The success of Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany's novel Chicago on the French stage reflects the thirst for information about Egypt's January Revolution, writes David Tresilian in Paris French director Jean-Louis Martinelli's stage adaptation of bestselling Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswany's 2007 novel Chicago, entitled J'aurais voulu être égyptien (I would have liked to have been Egyptian), has been playing to enthusiastic audiences at the public-sector theatre of Nanterre-Amandiers in the Paris suburb of Nanterre since 16 September in a run scheduled to finish in late October. Those attending last Saturday's performance were treated to quite a bonus in the shape of a meeting with the author himself, al-Aswany being in Nanterre to discuss events in the Arab world with a panel that included journalist and commentator Alain Gresh, deputy-editor of the respected French monthly Le Monde diplomatique, and assistant director-general of the Paris Institut du monde arabe, Badr-Eddine Arodaky, as well as to introduce the play. Both discussion and play were well attended by well informed and attentive audiences, testifying to the intense interest that events in the Arab world have given rise to in France and in Europe as a whole. While J'aurais voulu être égyptien, like the novel from which it comes, is set sometime at the beginning of the last decade, its success with Paris audiences perhaps owes most to the almost magnetic hold that recent events in Egypt have had over French audiences, as well as to the fame of al-Aswany himself. Al-Aswany's debut novel Imara Yaqubian ( The Yacoubian Building ), published by the small Egyptian publisher Dar Merit in 2002 and probably still his best-known work, sold an estimated 125,000 copies in France in the 12 months following the appearance of its French translation. When added to the many thousands more sold in English and German translations, The Yacoubian Building has been the first international bestseller to emerge from the Arab world, with al-Aswany himself in demand worldwide as a commentator on Egyptian and Arab affairs. A translation of his latest work, a collection of articles from the Al-Sharouq and Al-Dustour newspapers, is slated to appear in French translation in November, following its appearance in English some months ago under the title of On the State of Egypt. Small wonder, then, that al-Aswany's appearance on the panel in Nanterre should have been so eagerly anticipated, with a lively question-and-answer session following the panelists' presentations. The panel was entitled "the Arab Awakening," but how appropriate, asked Badr-Eddine Arodaky, was this appellation, which could give the impression that the Arab world had somehow awoken from an extended Rip van Winkle period, only recently noticing that the Arabs, too, had a role to play in the contemporary world. According to Alain Gresh, such a title could only be appropriate if one supposed that the Arab world, and Egypt in particular, had emerged from a condition of immobility. However, the years of strikes and political contestation, notably surrounding the Kefiyyah movement and the industrial disputes that had gone hand-in- hand with it, had shown that the regime of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had been on the defensive for years. The remarkable thing was that few people in the West, and even fewer in the mainstream western media, had appeared to notice it. This was an analysis shared by al-Aswany, who pointed out that only those who had supposed that the Arab world had been sleeping could now suppose that it had abruptly woken up. The truth was, he said, that "the West supported Mubarak, one of the world's worst dictators, until the last possible moment, all the while knowing him for what he was." The real question, he said, was not why it had taken so long for the Arab world to awaken, since it had never been asleep. Instead, we should be asking why things had developed as swiftly as they had, and how it was that a regime "that relied on one of the world's largest and most repressive security apparatuses, about which we still don't know all the details," had collapsed in a few weeks of contestation. "I am very optimistic about the prospects for Egypt's transition to democracy," al-Aswany told his French audience. "There has been a change in people's way of thinking as a result of the Revolution, and things cannot go back to how they were before." Turning to the larger picture, one thing that needed to be emphasised, said Alain Gresh, was the peaceful character of the protests that had taken place across the Arab world, these succeeding in overthrowing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia in an unprecedented fashion while managing to avoid either foreign intervention or civil war. While events in Syria and Yemen could yet unfortunately give the lie to this broadly optimistic picture, Gresh said, what struck the foreign observer about what was taking place in the latter two countries, as elsewhere in the Arab world, was the "extraordinary dignity and courage of those confronting dictatorship." In the Libyan case, Gresh said, there had been an uprising against the regime followed by western intervention, the only time that western intervention in the Arab world had not been met with immediate protest. Nevertheless, the intervention had given the western powers leverage in Libya that they had not had before, and "it is obvious that NATO violated the UN Security Resolutions mandating the intervention, the true purpose of which was to get rid of the regime rather than to protect the Libyan people." The fact that NATO had gone beyond the terms of the UN Resolutions in its intervention in Libya, with as yet unknown results, had meant that "Russia and China are now refusing to cooperate on a UN Resolution against Syria, having seen what happened earlier in Libya." Cairo to Chicago to Paris : There was a strong Arab and African contingent among the audience for the panel discussion, and al-Aswany was mobbed by appreciative members of the public on his way out, as befitted his status as one of the world's best-known authors. Perhaps this element was less in evidence for the play that followed, as the audience settled down for a performance of Martinelli's stage version of al-Aswany's novel. Published in Arabic in 2007, with English and French translations swiftly following, Chicago takes up the east-west theme dear to much Egyptian and Arab writing by following the fortunes of a group of Egyptian residents of the US city, showing how Egyptian and American lives run on parallel lines and sometimes cross each other with the inevitable misunderstandings, comic moments, and friendships that result. Readers of the novel will have recognised characters and episodes from the novel in Martinelli's severely redacted version, as well as occasional lines of dialogue. The play begins with the admission and subsequent arrival of Egyptian student Nagi abd al-Samad at the University of Illinois Medical School, spiritedly played in the Nanterre production by Mounir Margoum, and his introduction to the complicated world of the city's Egyptian community, among them fellow Egyptian students and an Egyptian faculty member, Ra'fat Thabit. Adding to the challenges of adjusting to the new city and its demands, there are also echoes of home in the form both of family pressures and expectations, perhaps among them the need to retain a clear view of Egyptian identity in a foreign environment, and the unwelcome attentions of Safwat Shakir, intelligence officer at the Egyptian embassy. Politics, whether in the form of pressures from the regime or from those who contest it, follow the Egyptian characters throughout their lives in the US, whether they are newcomers like Nagi, or old-hands like Ra'fat Thabit, who has been in America for 30 years and has done his best to put his Egyptian origins behind him. Perhaps Nagi's experience in the novel, those of an Egyptian dentistry student at the University of Illinois, parallel those of the novel's author, al-Aswany having also studied dentistry in Chicago as a graduate student in the 1980s. However, while the original novel, like its predecessor The Yacoubian Building, could be considered to be an exercise in literary realism, its immediacy and strongly drawn characters adding to its wide appeal, verisimilitude or, indeed, any straightforward correspondence between the actors and the roles they played, did not appear to be among the aims of Martinelli's production. Consisting of an open, rectangular space that featured what appeared to be the recreation of an actors' dressing room on its right-hand side, the Paris staging seemed designed to draw attention to itself, possibly at the expense of the original novel's narrative content. This impression was reinforced by reading Martinelli's programme notes, which focused on the theatre's necessary theatricality, even meta-theatricality, rather than the content of the play to be performed. Thus, the audience was invited to watch the actors as they tried on different roles within the framework of the play, lounging on the sidelines as they waited to be called on to play their parts. According to Martinelli, this procedure was intended to suggest something of the experience of reading a work of narrative fiction, such as a novel, when the "reading space" is peopled by different characters, only one of which receives the attention of the reader at any given time. What this meant in the context of the play was that characters moved in and out of the central space in a sometimes rather confusing fashion, and aside from Nagi abd al-Samad and possibly Karam Doss (played here by Azize Karbouche), it could be difficult to retain a grip on what was going on. All this could not really be considered to be in the spirit of al-Aswany's novel, where time, place and circumstance are spelled out in traditional fashion. However, it made for an interesting evening, the actors, in Martinelli's words, offering not so much "compassion" for the characters they had been called upon to play, as "giving them the smile that they did not have and indicating other possibilities besides those that they had chosen." J'aurais voulu être égyptien, adapted from Chicago by Alaa al-Aswany and directed by Jean- Louis Martinelli, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Paris, 16 September to 21 October 2011
