Nehad Selaiha is staggered by the correspondences between the Romanian and Egyptian revolutions in Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest: A Play from Romania at the AUC At the Malak Gabr Arts Theater, in the AUC Centre for the Arts in New Cairo, the stage was lined on all sides with forbidding black walls. Save for a door and a high window at the back, it suggested a grim, dreary prison. The floor of this picture- frame stage, however, had been overlaid with a huge triangular slab that projected into the auditorium over the first two or three rows of seats, significantly distorting its symmetry in a disorienting manner, but allowing close contact with the performers in certain scenes. The curiously intriguing drabness of Stancil Campbell's scenery and lighting was corroborated and enhanced by Dina Abdel Aziz's muted, well-studied, shabby costumes. A large picture of Romania's overthrown dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, dominated the scene, visibly hung up high on the same level as the window, which, eventually, was startlingly revealed to represent the abode of an archangel (identified as the Archangel Michael), who confesses to having collaborated with the fascist Iron Guard in the 1930s! The danger of religion turning into a form of arbitrary fascism was here satirically indicated. We were back in communist Romania, some months before the 1989 revolution. Every sign on stage, including the introduction of the scenes in both English and Romanian and a radio blaring Romanian songs in the first scene told us as much, even if we knew nothing of the subtitle of the play ( A Play from Romania ), or the history of its composition (that it was the result of a 3-week workshop to research the Romanian revolution and develop a play about it, conducted in Bucharest, in March 1990, by the author and director Mark Wing-Davey, with ten students from the London Central School of Speech and Drama and about 40 Romanian drama students). The play started and we were all at once plunged into a succession of short, flashing scenes that flitted across the stage with dizzying rapidity, giving us no clue as to who the characters were or what to make of them. To add to the mystery, 8 of the 16 first scenes were played in complete silence, and in the rest, the dialogue was so cryptic, elliptical, opaque, or artificially contrived as to tell us very little. The first half of the performance was muffled in baffling silence -- a kind of eloquent, teasingly suggestive silence that seemed to reach into the depths of memory and speak volumes. It seemed to me then that 'Mad Forest', the main title of the play, was not just a metaphoric name for Bucharest as a city that 'stands on land that used to be an impenetrable forest, known to the horsemen of the steppe as Teleorman (Mad Forest)', as one performer explains, but, indeed, a metaphor for the structure of the play and its import and an apt description of one's impression after seeing or reading it for the first time. Like a big, historical mural, shattered and fragmented into small details, momentarily caught and focused in succession as they fell, and only coming together and making sense in the viewer's mind at the end, in the same way that the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle finally form a picture, so seemed the performance. In the first part, I was vividly reminded of life under Nasser's socialist laws and police state in the 1960s -- the frenzied rush and long queues at the state co-ops at rumours that a chicken or a bit of rice was to be found, the shortage of every thing, the endemic failures of power and water supplies and telephone lines, the falsification of school history books, the manipulation of the media and arts, the cult of hero worship and the insidious, sinister atmosphere of suspicion and fear. That Big Brother was watching you, always watching you, was a daily fact of life. Everywhere was bugged, and at the national socialist union and its affiliated youth organizations, young people were taught that it was their sacred national duty to spy on their mothers and fathers, on their friends and colleagues, on their nearest and dearest and report them to the authorities. In that first part of the performance too, so quiet, so frugal, so hushed, and, indeed, in the whole play, I was also powerfully reminded of Chekhov and, to a lesser degree, perhaps, of Jane Austin. Revolutions happen, wars take place, but people carry on living as best they can. They love and hate, mourn and celebrate, marry and separate, and always struggle to survive with whatever dignity is possible for them. Sometimes they are drawn and caught into the grinding mill of history and die or are mutilated. But if they survive, there is always the business of daily life to engross and save them, the one to one hour existence to maintain. As the play drew me into its half fictional, half documentary world, I began to perceive parallels and correspondences with my own experience of Egypt's political history since 1952. While the first half referred me back to the 1960s, the rest of it had an eerie affinity to the present. After the half silent, miserable panorama of life in a police state, we are carried, with the aid of film footage, to 21 December, learn that the Romanian revolution has started and are treated to eye witness reports of the event. The action is no longer confined to the stage. The Auditorium is lit, and Bradley's actors are scattered all over it, giving testimonies of what they, as ordinary citizens, had seen and experienced. Having followed most of the verbatim theatre performances mounted in Cairo after 25 January, I was stunned by the similarity between the reports in both cases. Fear, anxiety, doubt, a desperate kind of recklessness born out of long frustration, the need to do something, to participate, and the hope that the army will finally side with the people were all there. Also there were the doubts, the suspicions of conspiracy, the blood shed and the many martyrs At the beginning of the second half (Bradley had knocked the first and second parts of the play together, giving the third after a short interval), a new character appeared: the Vampire. In a curious confrontation between him and a starved dog, whom we had seen earlier dismissed by his owner because he could not feed him, the Vampire ominously announces: 'I came here for the revolution. I could smell it a long way off,' then adds: 'Nobody knew who was doing the killing. I could come up behind a man in a crowd.' I immediately thought of that mysterious agent on whom the military council has been blaming all the deaths in the riots since February last year, and who has been jocularly dubbed in the popular press as 'El-Lahw El-Khafi' (literally meaning 'he who is invisible'). In Egypt now, as in Churchill's Romania of 1989, there is some sort of vampire, an invisible and unidentified internal enemy, roaming among us and destroying everything. Whether he is manipulated by the stooges and beneficiaries of the former regime, popularly called 'Al-Fulool' (stragglers), or by the military council in authority or the central security forces to convince the people of the need for their remaining in power to preserve law and order is a moot point both in Churchill's play and current Egyptian reality. In a very sinister way, the play projects the Vampire, the starving dog, and the fascist archangel as unifying consciousnesses. All flit through the city, blithe and uncaring, and always drawn by the smell of blood. But nothing could be more eerie, more astounding, more staggering for an Egyptian in the aftermath of 25 January, than the hospital scenes in the final part, where we see many of the injured in the riots, and where one patient suddenly shoots at us a volley of unanswerable questions about the mysterious circumstances surrounding an ostensibly spontaneous, popular revolution -- questions that we, as Egyptians, have been frantically, incessantly asking ourselves this past year: 'Did we have a revolution or a putsch? Who was shooting on the 21st? And who was shooting on the 22nd? Was the army shooting on the 21st or did some shoot and some not shoot or were the Securitate (Secret Police) disguised in army uniforms? Most important of all were the terrorists and the army really fighting or were they only pretending to fight? And for whose benefit? And by whose orders? Where did the flags come from? Who put loudhailers in the square? How could they publish a newspaper so soon? Why did no one turn off the power at the TV? Who got Ceausescu to call everyone together? And is he really dead? How many people died at Timosoara? And where are the bodies? Who mutilated the bodies? And were they mutilated after they'd been killed specially to provoke the revolution? By whom? For whose benefit?' It was eerie listening to those questions, so often reiterated in the press and daily discourse, shouted from the stage in a play about a revolution in a distant country. The blur, the sickening sense of confusion, of incomprehension, of suspicion, were all there. Nor were the Romanian perceptions of the Hungarian minority, as given in the play, or the many conflicting views about the nature of the events of December 1989, and whether the rise of Ion Iliescu constituted a coup d'état versus a revolution, without immediate parallels on the Egyptian scene. The same suspicions surrounding the National Salvation Front that took control of Romania and the ethnic prejudice against Hungarians have parallels in the Egyptian revolutionary forces' mistrust of our ruling military council and the Coptic/Muslim sectarian tensions. In contrast to the hushed first half of the play, its latter part was extremely boisterous and feverishly noisy. Though families are reconciled, and lovers are united, the revolution seems thoroughly suspect. Uppermost in the minds of the characters, and audience, are the questions of whether the revolution has been stolen and whether the event was a revolution or a putsch (irking questions for all Egyptians now indeed). The play ends in drunken revelry and sadistic, retributive violence, with another wedding, paralleling the one at its start, and vast apprehensions about the future. In his director's note, Bradley wrote: 'Last spring, when the world became conscious of an Arab Spring, Mad Forest seemed like a terrific idea. The university was busting with revolution- themed research projects, and I remembered Caryl Churchill's experiment from twenty years ago. She took a group of British drama students to Bucharest a few months after the Romanian revolution, and together with a group of Romanian drama students they conducted three weeks of interviews and research which resulted in the play you see tonight. But how do you know when a revolution is over? I confess to an assumption, which now, in retrospect, seems naïve: that by the fall of 2011, we in Egypt would have felt that something had passed, something we could look back upon. But the sense of passage, or having passed, is missing, Clearly we are engaged in a process that is ongoing, and it is surprising and a little disturbing to me to hear the words spoken by the Romanian witnesses in 'December', the second part of the play, echoed by our ongoing witness accounts, which we, our friends and family see and hear everyday. It has not been our intention to add, or show, more fire to citizens who have had more than enough of blazes, but to offer Churchill's distant mirror in the hope that some meaning can be taken. For me, I find great meaning in the incredible dedication of twenty-five or so citizen student theatre Makers who have pushed forward through often difficult circumstances to find artistic and civic expression by taking this journey to another time and place, while coming to terms on a daily basis with our own.' Bradley's tribute to his 25-member artistic team, actors and technical crew, is more than aptly deserved. A great deal of hard work, thought, ardour, profound reflection and dedication has gone into the execution of this masterfully performed project. That Bradley should have chosen to stage this play at this juncture in the progress of the Egyptian revolution evidences a deep intellectual, emotional and moral involvement in the destiny of the country that has been his home for many years, his fervent care for its future and his sympathy with his students, many of whom have been active in Tahrir Square. It also demonstrates the heart-felt interest of an artist, possessed of a perceptive, sympathetic intellect and great integrity, to actively participate in a historical moment and proffer his honest reflections on its course and vicissitudes, intimating all the time his sense of his immense good luck at being able to do so.
