Nehad Selaiha encounters a bald Berenice in Cairo and a modern Medea in Alexandria To the best of my knowledge, Racine's Berenice (1670) was first performed in Egypt in May 1994 by a visiting French company hosted by Al-Hanager and the production was directed by Christian Rist. I vaguely remember the production; but judging by what I wrote about it at the time, it seems to have had a tremendous impact on me. This is how I described it in an article published in the Weekly on 5 June that year: "For once, the grandeur, the serenity and sculptured elegance we usually associate with classicism have reached us unmarred by stiffness and rigidity. Curiously, the austere asceticism of the production -- in terms of movement, colour, props and costumes -- and the starkly denuded look of the stage created an intensely rich and haunting emotional experience. The frequent, alternate freezing of the three main actors -- spaced out geometrically in a visual triangle on their raised, intersecting platforms, with a circle of golden light in the centre -- produced a dream-like effect. Whenever they turned their backs on us and froze into stillness -- whether in standing or sitting postures -- one experienced a very real and disturbing feeling that one had only imagined that they had earlier spoken or moved. At moments, the stillness became almost hypnotic, generating waves of unseen energy and one felt as if one was watching their still forms through a haze of intense heat or that they were themselves about to melt into a haze. Solidity and etherealness were magically combined here to create a visual poetry of immense beauty, akin to the poetry of sculpture and architecture. Predictably, in this kind of production where the poetry of form is paramount, plot and character become marginal. We care little about story-line, motive or circumstance. What is communicated to us from the stage is an intensity of pain, caught at its height and frozen in perpetual freshness for all time." I have quoted extensively from that article because it is not available on line (at that time the Weekly was not published on the net) and because it bears directly on Jean-Marc Avocat's recent performance of the same play which I watched at the French Cultural Centre on the 4th of March. As you can see from the above quotation, Rist's Berenice had been delivered in an austerely naked fashion, without any theatrical frills, and at that time I could not imagine anyone beating that production in terms of ascetic frugality. Avocat, however, surprised me by going miles ahead in this direction. A seasoned actor, with a broad vocal range and a meticulous command of tonal variations, he, alone on stage, with nothing but a spotlighted, elegant seat, placed centre stage, and another, more modest one, shadowed and placed on one side, suggesting a backstage area, or the corner of a wrestling ring where the combatants sit to catch their breath, get a drink of water and dry their sweat, Avocat did the tremendous feat of delivering Berenice solo, acting all the parts with ease, grace, conviction and not a single halt in the emotional flow. Here the experience was very much akin to watching a wrestling match; the tension sprang not from anything that had to do with the play, but from our watching an actor taking on a near impossible task, valiantly wrestling with Racine's text and wondering how long his stamina would hold. And Avocat's stamina did hold out and his bald, starkly naked and totally verbal Berenice was a tribute to acting and actors. Within a couple of days I was in Alexandria, at the Jesuit cultural centre to watch the latest production of La Musica independent theatre troupe sponsored by the Goethe Institute as part of a project to introduce new German writers to the international scene. Roland Schimmelpfennig's Die Frau von Fruher (Lady of the Past), translated by Nabil Haffar, seemed deceptively at first like an ordinary, domestic melodrama about a woman coming out of the past to claim her old lover and having to fight with his wife and son to get him back. But long before the whole design of the play dawns upon you, throwing you back across centuries to the Medea myth, the temporal order of the scenes unsettles you. Each scene is first given in a cryptic version, then replayed, taking you back to its beginning, or end, so that the realistic illusion is completely disrupted and you feel as if you are watching a recording of an event managed by an invisible person who keeps twiddling with the tape. Dislodging the sequence of events out of the familiar, realistic, chronological order has an eerie effect very much like Brecht's alienation effect. This technique of upsetting the chronological order of the plot was used before by Harold Pinter in Betrayal. Here, however, it is used to achieve a different effect. I do not know what was going on in Roland Schimmelpfennig's mind when he wrote his play. But my guess is that he suddenly wondered what if Medea, who, in Euripides's play does not die but rises up to heaven in a golden chariot -- what if Medea did not kill her rival as in the myth and came back to life in the 21st century to haunt Jason and his wife? In the play, it is only at the end, when Tina, the girlfriend of Frank's son whom we have seen Romy, the stranger from the past, first seduce and then kill, describes to us how the gift left by Romy had burnt Frank's wife to ashes, that the Medea myth takes over the stage and all that had gone before in the performance neatly clicks into place and comes into sharp and gory focus. Nora Amin, the founder, sole director, and often leading actress of La Musica troupe is inordinately fond of Greek tragedy and all its savage heroines. For her, Clytemnestra, Phaedra and Medea are hallowed icons of female rebellion against patriarchal authority and she actually impersonated Phaedra in a stunning, politically oriented reworking of her myth written by Mohamed Abul Su'oud and directed by Hani El-Metennawi several years ago. Knowing Nora, I could easily understand her passionate enthusiasm for Roland Schimmelpfennig's new rendering of the Medea myth. Such enthusiasm could be easily justified in terms of temperament, ideology and artistry; but in terms of relevance, it does not have one leg to stand upon. As Hamlet said: "What is Hecuba to him or what is he to Hecuba". Likewise, I thought, what is the value of a show that simply tells us that the past will always haunt the present and that a woman's first love will survive long after she or her partner are married? But then, just like Avocat's Berenice, or that episode in Hamlet, topicality and relevance in the strictest sense would be the wrong criterion to apply. Here passion is all that matters, and distilling the essence of suffering and embodying it on stage. Of course, Nora would have fared better with a more sensitive costume designer, more competent actors and a better space. But when all is said and done, suffice it to say that both Avocat's Berenice and Nora's Lady gave us a red-hot taste of passion and a new perspective on familiar topics, using old timber to ignite new fires, and foregrounding the magic of acting, often making us hold our breath in wonder at the versatility and artistry of that bewitching presence called 'a performer'.
