Nehad Selaiha is puzzled by the intrusion of censorship into Laila Soliman's latest theatrical venture at the Hanager After five months of extensive research of censorship in Egypt and one week of intensive discussions of the subject in Lisbon, at the annual conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) which ended on 18 July, I felt I had had enough of it and that it was the last thing I wanted to think about for a long while. Within 2 days of my return, however, and just as I was trying to take in all that had happened at that conference, get back into the rhythm of things here and get over that overwhelming sense of restless emptiness that usually invades one after intense bouts of work and socialization, Laila Soliman called me. She was having trouble (again?!) with the censors over a new production of hers, she said. What for? What is it about? I asked. Fi Khidmat El-Sha'b (At the Service of the People), as her show was originally called before the censors insisted on removing the 'people' from the title to avoid any association with the former slogan of the Egyptian police force, which had clearly stated that: "The Police is at the Service of the People", and which has been replaced with the more ambiguous: "The Police and the People are at the Service of the Homeland" (read 'the State') ---- Fi Khdmat El-Sha'b, which finally became, at the censors' orders, Fi El-Khidma (At Your Service), turned out to be a play Laila Soliman made up out of knocking together two different foreign texts by world renowned authors: Franca Rame's A Mother and Harold Pinter's Press Conference. Though foreign plays are normally less severely censored than local ones, in this case the choice of texts was bound to stir up trouble. The first, Franca Rame's A Mother, is a fiery and poignant dramatic monologue in which the mother of a jailed terrorist voices her shock, airs her grief and grievances and gives her own point of view as to the reasons behind her plight and that of her son -- a very sensitive subject nowadays indeed, and highly topical in view of the increasing crack down on political dissenters, including bloggers, not to mention the recent wave of arrests of leading figures of the banned Moslem Brotherhood organisation. Though the mother's monologue is never sentimental, does not condone the son's killing of a policeman and is often laced with caustic self- criticism and embittered irony, indeed is even funny at moments in a dark, sardonic vein, it firmly pinpoints injustice and corruption as the root causes of terrorism and holds us all responsible for it. At one point in the play she stoutly protests (in Ed Emery's English translation) that "this idea of armed struggle" did not sprout "spontaneously, like a poisonous fungus" in her son's brain, but that it was the result of "Injustice -- Injustice! All over the place: scandals, unbridled corruption; thousands of workers thrown out of work; people without houses; thousands of youngsters alienated and criminalized." She also mentions "the show-trials" that "last for ages, and serve to divert attention from" the crimes, offenses and failures of those in power. And as if that was not enough to put the wind up the censors, the torture of prisoners was also mentioned. To her own question "why not kill them on the spot, as soon as they catch them? Just shoot them in the head," the mother herself answers: "Oh no, of course, that can't be done. Sorry, I keep on forgetting that we live in a democratic country in theory." The second text Laila used was Harold Pinter's Press Conference, a brief, satirical sketch in which Pinter himself took the leading part when it was first presented as part of an evening of sketches on 8 and 11 February, 2002 at the Royal National Theatre in London. In this 4-page political skit (published by Faber & Faber the same year), Pinter exposes the manipulation of culture for oppression under totalitarian regimes and lambastes their suppression of dissent and the freedom of expression in the name of safeguarding the 'cultural heritage' -- a practice all too familiar in 3rd world countries and the Arab world. Our Egyptian censors must have squirmed in their seats at discovering that the fictional minister of culture featured in the play was actually a former head of the secret police in that nameless country and to find him asserting, at the very outset, that there was no contradiction between the two roles. "As head of Secret Police," he explains, "it was my responsibility, specifically, to protect and to safeguard our cultural inheritance against forces which were intent upon subverting it. We were defending ourselves against the worm. And we still are." Questioned about "the nature of the culture" he was proposing, Pinter's minister of culture replies: "A culture based on respect and the rule of law." As for his "present role as Minister of Culture", he believes that "The Ministry of Culture holds to the same principles as the guardians of National Security", and goes on to say" "We believe in a healthy, muscular and tender understanding of our cultural heritage and our cultural obligations. These obligations naturally include loyalty to the free market." And about "critical dissent" he has this to say: "Critical dissent is acceptable -- if it is left at home. My advice is -- leave it at home. Keep it under the bed. With the piss pot. Where it belongs." No wonder the censors were up in arms. Alone, either of these two outspoken and critically daring plays, whether in their original languages or as rendered into Egyptian colloquial Arabic by Zeinab Mubarak, in the case of Rame's monologue, and Mustafa Hashish, in the case of Pinter's Sketch, cannot fail to put any censor's back up. By knitting them together and slightly adapting the Rame text so that all the Italian political allusions and topical references to local incidents and figures were replaced by ones immediately relevant to the current Egyptian scene, Soliman created what amounted to a political bombshell. And I think that what connected both texts in her mind initially and triggered the whole project (and this is only a guess) was a sentence in Pinter's play about children. Asked about "his policy towards children" when he was head of the secret police, the minister of culture says: "We saw children as a threat if -- that is -- they were the children of subversive families" and so, they "abducted them and brought them up properly or killed them -- broke their necks." The son in Franca Rame's monologue who grew up in 'a democratic family' where 'all have been involved in (leftwing) politics at some stage', would have qualified in the opinion of Pinter's minister as belonging to a 'subversive family' and therefore deserved to have his neck broken. Despite the hard time Laila Soliman had with the censors, I think she was really lucky that the production was not banned and that the compromises she had to make stopped at chagrining the title, removing a number of words and sentences and suppressing any mention of the specific job currently occupied in Pinter's play by the former chief of the secret police. It seems that representing ministers of culture on the Egyptian stage has become as much of a taboo as representing the Prophet and other religious figures! Still, the show went on, and for this, part of the credit goes to Huda Wasfi, the bold and mettlesome artistic director of Al-Hanager Centre who is never afraid to stick her neck out in championing freedom of expression and who gave Soliman and her crew throughout the fight with the censors her staunch and unrelenting support. Without her brave stand and the faithful dedication of her staff, I doubt that At Your Service would have seen the light of day. In the performance I watched at Al-Hanager, Soliman opted for a mixture of realism and expressionism, with a touch of the surreal. Using Pinter's Press Conference as a prelude to the mother's monologue, she placed his minister of culture (performed by Nagui Shehata) on a high chair, on top of a switched off television set, holding a magnifying sheet of glass in front of his face, so that he looked quite grotesque, like a pigmy with a giant's head, while huge, odd-looking puppets on wheels, equally grotesque, like monstrous travesties of humans (designed by Walid Tahir), milled around him or stopped still, pushed around by obviously deformed men and women, like their doubles, who talked mechanically, in metallic voices, and moved like robots. Sa'd Samir's lighting and Adham Hafiz's electronic music accentuated the surreal, nightmarish atmosphere of the scene. When the play moves on to the mother's monologue, which is delivered realistically, with verve, conviction and telling tonal variations by Amira Ghazala, in a plain and faded house dress that matched the grim and forbidding colour-scheme of the whole visual aspect of the show, the sense of grotesquerie, of being trapped in a fearful, lurid nightmare, is maintained by keeping the sinister minister on his high chair, with his back turned to us, as well as the deformed journalists and their weird puppets in full view the whole time, albeit in the shadows, on the fringe of the circle of light which frames the mother. Occasionally, some of them stepped forward, into the light, intruding upon the mother's monologue to represent 'the powerless, sleeping, stupid masses' who condemn her son, absolving themselves of all responsibility for his crime, the prison officers who harass and humiliate her when she goes to visit him, or other characters in her narrative; and in one startling moment, in the section in which she recounts her ghastly dream of her son's trial, the minister suddenly swivels his chair to face her, impersonating the judge who asks her to persuade, or, rather, pressurize her son emotionally to turn informer in return for a less severe sentence. In this way, the connection between the two source plays was firmly kept up throughout, creating a powerful drama that provided a different take on terrorism and, for once, gave voice to the horror, suffering and searing doubts of the thousands of its victims that the media, and all of us, always ignore and forget -- namely the mothers and relatives of terrorists. At Your Service, however, is tricky, particularly in the context of Egypt today, where the only terrorists seem to belong to Islamic movements. On a superficial level of reception, which ignores its technique, with its many alienation effects, it can be easily misunderstood by the unwary spectator as a sympathetic justification and/or explanation of Islamist terrorists. This was a trap that Laila Soliman deftly avoided by casting Amira Ghazala, an expatriate Egyptian actress who has been living away in Germany for years, as the Mother. Though Ghazala looked fittingly distraught and pathetically thin and emaciated, the image of grief and sorrow, reminding me fleetingly of that gaunt face in Kokoshka's famous painting, 'The Scream', try as you might, you could not relate her by any stretch of the imagination to the pictures of the mothers of terrorists you occasionally see in the Egyptian media. Vocally too, though she spoke in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, she sounded unfamiliar, using speech rhythms and pitches that you seldom hear in daily life whether in the lower or middle class circles. The effect was to distance the character emotionally to a certain degree, leaving some room for reflection, as Brecht would say. Naturally, some members of the audience found this disorienting and wished for a more straightforward, unproblematic emotional approach that dispensed with what they thought was the director's technical gimmickry -- meaning the grotesque puppets, the high chair, the robot-like chorus and the eerie lighting and soundtrack. This, however, would have made At Your Service a different show, and one, at least from the point of view of the present writer, ideologically objectionable. Soliman's message was more complex: an invitation to reflect, to try to understand and consider other points of view, those of the culprits and the victims. It was also a political statement condemning all forms of terror and all the dark forces that destroy the lives of individuals and plunge the world in a nightmare of violence. This message informs all the work Laila Soliman has done so far as director, dramaturge and playwright and makes her one of those wonderful theatre makers that are destined to always fall foul of censors.
