Boomerang

Nehad Selaiha enjoys a revenge melodrama at the Small Floating theatre
It is a sad fact of life that many playwrights have to wait until they go all gray before getting 'discovered' and seeing their plays come alive on the stage. Karam Mahmoud Afifi is one such playwright. I heard of him for the first time when he sent me a copy of his published drama, Wahag Al-'Ishq (Glow of Love) a few months ago to win me over to his side in a fight with the Censor's office over its staging. After reading the play, I could see why the censor would object.
Though the plot is based on an all-too-common theme, particularly in Egyptian movies -- a beautiful young woman sold in marriage by her impoverished family to an old, wealthy suitor (who is here impotent to boot) and eventually falls in love with another and seeks her freedom to marry him -- Afifi's characterization of his heroine, Mona, was more daring than usual. Whereas in most treatments of this idea authors would be (and have been) careful to present the heroine as prudishly chaste and 'good', and insist that her new love affair is thoroughly platonic, with no hint of sex, Afifi stoutly informs the reader in the first scene, which takes place in the studio of Mona's lover, the painter Ahmed, that the couple have been sleeping together for the past four years. Moreover, Mona, a wealthy, mature woman with two children, does not feel guilty for betraying her husband, but rather gloats over the fact and confesses to having had a string of lovers previously by way of avenging what she calls her husband's 'raping' of her in the name of marriage.
Ahmed, however, is a different kettle of fish: they had been at school together for years before drifting apart; and though Mona had really fallen in love once, before she was forced into her hateful marriage, and had even tried to elope with her lover to avoid it but was retrieved by the family, she confesses to Ahmed that she has never loved a man the way she loves him. The fact that her husband is always away on business, and only comes home for a week or two every now and then, had previously facilitated her sexual shenanigans and now allows her to visit Ahmed on a daily basis.
Mona's voluntary sexual promiscuity and her iconoclastic view of sex as being morally legitimate when practiced with mutual desire and consent, regardless of legal contracts and social taboos, are unprecedented in Egyptian drama and must have come as quite a shock to the censors. It is true that her previous affairs were mostly prompted by a combination of revenge and lust; but in giving herself freely to Ahmed she experiences no qualms of conscience and no sense of shame. She comes across in this first scene as a forceful, thoroughly emancipated woman who regards her body as her own and does not care a pin what society or other people think. Her experience as a member of the new, moneyed classes in Egypt has taught her that whereas society would ostracize a woman of her conduct if she were poor, it would always show her respect in public and curry favour with her on account of her wealth, even if it gossiped about her and condemned her behind her back.
Of the two lovers, Mona initially seems the stronger character and her self-confidence and resilience in the face of adversity are set off by Ahmed's diffidence and escapist reclusion. In the first scene, she urges him to get over his horrible, crippling experience as a political prisoner, which had involved torture and rape. She was raped too, she tells him, but that has not broken her spirits; rather than withdraw from the world in shame, as he has done since he was set free, and constantly dwell on the ignominious memory of having cowered before his torturers, uselessly pleading for mercy, as he confesses, she has been active in wreaking her vengeance on the people who had literally tied her up one day and handed her over to her rapist.
What a pity (though, doubtlessly, a great relief to the censors) that soon enough, in fact, in the very next scene, this refreshingly untraditional female character quickly gathered dark shadows and was exposed as a negative, destructive force, as much enslaved by the past as her lover. In that scene, the members of Mona's family are introduced and the nature of her revenge is revealed. Gradually, through their conversation, conduct and a series of stormy confrontations between themselves, then between Mona and each member in succession, we learn that, with the help of a whorish maid and a number of gigolos she employs, Mona has managed to turn her brother, who had hunted her down when she fled with her lover and forcibly brought her back, into a hopeless drug addict, enslaved by the maid who provides him with dope and sex, to debauch her middle aged mother, who had looked passively on while she was raped, turning her into a vulgar, lascivious man-huntress, and reduce her aged father, who had struck the deal with her rapist in the first place, into a ridiculous, lecherous cuckold, vying with his son for the maid's sexual favours.
Mona hates them all and enjoys seeing them squirm before her, and they hate her in turn, and also each other. What keeps them together is their dependence on her husband's wealth, which we soon learn is ill begotten through dealing in narcotics, while Mona stays with her husband only because he will deprive her of the children if she leaves. Like Mona's character, this ugly, repulsive family is unprecedented in Egyptian drama, and their ghoulish greed for the pleasures of the flesh is thoroughly nauseating. That the grimness of this image is unrelieved by any glimmer of human decency makes the whole scene teeter on the edge of melodrama.
Before the end of this scene, however (which, together with the first one, constitutes what is traditionally called in classical drama 'the exposition�, providing the needed information about the situation and characters), 'the complication', which triggers the action proper, sets in. It takes the form of a telegram, which announces that, finally, the husband has decided to give up travelling and settle permanently at home with his family. This spells the end of freedom for Mona and the interruption of her relationship with Ahmed. Distraught, she decides to betray the real nature of her husband's 'business' to the authorities, hoping they will arrest him on landing and rid her of him for good. Ahmed tries to dissuade her, not for the sake of the husband, but because he thoroughly distrusts the authorities and believes them to be the devil's disciples.
Predictably, given the relentlessly dismal nature of the world the play presents, his fears come true. When, against his warning, Mona steps into the 'den' of the 'authorities', she is promptly devoured. And it is in this scene that the play hopelessly slips into melodrama. The same human monster we had seen, in the flashback in the first scene, threatening Ahmed with rape in prison, appears here to terrorize Mona and ends up raping her, but not before revealing to her that not only do the 'authorities' he represents know all about her husband's transactions and give them their blessing, they also know all about her past lovers and present intimate relationship with Ahmed, and have even secretly videotaped them together to use the tapes whenever necessary to blackmail them into total obedience. He also tells her that all the people she has employed in her revenge scheme against her family, which he seems to relish, are in fact agents and spies he deliberately planted in her way. It is as if the 'authorities' in the nightmarish world of the play are not only hell bent on destroying the citizens they rule, but are also keen to get them to destroy each other. By the end of this harrowing meeting, Mona realizes that her vicious revenge scheme against her husband and family has boomeranged and that she has been hoist with her own petard. Shattered, she rushes back to Ahmed's studio and the two, having decided that the world is too corrupt to live in, make a suicide pact and die in each other's arms.
With a character like Mona, as she appears in the first scene, and the play's tight, classical structure (centering initially on one action and consisting of 5 compact scenes spanning 24 hours), Glow of Love had the potential to develop into a gripping, modern tragedy of revenge with a subtle political dimension. Halfway through the play, however, the revenge theme is dropped in favour of a political one that crudely condemns all police states as places where neither love nor human dignity can survive. Of course this political theme was present from the start, but only as a leitmotif, a variation on the theme of patriarchal oppression, and only in relation to Ahmed as a former, active political dissenter. But to spring it upon us suddenly in scene 4, making Mona this time, for no credible reason anyone can imagine, its victim, and thus causing it to appear like the instrument of poetic justice, the means of punishing her for her adulterous affairs and her treatment of her family, was completely disorienting, knocking the bottom out of Mona's earlier, untraditional definition of sexual morality. Was this perhaps the reason why the censors passed the play in the end?
Though sexual violation has often been used since the 1960s in plays and films as a metaphor for political oppression, the representation of the nameless man who symbolizes the 'authorities' in totalitarian regimes in this play as something of a headless sex maniac who has to rape every man and woman in sight was ridiculously naïve and heavy-handed. Besides, this metaphor is openly made in the opening scene in relation to Ahmed, and repeating it in scene 4, in connection with Mona, is not only out of place, but also redundant and seems to serve no purpose except to mechanically precipitate the death of the two 'sinners' and bring the play to an abrupt end. I like to think that maybe the play needed more space to develop and was only deformed by the constricting one- act formula. But even in its present form, the Glow of Love has many positive aspects and qualifies as a promising debut for a writer of talent.
For this debut, the author has to thank director Amr Dawwarah who discovered this text, believed in its value and fought to bring it to the stage. Using extremely simple realistic sets (by Mohamed Gaber) and adequate modern costumes by Gamalat Abdou, and framing the play with a telling song (by lyricist Isma'il Al-Aqbawi, set to music by Ahmed Rustum), bits of which were played during the change of scene blackouts to drive the production's message home, Dawwarah came up with a straightforward, unpretentious production which, except for a few very minor changes, stuck closely to the text. Though the cast sported no stars, it consisted of good, competent actors, some of them with long experience in the theatre. As Ahmed, Hisham El-Sherbeeni gave a convincing, low-key performance calculated to contrast sharply with Magdi Idris's strident caricature of the representative of 'the authorities'; and while Mohamed El-Desouqi, as the Father, and Nahid Isma'il, as the Mother, attempted to inject some humour into their parts, occasionally playing for laughs and inserting colloquial phrases and expressions into the classical Arabic dialogue, Ahmed Ibrahim, as their junky Son, and Abeer El-Tookhi, as the coquettish maid, delivered their parts as straightforward stereotypes.
The real surprise of the evening was Walaa' Farid. I had known her as charming actress in light comedy and children's plays and had seen her sing and dance and bewitch the audience with her cute appearance and loveable presence in countless performances. However, she is the last person I would have cast as Mona in the Glow of Love. Obviously, Dawwara thought otherwise and saw in her more than meets the unprofessional eye. Casting her as Mona was a gamble and he pulled it off. Farid gave a compelling performance which left me wondering if she was the same actress I thought I knew. If the Glow of Love had done nothing but reveal to us the breadth of Farid's talent and her ability to take on serious, complext parts and soar to tragic heights, it would have been well worth all the trouble its author and director had with censorship in order to get it performed.