Nehad Selaiha welcomes the Egyptian premiere of Dale Wasserman's stage adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest at the AUC and ponders the representation of mental institutions on the Egyptian stage. Egyptian movies have featured scenes in mental hospitals since the late 1940s and at least one famous movie (Ismael Yasin fi Mustashfa El-Maganeen), made in 1958, sports the term 'madhouse' in its title, as far as I could ascertain, no Egyptian play was ever set in a mental hospital before 1980. In that year, director Samir El-Asfouri staged his own adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Ward No. 6 �ê" a long short story that had captured the imagination of his generation of artists and writers in the 1960s, during the worst period of Nasser's repressive regime. The huge interest in the story at that time was undoubtedly attributable, at least in part, to the practice, familiar in all totalitarian states and military dictatorships, of occasionally diagnosing political dissidents as mentally disordered and consigning them to the mad house to be made 'reasonable'. That Zinzanet El-Maganeen (The Lunatics' Cell), as El-Asfouri christened his stage version of the story, could not be attempted in the 1960s goes without saying. At that time, theatre was heavily censored and writers were sent to prison or the state mental institution for less daring criticism of the regime. By 1980, Egypt had undergone a veritable sea change. The 1967 defeat in the war with Israel had brought about the collapse of the Nasserite socialist/nationalist project and Sadat's promises, upon his accession to power in 1970, to restore democracy and dismantle the fearful police state Nasser had erected came to naught. The measure of popularity he won after the 1973 war in which Egypt won an initial, partial victory over Israel was soon eroded by the harsh punitive measures he took against all who opposed his peace negotiations with Israel and his new economic policy. His fanciful construction of a nation built on a consecration of 'science' and 'religious faith', probably intended to win the simple people and crush the opposition (mainly Nasserites and socialists), was accompanied by a fierce, systematic persecution of the Left in favour of an extreme form of conservative Islamist Right. That such policies could only lead to the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism was a natural consequence. More bewildering and damaging still was the sudden swing from an inept, corrupt socialist economy in Nasser's reign to an aggressively commercial, consumerist and equally corrupt laissez-fair one, which drastically affected the social order, virtually eroding the middle classes, leading to a mass exodus of professionals to the oil-rich Gulf, and raising to the top an upstart class of Mammon-worshiping capitalists and unconscionable businessmen. In view of the social/economic/cultural upheavals experienced in the 1970s, is it a wonder that the mental hospital as a metaphor for a debilitated country, in the grip of political oppression, ruled over by ruthless tyrants, as it was perceived in the 1960s in the perusal of Chekhov's Ward No. 6, was supplanted in the early 1980s by its representation as an all embracing metaphor for a world out of joint, where nothing makes sense? In 1980, El-Asfouri's Lunatics' Cell dramatically documented the frustrations, disillusionment, confusion, feeling of impotence and overriding sense of chaos experienced by Egyptians in the previous decade. At the core of the performance was a degree of nihilism that could not pinpoint a particular cause, foresee a solution, or hope for alleviation. The cell in that play was not unlike the hotel room in Sartre's Huis Clos: an existential hell with no exit. It is not improbable that Samir El-Asfouri could have been influenced to some degree by the revolutionary redefinitions and reconsiderations of 'mental illness' put forward in such books as Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), or Erving Goffman's Asylums (1961). Such books were available in the 1970s and some of the ideas propagated there could have filtered through into intellectual circles in Egypt. It is less improbable still that he could have missed seeing Milos Forman's 1975 Academy Award-winning film version of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Indeed, the idea of staging Ward No. 6 could have germinated in the watching of that film. The mental hospital as dramatic setting did not surface again on the Egyptian stage until 1991, when 10 years under Mubarak had put paid to all hopes of any real political liberalization and made the state security apparatus more powerful than ever. In that year, the late poet and playwright Mohamed El-Sherbeeni authored a loose, song-padded and somewhat sentimental stage-adaptation of the film version of One Flew over the Cuckoo's nest, resetting the action in Egypt. El-Maganeen (The Lunatics), the name this Egyptian version carried, was directed by Nasir Abdel-Mon'im and presented by the Damietta Cultural Palace troupe in May. Though I gave it a very negative review on this page on 28 May, 1991, entitled 'Madness, Country Style' (later included in my Egyptian Theatre: A Diary: 1991-1992, published by The General Egyptian Book Organisation, Cairo, 1993, pp. 56-8), the play could be said to have exposed some of most sordid, repulsive aspects of Egyptian reality under a fiercely patriarchal, totalitarian cultural tradition. In the same year, Khaled El-Sawi, possibly inspired by El-Sherbeeni's adaptation, or by the original source, and cognizant of Foucault's critique of mental institutions as instruments of oppression and subjugation, wrote Haflet El-Maganeen (Lunatics' Party), focusing more directly and powerfully on political oppression in military dictatorships and the brutal abuses of the state security system. In 1992, a production of the play, directed by the author himself, was mounted at the small hall of the Opera house. Both plays have proved hugely popular as vehicles for violent political protest and have been regularly staged (either in their original form, with their original titles, or in new adaptations, often with new titles) in regional, amateur, independent and university theatre productions. It is significant indeed that on 16 October 2010, only a little over 3 months before the 25 January revolution, El-Sherbeeni's and El-Sawi's texts (both adapted, with the former rechristened Psycho and the latter The Party) were presented in a double bill at the opening of the 18th edition of the Free Theatre Festival of Shubra El-Kheima, held that year in Rawabet. The Party had opened earlier that year, in May, at El-Sawy Cultural Centre while a production of the original Lunatics' Party was staged at the Creativity Centre in Alexandria a few months later. In 2011, El-Sherbeeni's Lunatics surfaced again in 3 new versions: first as Psycho in the Arab Theatre Festival held by the Egyptian Society for Theatre Amateurs at the Puppet theatre in April; then, also in April, as Ana wi Enta wi Homma (I, You, and Them), presented by the College of Medicine troupe in the annual theatre festival of the University of Banha; and a third time, in June, under its original title, as part of the Cultural Palaces theatre season for Middle and Upper Egypt theatre troupes. In all 3 versions the mental hospital was a transparent metaphor for Egypt, with the patients representing the people and the hospital staff the regime and all ended with the patients staging a successful revolt. Such an ending would have been inconceivable, or would have seemed foolishly, facilely optimistic in any play metaphorically representing Egypt as a vast madhouse in the 1990s, or the first decade of the new millennium. And there was no shortage of such plays during that period. In 1990, the same year that witnessed El-Sherbeeni's adaptation of the screenplay of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Samir El-Asfouri staged his own adaptation of Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, setting the action in a mental hospital-cum-concentration camp where all the female inmates are victims of social, sexual and political coercion, and billing it as Beit El-'Awanis (The House of Spinsters). Three years later, he commissioned, co-authored and directed Omar Nigm's adaptation of Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, which presents madness as the scourge inflicted on dissenters and nonconformists in totalitarian societies. Describing the performance in a review published in the Culture section of this paper on 19 August, 1993, I said: 'Stoppard's live, full-size orchestra, which, in the text, occupies the whole stage, leaving only three cramped acting areas, was here replaced with a down-and-out scanty oriental band encased in a huge construction of metal bars and hardly visible. When the flimsy draperies hanging down the sides of the bars were parted, they revealed not the musicians, but shadowy scenes of torture and bare, limp torsos hanging upside down. Flanking that forbidding structure which occupied the centre of the stage were the cell and the psychiatrist's office, while the front stage housed the school scenes.' The most unforgettable scene of that production, however, was the one in which the military dictator (the Colonel at the head of the asylum in the play) takes a bath in his boots while munching a beef burger. In the following years, El-Sherbeeni's Lunatics and El-Sawi's Lunatics' Party were regularly adapted and staged on the fringe �ê" always with topical political allusions, and usually in a quasi-musical form, with different songs and dances every time �ê" and in 2006 El-Asfouri rewrote and staged his earlier adaptation of Ward No. 6, redefining the mental hospital as a metaphor for the new world order ruled over by the United States and calling the new version Mad Confessions. It was not until 2009 that I came across a new play that uses the madhouse as a metaphor. In February that year, Rami El-Qattan's Ana wi Enta wi Baba fil Balala (You, I and Papa are in Cuckoo Land), presented by Al-Amwag (Waves) independent theatre troupe under his direction at Al-Hanager Arts Centre, took me by surprise. A harsh and grim political satire on Mubarak's regime, it begins with hope and gladness and ends in the misery and sadness of the madhouse (see my review in Al-Ahram Weekly, Issue No. 939, 19 March 2009). Mohamed El-Saghir's Chaiselongue, collectively improvised by the young members of an extended drama workshop organized by the Youth Theatre, opened at the small hall of the Floating Theatre in Giza in December the following year and was immediately a success. Set in a mental hospital and cast in the form of a 'political cabaret' show, it consists of a string of satirical sketches on the many different evils suffered by Egyptians under Mubarak's rule. But while the metaphor of Egypt as a madhouse, projected in the plays mentioned above, is maintained here, the figure of the 'psychiatrist' undergoes a happy transformation. Rather than an oppressor and torturer, he is presented as a kind of benevolent psychological agitator who actually prods his patients to loudly air their grievances and rebel against oppression. The play ran until the eruption of the revolution on 25 January, 2011 and when it reopened after the fall of Mubarak it had incorporated new scenes that related to this historic event. Based on collective improvisation rather than a fixed text and with an open form that allows for endless removals and additions, Chaiselongue has been able to keep pace with the turbulent political scene since the outbreak of the revolution and reflect the changes in the public mood. No wonder it has played on and off throughout 2011 and has survived well into 2012. With so many plays set in mental hospitals and at least one very popular adaptation of the movie version of Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, it is surprising that Dale Wasserman's 1963 dramatization of the novel has never been made available in Arabic and had had to wait for so long before it was finally aired in Egypt at the American University in Cairo early this month. As drama critic Wade Bradford has rightly noted: 'Compared to the Milos Forman film, the stage play offers more insight into the mind of Chief Bromden ... Bromden's cerebral monologues strengthen the theme of a machine-like society that forces an unnatural, unhealthy conformity upon its members. Also, the stage play feels more like an ensemble piece, rather than a "star vehicle". The result is an emotionally-stirring evening of theater' (http://plays.about.com/b/2009/03/22/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest-stage-version.htm). With a cast of 17 extremely talented, dedicated and highly disciplined young people, a superb artistic crew led by stage and lighting designer Stancil Campbell, costume designer Jeanne Arnold and sound designer Dave Tewfik, and the generous, committed assistance of 'over one hundred students who,' according to the director's notes in the programme, were 'directly involved in mounting One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', Mark 'Coach' Mineart, a new and most welcome addition to the brilliant staff of the AUC Performing Arts Department, did not only give his audience a powerful, alternately funny and profoundly disturbing production and a thrilling, memorable theatrical experience, but has also made a valuable, long overdue contribution to theatre in Egypt. That the play was performed in English does not make it any less a part of the Egyptian theatrical heritage. For, to my mind, any play mounted in Egypt by a predominantly Egyptian group of artists for a predominantly Egyptian audience automatically becomes part of the history and heritage of the Egyptian theatre, even if it is a foreign one, performed in its original language. It is only when seen in the context of the Egyptian performances I mentioned above, as part of a tradition of setting plays in mental hospitals that began in the 1980s, that one can fully appreciate both the artistic, cultural and, indeed, political value of Mineart's production. Staged at a time when Egypt, having just overthrown one repressive, restrictive and conformist regime, or 'Combine', to use Chief Bromden's word, seems in imminent danger of being saddled with an even more oppressive, more mind-crushing one, Dale Wasserman's play cannot fail to hit a chord at a deep, personal level with liberal Egyptians at this moment. It came across as a strong, poignant warning of the waves of darkness that could soon engulf us. The hospital on stage, ruled over the insidious, artificially gracious and brutally vindictive Nurse Ratched (or Ratshit, as the charmingly rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, half Christ and half con-man, abusively calls her), was a concrete image of Thomas Szasz's 'vastly elaborate �ê� control system, using both brute force and subtle indoctrination, which disguises itself under the claims of scientificity.' Watching the performance, I could easily imagine this indomitable figure in her white nurse's coat easily replaced with a bearded Salafi, in a white galabiyya and skull cap, manipulating an equally elaborate control system which, in this case, would disguise itself under the claims of 'religionism', or, rather, 'religiosity'. What a frightful prospect! The end of the performance, however, though emotionally harrowing, with the incorrigibly defiant, infectiously cheerful, energetic McMurphy wheeled in, silent and motionless, in a vegetative state after receiving a lobotomy, is not quite bereft of hope. Though the revolt leader is vanquished, his pupil breaks free to continue defying the 'Combine'. Indeed, I do not think I could have borne the pain and horror of watching Chief Bromden smother the lobotomized McMurphy, in an act of mercy and to rob his oppressors of their victory, crying in anguish all the while, were it not for the immediate emotional release provided by his lifting the massive hydrotherapy console off the floor, as McMurphy had previously urged him to do, and hurling it through the barred window to climb through to freedom. It was an emotionally liberating act, and though we realize that Bromden's freedom is only temporary, that the 'Combine' will soon catch up with him and engage him in battle, we are nevertheless reassured that people, however simple, marginalised, or brutalized, can still resist oppression, conformity, and totalitarianism and defy the forces that seek to demoralise and dehumanize them. This gave me hope for the future of Egypt. Technically, in terms of direction, scenery, costumes, lighting and sound, Mineart's production was clear, uncluttered, seamlessly smooth, alternately harsh and poetic and always powerfully evocative. He achieved what he set out to do. In his Director's Notes, he tells the audience: 'I hope the play transports you today. I hope that like the pages of a good book, the framework disappears and you are taken someplace. Where? Well, that is for you and the Story to work out between you.' And the framework did disappear, at least for this one viewer; and the play did transport me from the insane asylum in Oregon, where the action is set, to several moments in Egyptian history. But powerful as Wasserman's text is, and haunting as the scenery and sound effects were, for this play to work, a strong ensemble cast was absolutely essential. And it is in this respect that Mineart as director should be heartily congratulated. Despite the limited choice age-wise, most of the actors were reasonably suited to their parts in terms of voice, physique, and general mien and acted with conviction, precision and flair. Particularly happy was his casting of Adham James Haddara as McMurphy. I had recently seen Haddara as the 'Vampire' in Frank Bradley's AUC production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest, and before that as 'Vershinin' in Bradley's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters. Seeing him here as the roguish, charismatic, vainglorious but also tender and ultimately vulnerable McMurphy with suitable panache, childish arrogance and affectionate warmth, I became convinced of the immense range of his acting talent. I had also seen Karim Sabry and Mustafa Khalil in Black Forest, There, while Sabry's performance was generally adequate, with fine emotional shadings here and there, Khalil had almost mesmerised me with his stunning performance as the 'Dog' in search of a master and pathetically fawning on Haddara's chillingly smooth 'Vampire'. Here, however, while the part of Charles Cheswick, especially in the shortened, 2-act version of the play Mineart used, did not give Khalil enough scope to display his real acting abilities, the character of Billy Bibbit, the shy, nervous, boyish patient with a painful stutter and a real terror of his mother, allowed Sabry to do just that. But individual performances in this play count far less than smooth, unselfish, rhythmically harmonious ensemble acting. It is no less a credit to the actors than to their director that their ensemble performance was quite convincing, profoundly moving, finely orchestrated and delicately tuned. They gave us a performance that cannot be easily forgotten and I thank them deeply for making me leave the theatre hoping that, after all, Egypt may perhaps just manage to fly over the cuckoo's nest. Dale Wasserman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, based on Ken Kesey's novel of the same name, directed by Mark 'Coach' Mineart, the Malak Gabr Arts Theatre, AUC Center for the Arts, AUC New Cairo, 3-10 May, 2012.
