough to be sent back into the world once more to rejoin it and live as others do. Just like the people he left outside, Maggie and the Matron cannot but see his flight from the world in negative terms and smugly believe they know how he should live and what is best for him. All he wants is to be allowed to "sit inside my painting," that is, inside a world of his own making, to retreat into art; barred from his wish, he leaves, and there being no monasteries 'for atheists' and no hospitals 'for the healthy', he melts into the night. The performance, which Nadeen Lotayef directed, was simple, clean, uncluttered and rigorously economical. The stark, white set of the hospital room gains in colour, warmth, beauty and tenderness as Brown, under our very eyes, paints the wall in his room, bringing sunlight, the open blue sky, gently rolling green hills and graceful trees into it. But the best thing that Lotayef did as director to ensure the success of her production was to cast Jason Will in the role of John Brown. Jason, a truly gifted and versatile actor, with a powerful, captivating stage presence and infinite charisma, as I have reason to say, having watched him in different parts at the AUC, including Petruchio, in Laila Saad's The Taming of the Shrew, and Vershinin, 'the love- sick major', in Frank Bradley's The Three Sisters, played Brown deftly, in low key, with studied restraint, keeping all the feelings well under the surface and only allowing them to show in fitful shades and flickers that made them all the more poignant. The rest of the cast, Kismet Waked, as Nurse Maggie Coates, Kariman Hussein, as Matron, Mike Bali, as the Doctor, and Yusra Shalabi, as Nurse, were tolerable and did what was expected of them, which was not much. Only, I wish Waked could have raised her voice a little and spoken a bit more legibly. Unfortunately, the only Arabic entry in the festival, Families, originally written in English by Mustafa Khalil, rendered into Arabic by Omar Madkour and directed by Nizar El-Drazi, compared very unfavourably with the foreign plays. Though the initial situation was promising -- two orphaned young women, strictly brought up by a despotic father in a rigorously conservative and narrow-minded Islamic tradition and veiled, forced by circumstances to take temporary abode in the flat of a modern, liberated, secular cousin and her brother until they could find a mysteriously disappeared uncle whom they hope would take care of them and put them under his protective patronage -- it seemed to be abruptly and facilely resolved before its full and vast dramatic potential was exhausted, and by no weightier means than an old photo album. Soon enough, the grimly and ridiculously fanatical older sister is reconciled to her cousins' way of life and willingly accepts her younger, more tolerant sister's suggestion that they stay with them for good. The suggestion, however, is not welcomed by the older, female cousin, Miriam, who has a boyfriend, as we gather from a telephone call, and, consequently, may have plans to marry him and bring him to live in the flat. At this point, the play abruptly ends, leaving the future of the two orphans and the mystery of the missing uncle hanging in the air. It is sad that the initial conflict of attitudes over the veil and all it stands for, which is extremely topical and urgently relative in today's Egypt, where the Salafis are clamouring for an Islamic state that would further curtail women's freedom, was used only for comic capital and quickly dropped when that was exhausted. After that, the play seemed to lack focus and direction and the dialogue became thin and repetitive. Displaying a severely deficient linguistic store on the part of the author, or his translator, the verbal texture sounded anaemic and failed to reflect and individualize the characters. Rather than a one-act play, Families seemed like a hazy, sketchy outline of something that has yet to be developed and given shape and focus. Hopefully, Mustafa Khalil will take this criticism in the right spirit and get down to working on this primary sketch that has in it, I believe, the makings of a topical, hilarious social satire.
