By Mursi Saad El-Din For most young men and women in Egypt today, particularly in the urban middle classes, marriage has become an intractable economic problem. Whereas in my generation people usually got married in their mid twenties, and in the case of women much earlier than that, nowadays a middleclass woman would be lucky if she lands a husband before she hits 35, or, indeed, before she reaches the age when she can no longer have children. The problem is often discussed in the media and has been thrashed in numberless films, plays and television dramas. Rampant unemployment among university graduates, the scarcity of decent, affordable accommodation away from the family, the rising cost of living and the persistence of the traditional view of marriage as a financial transaction that makes unrealistic and unreasonable demands on the family resources of both bride and groom are generally held responsible for the soaring rate of forced celibacy among people of a marriageable age. Naturally, any play that tackles this problem, exposing its damaging psychological and social consequences, is bound to touch a raw nerve in the audience, no matter how many works on the same theme they have seen before, and it was with this expectation that I went to the Yusef Idris hall in Al-Salam theatre to watch the Youth Company's production of a new play called Al-'Anis (The Spinster). Titles, however, can be deceptive, and The Spinster is a case in point. But you don't realize this until you are halfway through the play. Set in a village in Upper Egypt, as Amr Abdallah's stage design, Gamalat Abdou's consumes and the dialect in which the first words are uttered immediately alert you, it features a lonely, decrepit old woman, called Tibr (meaning gold), who has never married, has lost all her family and has to fend for herself, eking a living out of midwifing, matchmaking, running errands and doing all sorts of odd jobs for the village people. Not only is she underpaid as a rule, as she tells the audience in her opening monologue, but she is also constantly vilified and sneered at for being a spinster, as if it were a social stigma. As Hanan Soliman (impersonating Tibr) bemoaned her fate in a hoarse tremulous voice, pathetically described her endless toil despite her aches and pains, tottered around shakily with a bent back, starting at every sound, the plight of all women in this situation came across vividly and quite poignantly. Tibr's monologue, though sad, is shot through with sparks of humour, particularly when she describes some of her regular, well-to-do customers, dwelling with delicious malice on their inane vanity, pomposity and ridiculous self-delusions. It reveals her as a plucky, plain-speaking woman, unafraid to hurl the truth, however painful or offensive, in the face of her superiours, or to lash out with her tongue when insulted. Nevertheless, she is not above a little deception when the need calls for it. As a matchmaker, she had once or twice foisted ugly brides on unsuspecting, prospective grooms to keep in business and earn a little, sorely needed money. The monologue, however, is soon interrupted by the appearance, in succession, of the characters Tibr describes, and the stories she recalls from memory are enacted before us on stage. First, her childhood playmate, Um El-Sa'd (Fawzia Abu Zeid), now a married woman with many children, enters, gaudily bedecked and heavily painted, to taunt her with her single status, jeer at her childlessness, comparing her to a barren land, and calls her 'aunt' despite their similar ages to further vex her. Tibr sends her off with an abusive harangue. Next, we are treated to a number of short, boisterous sketches that farcically enact some of Tibr's matchmaking adventures. In one of them, having lured a young man (Yehia Hussam) into marrying an ugly girl he had never seen with false reports of her beauty and wealth, Tibr is forced to literally tie him up to prevent his running away when he discovers the truth on the wedding night and, together with the bride's family, drags him kicking and screaming into the bridal chamber and into the eager arms of his rapacious bride (delightfully played by Isabel Kamal in a grotesque vein). Retribution swiftly follows in the next sketch: when Tibr visits the couple the following morning, hoping for some kind of reward from the bride, she is coldly received by the bride's mother (Iman Hamdi), told she has already been paid enough for her troubles and promptly shown the door. Enraged, Tibr retaliates with a long, abusive tirade, in the tradition of popular comedy, tearing the bride to pieces and screaming out her defects for all the world to hear. Hilarious and colourful as this part of the performance was, with a cheerful wedding song blaring in the background and two rural dancers swaying up front, and with Tibr alternately bullying and commiserating with the hapless groom and blessing and cursing the bride in the same breath, not to mention the comic brawl that winds it up, it completely threw the play off course, turning what had originally seemed a tragi- comic monodrama about the suffering of an aged spinster, into a rowdy farce about ugly girls seeking husbands and a cunning matchmaker. Those of us who were prepared to forgive the author and director the long wedding-sequence diversion, and charitably accept it as a kind of comic relief after which the play would revert to its original course and to the theme of spinsterhood emblazoned in its title, were sorely disappointed. As soon as the wedding sequence ends, the play suddenly veers in a completely new direction. The next group of memories, which make up the final part of the play, carry us further back into the past, and show us Tibr as a beautiful young woman, passionately in love with the handsome Hamad who returns her passion and prepares to marry her. However, as Shakespeare said once, 'The course of true love never did run smooth ... So quick bright things come to confusion'. In Tibr's case, the confusion is caused by the government-appointed village Umdah (Mayor) -- an obvious symbol of coercive political authority -- who covets beauty and wants her for himself. When she rejects him and insists on marrying Hamad, the Umdah has him shot during the wedding celebration, before the marriage is consummated. Hamad dies in Tibr's arms while the wailing women dress her in her widow's weeds, and the play ends with her slumped over his body. At the end of the play, one cannot help feeling that in writing it, Ali Abu Salem has fallen between more than the proverbial two stools, producing 3 distinct sections that do not add up to a play. Indeed, if developed, each of these 3 sections could produce a separate play: a realistic monodrama about the grim prospects of lonely, uneducated and impecunious spinsters; a traditional, coarse farce about deceitful matchmakers and ugly brides, with the usual (anti-feminist) valorization of physical beauty above all else thrown in for good measure; and a tragic love story with an implicit political message that condemns all oppressive rulers in the figure of the murderous Umdah. As it stands, The Spinster could be said to be about many things, including the capacity of women to remain heroically faithful to their lovers long after they die and despite many hardships. It is not, however, a play about spinsterhood at all, which makes the author's choice of title a mere commercial gambit. I do not know what any other director would have made of this play. But in the hands of Lubna Abdel-Aziz, its structural faults became even more obvious. Rather than cement the cracks and fissures in the structure, or even paper them over to hide them, Lubna Abdel-Aziz's bumpy direction, with its sharp, abrupt shifts in tone and rugged scene- transitions, its reckless chasing after comic effects and arbitrary insertion of songs and dances, tended to expose and deepen them. Her one saving grace was casting the magnificent Hanan Soliman as Tibr. I first saw Soliman on stage as Lettice, in Emil Shawqi's production of Peter Shaffer's Lettice and Lovage at Al-Hanger in 2002, and was completely bowled over by her performance. I saw her again as the alienated, mentally disturbed and deeply anguished heroine of Nadia El-Banhawi's Ru'a (Visions), in the production Amr Qabil directed at Al-Tali'a theatre, and became convinced that she was one of the most sensitive, gifted and versatile actresses around. Soliman's acting is at once passionate and subtle, graceful and effortless, and she handles the shifts in tone and mood with amazing smoothness and mastery. Never wearing makeup, her face looks almost transparent, like the surface of a limpid pool, revealing the depths of her soul and allowing it to shine through it. It is a great pity that we do not see this enchanting performer on stage more often. That The Spinster, with all its serious faults worked at all as a performance, and was even enjoyable most of the time is a credit to Soliman talent. Her performance held it together, breathed life into it and gave it a semblance of integrity. Al-'Anis (The Spinster), by Ali Abu Salem, directed by Lubna Abdel-Aziz, Youth Theatre Company, Yusef Idris Hall, Al-Salam theatre, July- August, 2009.
