Nehad Selaiha laughs and commiserates with a Hungarian family transplanted in Egypt It is funny how plays that were once considered avant-garde can seem to some nowadays tame and 'traditional'. Watching Istvan Orkeny's 1967 hilarious and poignant satire Totek (or The Toth Family, as it is known in English) at Al-Hanager last week, I was startled when my neighbour, a well- know theatre scholar and diligent critic, bent his head towards me and mumbled: "This is the 'weakest' so far, don't you think?" He was referring of course to the 3 earlier productions in Al-Hanager's 2nd season of independent theatre launched on 20 March and unfavourably comparing the Egyptian version of Totek, rechristened 'Aelat Tawfiq (Tawfiq's Family), we were watching with them. I didn't agree with him and whispered back, almost reading his mind: "You think it too traditional?' "Um..," he murmured nodding. Of course Orkeny's delightful Totek is very different in style and technique from The Theatre Atelier's Sorry, Your Credit has Run out which opened the season, or La Musica's Women in his Life and Al-Misaharati's Viva Mama which followed. Unlike them, it has a realistic setting, recognizable comic types, a clear conflict, a straightforward storyline, a linear structure and, despite the tragedy at its centre which is ironically never revealed to the characters, a neat end. Its political message too, which condemns military dictatorship, showing how in times of war it grows in ferocity, pretending to care for the people while dominating and terrorizing them and reducing them to willing victims, puppets and automatons, is reminiscent of many Egyptian dramas in the 1960s. Not that military dictatorship and political repression have become quite a thing of the past and are no longer relevant. When the play was discovered and translated by Unsiyya Abul Nasr and published (with an introduction by Fawzi Al-'Anteel) in the General Egyptian Book Organization's Masterpieces of World Drama series in 1981, it became instantly popular with theatre makers and has since been frequently adapted and staged, particularly in the provinces and on the fringe. This may account for the feeling, expressed to me by another critic on another night, that the text has been 'exhausted'. But one does not always go to the theatre looking for something completely novel or wildly experimental. Unlike jokes, good plays that deal with recurrent experiences in human history and do this poignantly, with humour and artistic sophistication as Totek does, never actually become hackneyed; they tend to defy the years and preserve their bloom. Done simply, without gimmicks and with good acting, they can come across as fresh as when they were first performed and strike a relevant chord in people's hearts. Hani El-Mettenawi, the founder of the Society for Theatre Studies and Training Troupe is one of the few young directors left who still have a respect for texts, whether old or new, and put their talents in their service rather than use them as vehicles for showcasing their directorial inventiveness or imaginative prowess. Far from spelling servility and lack of creative initiative, this attitude, which El-Mettenawi imbibed during his years of work with the prestigious Shrapnel independent troupe before he split from it to form his own, sharpens the director's wits and drives him to find the best ways to bring the text home to his audience and make it click. Furthermore, directors like El-Mettenawi who opt for text- based theatre frequently treat their audience to excellent new foreign plays or ones that had never been done in Egypt. Not surprisingly, El-Mettenawi's new troupe made its debut in the 1st Al-Hanager independent theatre season last year (on Monday, 18 February) with a riveting production of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's masterpiece, Oscar and the Lady in Pink, a work of remarkable beauty and poignancy. No one had even heard of the play or its author before that day, but it at once captured the audiences' imagination and moved them deeply, bringing them back time and again to see it. Sensitively translated into colloquial Arabic (by Mohamed Saleh), this delicate, radiant text was elegantly, simply and eloquently directed by Hani El-Mettenawi with charmingly naïve illustrations of scenes from the narrative by Rabab Hakim's, projected on a screen, and strains from Bach's cello concertoes 1, 2 and 3 intermittently playing in the background (See my review in the Weekly, 28 February, 2008.) The same simplicity and eloquence marked the Society's second production. Like Oscar, Totek was rendered into Egyptian colloquial Arabic; but whereas it was deemed unnecessary to reset the earlier play in Egypt, its setting, a children's hospital, being quite universal, here the story (about a simple family that hosts a convalescing army major under whom their son serves during a war in the hope that he would transfer him to a safer post, not knowing that their son was killed in action after the major left, and end up being thoroughly oppressed and almost driven insane by their guest), as well as the setting (a small village) and the characters -- Totek, the fireman and ex-railway employee, his ordinary wife and sharp teenage daughter, the major, the village imbecile who acts as postman, the village prostitute, a mad medical doctor, an equally mad, unjustly sacked ex-academic, a sewage cleaner and the parish priest -- cried out to be transplanted to Egypt. Dramaturge Mohamed Munir did the job quite well, providing a smooth and lively colloquial dialogue, finding the right local equivalents for phrases, proverbs, locations and objects, and replacing the parish priest with the Imam of the village mosque. He, however, decided to make the play even bleaker than it already is. Instead of ending it, like Orkeny, with the enraged Totek marching in and announcing that he has sliced the major with the paper guillotine into four parts so that he and his family can finally have peace -- a grotesque and absurd end which yet gives us temporary relief and some vicarious satisfaction -- Munir left the family frantically making boxes under the watchful eye of the major and trotted out the postman on stage to announce the end of the show. The sets, designed by El-Mettenawi, were extremely simple, even primitive, this being a very low-budget production. Using for walls 3 mobile painted flats with cutout windows and a door, a couple of benches dressed to look like traditional Egyptian sofas and a couple of tables and chairs, El-Mettenawi was able by shifting them around in the brief blackouts to create the different locations required by the action. After a few minutes, you hardly noticed the set; so wonderful were the actors (simply and suitably costumed by Fayza Nawwar) and so absorbing was their exquisite ensemble performance that it would not have mattered had there been no sets at all. Indeed, the cast, though it featured no stars or well-known names, displayed a wealth of comic talent and did more than justice to Orkeny's black farce. Though I enjoyed the performance very much, I found myself at the end hounded by the same question that always crops up in my mind every time I come across this play: why in God's name was Totek given in the English translation the name of Toth, the god of writing, wisdom, learning and the moon in Ancient Egyptian mythology? Istvan Orkeny's Totek, or The Toth Family, Arabic version: Tawfiq's Family, Al-Hanager, 26/3-3/5, 2009.
