Nehad Selaiha remembers an ardent rebel who did not live to see 25 January I had arranged with friends to go to Tahrir Square on New Year's Eve at 10 pm after dropping in at my mother's. On an impulse, however, I found myself driving to the Floating theatre in Giza at 8. Nothing spectacular was taking place there at that early hour and, as I rightly guessed, the sunken garden that surrounds both its halls was deserted. Save for a lighted Christmas tree at the bottom of the broad stairs leading up to the main hall facing the entrance, the place looked quite forlorn. It would, of course, begin to fill up and come to life when the starting time, at 10.30, of the Comedy production, Tailcoat, which has been successfully running at the theatre's big hall for some weeks, drew nearer. At that early hour, however, outside the adjacent small hall, one of the 2 Youth theatre's modest venues, there was but a thin sprinkling of people dimly visible in the shadows. Most of them were theatre employees, lounging in chairs in front of glasses of steaming tea, or walking up and down to warm themselves. Among them I recognized two old friends whom I hadn't seen for quite sometime �ê" director Abdel Rahman El-Shaf'e, a pioneer of musical folk theatre in Egypt, and Magdi El-Hamzawi, a diligent theatre critic and activist who lives in the town of Zefta in the Delta. Like me, they had come to the bare and draughty small hall of the Floating theatre on that very cold evening in search of times past, of a lost glow that had once warmed their days and cheered their hearts. The show on offer there, Mashhad min Al-Share' (A Street Scene), was a revival, by director Yasin El-Daww, of a play written by Saleh Saad some 20 years ago. We had all seen it when it was first produced by the Cultural Palaces organization (then called Mass Culture) and performed in the now defunct 'Masrah Al-Ghorfah' (Chamber theatre) in Ramses Street and vividly remembered it still. Its director then was Yusri El-Sayed and El-Daww had acted in it and written the songs. It had enchanted us then, we remembered, and won the Critics Award in the 3rd Edition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in 1991. Though A Street Scene was the first play by Saleh to be produced by a state organization and immediately brought him critical recognition, it was by no means his first playwriting adventure. He had joined the Mass Culture organisation in 1983, but it took him 8 years to get one of his plays produced there. Impatient with that organisation's notorious, endemic bureaucracy and anaemic budgets, he had started in 1986 his own independent project: Al-Suradiq (The Marquee) �ê" a vibrant and exciting independent theatre troupe for which he wrote and successfully directed some plays, drawing on folk stories and legends for material, and on the traditions of popular comedy, indigenous festive celebrations and folk rituals for form. It was through Al-Suradiq that I met Saad for the first time and thenceforth followed his work with keen interest and pleasurable enthusiasm. I remember how I took my theatre criticism class to A Street Scene one evening and the wonderful discussion we had afterwards. Inspired by Berthold Brecht's short article explaining the mode of acting in his epic theatre, an article which he called "A Street Scene," Saleh produced a lively, though profoundly poignant, episodic piece that unfolds within the framework of a trial and centers on the investigation of a car accident which kills a poor citizen. As the play progresses, the trial, which examines the histories of the victim and the rich car owner in a series of flashbacks, interspersed with discussions, comments from the chorus and satirical ditties, soon expands into a trial of the whole of society and its unjust, corrupt and exploitative economic system. And here too, as in his former experiments with Al-Suradiq, and notwithstanding Brecht's influence, Saad steeped his text in the traditions of folk culture and popular comedy. Poignant in content, subversive in intent and rebellious in its message, Saleh's Street Scene is one of the funniest plays you could find anywhere. And no wonder, since its author believed in the at once subversive and healing power of clowning �ê" "not cheap, physical clowning�ê�," he notes, "but a kind of profound, bitter clowning which pierces through what is material, physical and external to reach the spiritual core inside and arouse genuine human joy �ê" a joy that can make you smile and also cry." Without posing as a 'committed artist' or spouting off a lot of ideology, Saad was a rebel through and through. For him, theatre was "an objective, communal art and will remain so no matter how much of his soul the artist pours into it." And, "Like the madman, the writer, or artist in general is a person who opts out of the social context; the only difference is that the artist does it willfully, consciously. Both are exiled from society by some hidden, implicit social contract intent on preserving a set of rules and established structures." These rules do not normally allow the public airing of new ideas or unfamiliar images, regarding those who think them up as dangerous, subversive elements. "This view of the artist," he goes on to say, "brings him very close to the vagabonds and clever adventurers in our Arabic heritage and extends to poets, eccentrics, non-conformists and everyone who rebels against the tribe's traditions and way of life." Born in the shadow of Nasser, reaching adulthood in the reign of Sadat and struggling for survival, both as man and artist, in the reign of Mubarak, Saleh Saad was finally wantonly killed by criminal negligence and corruption in the Beni Sweif holocaust on 5 September, 2005. Of his generation he wrote (in an undated entry entitled "A Dream") in his confessional, reflective diary, Days of The Last Exile, published in 1999 (from which all the quotations in this article are taken), that it was "the generation of silence�ê� who arrived too late, when everything had been said and all meanings exhausted;" all they could do was "to bear witness to the death of art and philosophy and the final death of this old universe." They "had lost the virginal innocence of the word" and were treated like "whores on the market of a corrupt world which respects nothing because nothing can equal its filth." Yasin El-Daww's current version of A Street Scene, which opened a few days before the end of the year, updated the play, resetting it in the first decade of the 3rd millennium, prior to 25 January, 2011, and provided new lyrics, which he himself wrote, and which Ahmed Khalaf put to music and sang live on the lute, accompanied by his band. In the interest of intimacy, El-Daww placed the audience on stage, round the actors, in the atmosphere and ambience of a popular, street side caf��, and Mohamed Hashim's simple and mobile sets made the subsequent scenes look delightfully like a series of animated cartoons. As I watched the wonderful cast of actors and singers, led by Sumaya El-Imam and Akram Mustafa, dexterously flitting in and out of many parts, alternately drawing pathos, anger and laughter, I remembered how their old counterparts, in the 1991 production, had done the same, but without much hope that Mubarak's nightmarish rule would some day come to an end. In their time, there was no Tahrir Square alive with rebellion and vibrating with hope nearby. In this production, only El-Daww, Khalaf and Hashim belonged to Saleh Saad's generation �ê" "the generation of silence." Luckily for them, however, they had not "arrived too late" to see the 25 January revolution and celebrate it on New Year's Eve in Tahrir Square after the performance. It broke my heart that Saleh Saad did not live to see it, but I felt infinitely grateful to El-Daww for having brought him back to life through theatre that evening, for having allowed me to send him homage across the unknown gulf that separates us. Still, what sorrow it was to remember that he died feeling, as he said in a poem called The Frame, in his last volume of poetry, Back from a Night Stroll, An empty frame with images rushing through it... Fluid and roaring... Bits of my life, my moments... Scattered and mixed... And swept by the tide of time to the universal ocean... To the gate of nothingness.
