Up in the air, Nehad Selaiha has a wonderful theatrical experience Like a man besieged by floods, Lenin El-Ramli has for 2 years now sought theatrical refuge on the rooftop of the 3-storey Cinema Cultural Palace in Garden City. Last year, during Ramadan, he presented there, on a primitive, makeshift stage, hastily set up for the occasion, and with an amateur cast and crew, whom he personally trained, drilled and directed, a short, hilarious satire on the film industry in Egypt, called Matigi Ne'mel Film (Let's Make a Movie). In it, a hack scriptwriter is stuck for a plot for a new commercial action movie that he should submit on the morrow or lose the commission. Scolded by a shrewish, avaricious wife and bullied by the producer �ê" a vulgar, ignorant person who dictates that the script be tailored to suit the whims and fancies of the hired superstar and be full of thrills and frills to guarantee fat box-office returns �ê" the writer feels desperate. When a down-at-heel, ham burglar and his clumsy fianc��e break into his flat that night, on the spur of the moment, in the hope of a modest loot that would enable them to marry, he seizes his chance and blackmails them into providing him with ideas out of what he supposes to be their vast criminal experience. With no such experience to fall back on, the frightened young couple starts fantasising, producing a string of illogical, extravagant and thoroughly nonsensical situations, mostly drawn from commercial action films, but luridly exaggerated and fancifully embroidered to pacify their grumbling persecutor. The comic effect of this whimsical narrative was multiplied by having it simultaneously projected in amateurish film shots on a large screen at the back, treating us to a deliciously funny burlesque of such movies. This year, and in Ramadan too, El-Ramli was back on the roof of the same building, directing the same group of dedicated young actors in Al-Garima Al-Kamila (The Perfect Crime) �ê" a brilliant comic thriller with a subtle political message that ironically reflects on the current political scene in Egypt. Watching this intriguing, suspenseful, masterfully crafted comedy (it played 5 nights, from 15 to 19 August), you would never think it was a compressed version of an earlier, longer play �ê" in fact, El-Ramli's first-performed full-length play, called Meen Qatal Bora'ie? (Who Killed Bora'ie?). It was under this name that Galal El-Sharqawi decided to produce and direct it for his own commercial company in 1974. Midway through rehearsals, however, El-Sharqawi, with his eye on the box-office, rechristened the play Innahum Yaqtuloon Al-Hameer (The Kill Donkeys). His idea was to cash in on the vast popularity of Sydney Pollack's 1969 film version of Horace McCoy's 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which, when shown in Cairo while the production was making, was billed in Arabic as Innahum Yaqtuloon (meaning 'kill' rather than 'shoot') Al-Giyad. He had bought the rights to the play and El-Ramli could not stop him. The production was a success and ran for 2 years, but not simply on account of the title. While the first batch of spectators might have been drawn by it, it was the text itself �ê" its intriguing, suspenseful action, crisp, witty dialogue, irrepressible humour and dazzling manipulation and subversion of familiar dramatic conventions, stereotypes and clich��s (a skill El-Ramli learnt from Shakespeare) �ê" that kept the production going for so long, attracting more and more audiences. The new compressed version kept only the most essential elements and details, reducing the original 3-hour performance time by half. Here the mysterious murder of Mr. Bora'ie, a wealthy, influential and reputedly pious member of the People's Assembly, was the sole focus, and the investigation, conducted by a comically inept police commissioner (Tamer El-Gazzar) and his obtuse assistant (Rida Tulba) �ê" a burlesque of Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Watson �ê" moved at a brisk pace, introducing one self-confessed murderer after another, each enacting the murder in flashback (with Yasir Badawi, as Bora'ie, promptly coming to life to assist), to the befuddlement, confusion and utter despair of the two investigators. Rather than defend themselves, the individuals caught hovering around the scene of the crime and dragged before the investigators by a diligent, chronically suspicious detective in plain clothes (Ahmed Kamal) �ê" a young, dimwitted fortune-huntress seduced by the deceased and left in the lurch (Radwa Adel), a vain, pompous, young writer, hungry for fame (a kind of literary miles gloriosus), who boasts of the murder as a service to humanity (Amr Sherif), a young, gullible law student from Upper Egypt (a typical country yokel), who has a vendetta against the murdered man for murdering his father (Hazem El-Qadi), and the dead man's obsequious, wily, secretive servant (Hamada Shousha) �ê" are all anxious to be arrested for the murder of the said Bora'ie and end up fighting over who is to claim that honour. The confusion is exacerbated by the sudden appearance of a spitting image of the dead man in the figure of his cousin, who claims that he had banished himself to Somalia (of all places) to escape the dire consequences of his resemblance to the deceased and has just come back upon hearing of his death. The possibility that it could be the other way round, that he could be the real Bora'ie and had killed his cousin and assumed his identity to elude his many enemies and evade legal prosecution for corruption, is teasingly dangled before both the two investigators and the audience till the final scene. Much as I would like to, it would be unfair to the author and future audiences of the play, should it have another run, to reveal to you who killed Bora'ie. Suffice it to say that the denouement of this sprightly, exuberant thriller suddenly invests the play with an ironical metaphoric dimension that satirizes the feverish eagerness of every political faction in Egypt today to claim for itself alone the honour of having brought down Mubarak, whereas, according to the author, it was Mubarak himself who put an end to his political life. Scripted, conducted and played like a tight musical score, with every note finely placed to interact and harmonize with the rest, gripping the audience all the time, El-Ramli's Perfect Crime seemed almost like a perfect play, at once highly sophisticated and accessible to all. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication, loyalty and discipline to produce a piece of this quality in such unpropitious conditions, on next to no budget, with primitive sound and lighting systems, a cheaply improvised set and non-professional actors. Indeed, it took much more than that to bring this piece to the audience. When after two months of long and arduous rehearsals, the ministry of culture withheld the miserable contribution to the production it had promised, which would hardly cover the costs of the planned simple set, on the plea of being short of funds, and made this known within only a few days of the scheduled opening, the actors and crew decided to stage a sit-in protest on the roof, informed the security forces of their decision and threatened a public scandal in the media. Their passion won the day: the ministry cowered and issued the measly cheque on 11 August, at noon, which just caught the banks before they closed, and for the next 3 days most of the group literally camped on the roof to get things ready, only going home when absolutely necessary. The material for set was hastily bought and every one set to work, cutting and sewing, sawing and painting, hammering and gluing and all was finally fitted together to create the faint semblance of a hall in a rich man's flat. Where among professionals could you find such love and passion? And where among professional theatre-makers in the Arab world could you find someone with El-Ramli's faith in his art and power to inspire beginners with a similar faith. But wonderful and uplifting as El-Ramli's persistent pursuit if his art against all odds may be, one cannot help thinking that when a great playwright, both nationally and internationally recognized and highly esteemed, is forced to seek asylum on the roof of a building, then something must be terribly wrong with the country where he lives. Not for the first time did I find the material context of a performance as important and significant as the show itself. Here, the identity of the building which hosted the play �ê" a cultural palace for cinema, in other words, an organization that promotes a totally different art and only caters for amateurs and cinema lovers �ê" seemed highly symbolic, summing up and ironically commenting on the state of homelessness and marginalization experienced by dedicated great theatre-makers, both old and young, in this country. Faced with the fast deterioration of the state-theatre organization in the last decade (not that it had ever been quite healthy since the late 1960s), most playwrights of El-Ramli's generation have deserted theatre, migrating to television, or turning to other forms of writing. In this respect, El-Ramli's reaction was singular and unprecedented. Though he regularly contributes witty and pungent articles to different newspapers and sporadically writes for cinema and television, he knew that he could not survive without making theatre. Turning his back on the state-theatre, its impudent, ignorant bureaucracy, sloppy, antiquated, timid and often corrupt management and vain, conventional, unimaginative directors, he decided to create his own theatre with non-professionals that he would train himself to be better that professionals and stage his plays in untraditional venues. The result has been a string of little theatrical gems, performed in a garden, a gallery, an open courtyard, or, since last year, on a rooftop (For more on this, see my 'Guarding his own light' in the culture section of the Weekly, 13 October 2005, Issue No. 764). Throughout, the core artists in this troupe have been sustained by their faith in their leader, trusting in the power of his plays, his careful, meticulous direction of every actor, however minor the part, and his relentless insistence on developing their talents, honing their skills and getting the best out of them. With him, they know they are on safe grounds, on a road that can only lead them upward. Panting and wheezing up the stairs of the Cinema Palace the following night, to see The Perfect Crime once more, I grimly wondered how long it would be before the floods of apathy and indifference, of ignorance and fanaticism swamped this place as well, and with it all the things I loved. The image I carried home with me, however, was not of destructive floods and obliteration. It was of the devoted prentices and trainees celebrating the master's birthday with fireworks and a cake after the show. If filled me with reckless courage and flashed a spark of hope. What matters if the waters keep rising? Let them rise; the deluge may be upon us, but so long as people like El-Ramli and his troupe continue to have faith and create magic, we will survive.
