Obituary: Exit great theatre maker Theatre director and cultural mediator Hanaa Abdel Fattah (1944-2012) died on 19 October at the age of 68 I met Hanaa Abdel Fattah for the first time in April 1964, but I knew him by name and voice long before that date. For years he had been a household name thanks to a long-running radio drama serial about the daily life of an ordinary middle class Egyptian family in which he played the youngest son. The serial (The Family of Marzouq Effendi) was broadcast daily as part of a morning show targeting housewives and, indeed, non-working women of all ages, married or otherwise. A regular radio actor from his tender years, with occasional appearances in films, including Yusef Chahine's Bab El-Hadid (The Railway Station) and Salah Abu Seif's Al-Fetewa (The Bully), Hanaa naturally went on to join the acting and directing department of the Theatre Institute in the Academy of Arts. He was in his third year when we were first brought together by a theatrical event jointly mounted by his institute and the English department of Cairo University to celebrate the third centenary of Shakespeare's birth. The event was to consist of a number of key scenes from Shakespeare's plays to be performed by students of the English department, plus an abridged version of an Arabic translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream to be acted by students of the Theatre Institute. Though I belonged to the English Department and was in my second year then, I put forward to join the Midsummer cast. I auditioned for Hermia, and Hanaa, who was cast as Lysander, was enthusiastic and overrode the director's objection that I was an 'outsider'. Hanaa was something of a star then, with plenty of acting experience as well as 3 years professional training behind him; and yet, he was gentle, quiet, modest and unassuming. His friendly attitude soon removed my awe of him, and his many valuable tips, always courteously, almost apologetically given, together with his warm encouragement and unflagging support won me the part and laid the foundation of a long, solid friendship. It was a proud evening when I stood opposite him on the stage of El-Hakim theatre in Emad Eddin Street (now defunct) and has since been one of my most cherished memories. The warm friendship we struck up during rehearsals lasted till the day he passed away. But how I wish we had seen more of each other and shared more experiences together. Unfortunately, our lives moved in different directions, keeping us apart for over 20 years. I left Egypt for England in 1966, the year we both graduated, and he remained, joining the theatre department of the Cultural Palaces organization (Mass Culture then). For the next 8 years, before he left for Poland on a scholarship to study theatre, he directed student productions at both Cairo and Ein Shams universities and many others in the provinces. His most remarkable, pioneering and justly celebrated achievement in those years was his launching of 2 amateur theatrical troupes, the first, made up of illiterate peasants, in the village of Dinshaway (also spelt Denshawai or Dinshwai, famous for the British atrocity committed there in June 1906 against Egyptian peasants falsely accused of assaulting British officers), and the second, made up of miners and front-line soldiers in the city of Hurghada, when he was head of of the cultural palace there for 2 years. In both cases, he directed the troupe in simple, political plays, like Yusef Idris's realistic Cotton King, which he staged in a barn in Dinshaway, or in collectively improvised, semi-documentary plays, drawn from the history of the place, and/or expressive of the problems faced by its inhabitants. In such works, and indeed in all the productions he staged in this period, he displayed a strong bent for experimentation, coupled with a desire to bring theatre closer to the lives of the people and their daily struggles and conflicts. In 1974, Hanaa went to Poland where he spent the next 12 years, getting an M. Phil then a PhD in theatre from the University of Warsaw, followed by an M. A. in theatre directing from the Polish Academy of Arts. During those years, he also taught Arabic theatre at Warsaw University, successfully directed a number of plays, including Alfred Farag's Lazy Buqbuq, translated into Polish, and, most important of all for his subsequent career in Egypt and his future happiness, met, loved and married the beautiful, intelligent Dorota Samolinska, who became his life-long companion, closest friend and advisor and generously supportive work-partner. Theirs was a marriage of true minds and kindred souls. By 1986, both Hanaa and his family and I and mine were back in Cairo and thenceforward I followed his work with unabated interest and profound respect and admiration. In that year, he founded an experimental theatre troupe at the Cultural Palaces' Manf Hall, directing it in performances that relied almost exclusively on the bodies, voices, movement and energies of the actors and clearly reflected the influence of Grotowski and similar Polish directors. A vivid dramatization of Ahmed Abdel Mu'ti Higazi's poem The Citadel Massacre was followed by a powerfully atmospheric rendering of Saadallah Wannus's parabolic The Elephant, Oh King of All Time and Mahmoud Diab's experimental peasant drama, Harvest Nights. The launching of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET) in 1988 marked the beginning of a new line of activity for Abdel Fattah, adding to his many roles �ê" as experimental director, theatre activator, critic and actor �ê" a new one as cultural mediator. From the first edition until the very last one in 2010, he was indefatigable in promoting knowledge of the Polish theatre in Egypt, suggesting the figures to be invited and translating and moderating their presentations when they arrived, assisting at workshops conducted by visiting Polish artists, translating Polish plays and important critical and theoretical works on theatre and writing illuminating reviews of guest Polish performances. Indeed, one can safely say that until September, 1991, when at Hanaa's recommendation the CIFET hosted a Polish show called Humidity (or Moisture), devised and directed by Leszek Madzik and presented by the Scena Plastycana Company of the Catholic University of Lublin, no one had ever seen a Polish performance in Egypt and very few knew anything about Polish theatre. Though Grotowski's classic, Towards a Poor Theatre was translated into Arabic by Samir Sarhan in 1968 and included in his book New Experiments in Theatre, it had remained largely neglected until the beginning of the 1990s and the arrival of Polish theatre on the Egyptian scene. To sustain the interest in Polish theatre aroused by Humidity and provoke Egyptian theatre-makers to further rethink and question their concepts, methods and tools, Hanaa Abdel Fattah arranged for the legendary Josef Szajna to be among the honorees in the 1992 CIFET edition and to take part in a symposium on theory and practice in experimental theatre. He also arranged for Krzysztof Domagalik, one of Grotowski's students, to a give a series of video-lectures on the work of Grotowski, Szajna and Kantor in the same edition, undertaking all the translation work and providing extra information and illuminating comments into the bargain. The series proved highly popular and bolstered the new critical interest in Polish theatre. When the issue of the Theatre Magazine dedicated to that year's CIFET appeared, it featured many translations, studies and portraits of Polish theatre artists by Hanaa Abdel Fattah. From that time onward, the work of leading Polish writers and directors became one of the major sources of inspiration for young Egyptian theatre-makers who wanted to revitalize the craft, and guest shows from Poland invariably excited frantic interest and wild admiration, often causing furious rioting at the venues where they played. It is thanks to Hanaa Abdel Fattah that CIFET audiences could enjoy over the years such stunning, breathtaking productions as the Centre of Theatrical Practices' Carmina Burana, directed by Wkodzimierz Staniewski in in 1996; For You the Way, Fin, and Caligula, all by the St. I. Witkiewicz Theatre (popularly called Witkacy Theatre) and all directed by Andrzej Dziuk, in 1997, 1998 and 2000 successively, and the Theatre-Cinema's Dong, devised and directed by Zbigniew Szumski, which opened the CIFET in 2000. Outside the CIFET, Hanaa found in Al-Hanager centre a healthy work environment where he could combine his roles as creative theatre-maker, activator, educator and cultural mediator. In 1991, the year the centre opened, he assisted Josef Szajna in a scenography and directing workshop he conducted there at the invitation of Hoda Wasfi, the centre's artistic director, and 5 years later, in 1996, Hanaa was back assisting with another Polish workshop on stage and costume design, conducted by Janusz Sosnowski, and directing the participants at the end of it in his own translation of Bruno Jaslenski's The Mannequins' Ball. The 5 years separating the 2 workshops were truly hectic, full of bustle and activity. In those years Hanaa successively directed at Al-Hanager the top winners in the 1992 and '93 rounds of the Mohamed Taymour annual new-playwrights-competition �ê" namely, Sa'id Haggag's A Special Celebration in Honour of the Family and Ayman Abdel Maqsood Rizq's. A Very Rowdy Night, was busy teaching at his old Theatre Institute where he was appointed professor of acting and directing in 1992, served as artistic director of the newly established Al-Ghad experimental theatre company (from 1993 to '94) and taught some courses as visiting professor at the theatre department of Sultan Qaboos University in Oman during the 1995 and '96 academic years. After The Mannequins' Ball, Hanaa's association with Al-Hanager, where he held no formal, permanent position, began to fade as more and more directors, young and old, flocked to it and jostled for a niche to work. He turned his face to the state-theatre sector, but there he sadly found that he was regarded as an outsider. He had always worked on the fringe, with amateurs and students, in university and regional theatre and did not belong to the state-theatre fold. However, he was allowed in 1998 to stage his own Arabic translation of Catherine Hayes's searing Skirmishes at the Yusef Idris Hall in Al-Salam Theatre, with live music (for piano, cello, and clarinet) composed by his equally gifted brother, Intisar Abdel-Fattah. It was an unforgettable theatrical experience. In the following year, after much ado and endless obstacles and hurdles, he directed Mohamed Salmawy's Salome's Last Dance at the National. And that was as far as his cooperation with the state-theatre organization went. He did no more productions there as far as I know. However, it is consoling to remember that before the 1990s ended, Hanaa deservedly got the Arts State Award. In the first decade of the new millennium, Hanaa directed very few plays. The earliest was Sanduq El-Dunya (Chest of Miracles), in 2000 �ê" a collage of many oriental theatrical traditions, plus extracts from two modern poetic dramas on religious themes (Salah Abdel-Sabour's Murder in Baghdad and Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi's Al-Hussein as Rebel), performed in Polish by the actors of the Witkacy Theatre at Al-Salam theatre during the company's visit to Egypt with a new production of Caligula. This curious, one-night venture was prompted, as Hanaa confessed in his programme note, by the attempt to "find values which are common for both Arab and Polish theatre," and to rediscover one's own culture and revise one's "subjective attitude" to it by projecting it in a different context and viewing it through the eyes of the other. There was also the curiosity as to what the other would make of it. In short, it was an exercise in cultural mediation, exchange and interaction (see my review of the play in 'Poles apart', Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, 30 November, 2000, Issue No. 510). Alfred Farag's Ali Janah Al-Tabrisi, a student production directed for the AUC (the American University in Cairo) in 2009, was to prove Hanaa's last and seems in retrospect to have been meant to bring him back, full circle, as he neared the end of his journey, to his early beginnings in university theatre. In the last 10 years of his life, Hanaa and Dorota dedicated themselves almost exclusively to translating the masterpieces of Polish literature into Arabic. They worked hard and ceaselessly, despite his failing health, as if in a race with time, with only occasional, brief breaks, when Hanaa did an acting job in cinema or television serials. I know of no other individuals, Egyptians or Poles, who have done as much, or half as much to promote cultural dialogue between Egyptian and Polish artists and writers and provide the necessary groundwork and knowledge it badly needed. One reason why they pursued their self-appointed task with such loyalty and passionate dedication was that, for them, cultural dialogue was an existential need, a daily reality and fact of life. It happened every moment within the family and could only stop with death. Happily, the couple's exertions were crowned with the Polish Literary Syndicate [ZAiKS] Prize, the International Theater Institute (ITI) award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between Poland and the Arab world, the Egyptian State Award of Merit in the Arts, and, finally, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs Culture Award, which boasts among its former recipients such distinguished figures as the Italian author and theatre director Eugenio Barba, the founder of the Odin Teatret in Norway, German journalist Martin Pollack, and Chinese translator Yi Lijun. I was present when Hanaa received this last award at the house of the Polish ambassador in Cairo some months ago. The ceremony was held in the garden, just before sunset, with birds flying overhead to their homes in the trees of Zamalek. Hanaa looked extremely, painfully frail; but he was happy, very happy, and quite cheerful. He spoke long and lovingly of his wife, telling us how she completely bowled him over and totally captivated him, body and soul, as soon as he saw her, and dwelt with affectionate gratitude on all she and her father and family did for him when a stranger in Poland and what she had been to him and done for him since. I will always remember Hanaa as he looked that afternoon, in that garden scene, with all his beloved family, close friends and old colleagues around him, happy in their affection and in the knowledge that they were genuinely proud of him and of his achievements. In the annals of the Egyptian theatre, however, Hanaa will be remembered as a force of innovation and rejuvenation in the post-1960s Egyptian theatre, as a liberating energy that helped to revolutionize theatrical practices and concepts in Egypt and inspired many artists to cross boundaries, search for new routes and explore new horizons. He was a man that left the world, in his case the world of theatre and culture, better than he found it. Can anyone aspire to more? By Nehad Selaiha
