Nehad Selaiha attends an unusual funeral at the Creativity Centre I never thought funerals could be such fun. But then, not every funeral has Khalid Galal as director. He has a keen eye for the ludicrous and an eerie knack for squeezing laughter out of the most lugubrious situations and gruesome events. Parody and the conventions and routines of popular comedy, including the arts of clowning, are his tools, and he often uses them to transform his material -- be it history, a classical text, the events of daily life, or current topics in the news, into carnivalesque pageants of great ebullience. Invariably, however, the boisterous vivacity has a sharp satirical edge and bespeaks a robust critical intelligence alive to the threats and challenges that face his generation. This could perhaps account for the elusive strain of sadness, the vague sense of loss, the tinge of sorrow that, not infrequently, floats up to the surface of his spectacles, momentarily dimming their sparkling wit and bubbling humour. And because he is a born spectacle-maker, he is at his best working with a huge cast where all have equal parts, and his favourite theatrical mode is the one nearest to that of the parade -- namely, the variety show. Though he always writes the final script for a performance, it is usually the product of a collective effort involving the whole cast, in this case, the members of the second acting workshop at the Studio of the Creativity Centre which he runs. He begins with an idea or an image which he allows his cast to develop through improvisation -- a process which can take months of creative rehearsals and brainstorming. In the case of the present production, Qahwa Saada (Unsweetened Turkish Coffee), it lasted for 8 months, at the end of which Galal found himself with 12 fat notebooks closely written over with all the improvised stuff. It was then his job to cull the best sketches, refine them, and give them a meaningful form. In Qahwa Saada, the dizzyingly fast changes that have lately overtaken Egyptian society and culture, and what they predict for the future, formed the generative idea and eventually yielded the strong, central, unifying image of a funerary gathering signified in the title. Though many people drink it at all times, unsweetened Turkish coffee, usually served in tiny cups, is primarily associated in the minds of Egyptians with death and mourning. In the reception following a Muslim funeral, whether held at home, in a marquee on the street, or in a special hall adjacent to a mosque, the mourners are always ritualistically served this black, bitter-tasting, thick liquid while they gossip or listen to the Qur'an. But whose funeral is it? Who is the dear departed? I wondered as I walked into the Creativity Centre in the Opera grounds. The answer came slap on in the first scene, which I later christened in my mind "The Burial of the Dead", after the title of the first movement in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. For, indeed, by the end of the show, the world portrayed on stage, though extremely farcical, seems a veritable wasteland of the kind Eliot describes, and the metaphor is enhanced by direct quotations from that text, as I shall point out later. In this opening scene, the 35-strong cast, all clad in black, walked into view, singly or in couples, in bluish lighting, amid clouds of smoke, and slowly advanced to the edge of the stage, in measure to a sad, mournful tune, and there paused, wailing and weeping, to lay down something they carried, as if lowering a corpse into a grave. Only what they consecrated to the ground were not people, but old objects and pictures: an ancient radio set, a manual coffee-grinder, a traditional low table for eating while sitting on the floor, a lattice window, a primitive, earthenware water jug, an old-fashioned, bulky tape recorder, a mantel clock, several billboards of vintage Egyptian movies (such as Shadi Abdel-Salam's The Night of Counting the Years, Salah Abu Seif's The Second Wife, and Hussein Kamal's A Touch of Fear ), a reproduction of one of Mahmoud Said's famous paintings, an old shot of a sailboat on the Nile and a host of black-framed photos representing some of the most emblematic figures in modern Egyptian culture including, Um Kulthum, Naguib El-Rihani, Naguib Mahfouz, Tawfiq El-Hakim, Saad Zaghloul, Talaat Harb, Layla Murad, Zeinat Sidqi, Salah Jahin, Fuad El-Muhandis, Ahmed Rami, Mohamed Abdou, Abdel Halim Hafiz, Sanaa Gamil, Karam Metaweh and Soad Husni. The scene ends with the weeping mourners throwing red roses on what they have metaphorically interned and retreating into darkness. The lights remain a few seconds on this cultural graveyard then black out. When they come on again, we see the mourners sitting or standing rigidly at the back, holding small cups of coffee in their hands, and slowly raising them in unison to their lips while the voice of Um Kulthum fills the hall with her famous 1950s' song, "My eyes have got accustomed to seeing you" -- the 'you' palpably referring to the objects just buried and the vanished way of life they once represented. This short scene will be repeated several times in the course of the show, with suitable variations in the soundtrack, acting both as a refrain and a silent, reproachful comment. Formally, it functions as the thread on which all the sketches are strung and linked together. While the song continues, the lights dim on the mourners at the back and pick out a group of women downstage, expressing their rapturous admiration for the singer in such familiar words as 'beautiful', 'wonderful', 'delightful', 'adorable', etc. Suddenly, however, the tune and the whole mood changes; instead of Um Kulthum, we hear a rough, rasping voice, screaming out a silly raucous song; the gentle, demure ladies transform into writhing and squealing monkeys; and language turns upside down or back to front, with ugliness, obscenity and vulgarity becoming the highest terms of praise these girls can find. What's happened? The next sketch, after a momentary blackout, tells you that, without a moment's warning, we have been jolted from the fifties more than half a century forward. The sketch is a television chat show in which a poet, surrounded by a covey of cheering females in weird wigs, reminisces about an old poetry recital held at the Book Fair in 2008. This temporally sets the sketch and the ones that follow at some point in the foreseeable future. By that time, Egyptian Arabic, as we speak it today, though hilariously burlesqued in the enactment of the remembered 2008 poetry recital, will have been thoroughly corrupted, deteriorating into bizarre, cacophonous sounds the meaning of which one can only guess at from the facial expressions and gestures of the speaker. At the end of the show, the lights are back up on the mourners, sipping their coffee, and listening with us to Salah Jahin's warm and clear voice, reciting one of his own priceless quartets. Then follows a sequence of three sketches in which the domination of Egyptian media and art by oil-rich Arabs is sarcastically caricatured and bitterly lambasted. In the first, a popular Egyptian television serial is reproduced in the dialect and body language of the Gulf Arabs at the order of a Gulf Arab viewer; in the second, a Gulf Arab producer rehearses a drama serial with Egyptian actors about the Egyptian 1952 revolution, giving himself the part of Nasser, attributing its success to a mysterious Arab hero from the Gulf, by the name of Nawwaf El-Ghamdi, and changing history out of recognition. In the third and last, an Egyptian singer with a beautiful voice is up for sale at an auction, with two Gulf Arab potentates leading the bidding and finally forcing her to change her song and switch to a Gulf tune. After a momentary return to the mourners and their coffee-drinking ritual, the show turns its satirical gaze homeward, taking up, one after the other, some of the most salient problems that face Egyptian society today and farcically exaggerating them: the religious hypocrisy of the new class of upstart businessmen and the dangerous coalition of money and religion; the rising cost of marriage which forces young people into long, secret, fruitless liaisons or condemns them to lifelong celibacy and sexual frustration; the chronic shortage of bread; the architectural anarchy and neglect of beauty which has disfigured the face of Cairo and other Egyptian cities; the disintegration of a once powerful local film industry and its invasion by moneyed ignoramuses and unconscionable charlatans; the deterioration of the educational system and the general amnesia among young people regarding their history; the worsening economic crisis which has made it impossible for most people to find a home of their own, seek medical help, or even bury their dead, has driven some parents to sell their daughters under the guise of marriage and has caused waves of illegal immigration across the Mediterranean, often ending in disaster. But, painful as they are, these problems are unfailingly translated into compelling theatrical metaphors and highly inventive and witty sketches. A memorable example is the sketch where a group of young women embroider a wedding dress mounted on a mannequin and are surrounded by four dancing couples. When the dancing women complain, one by one, that they have grown tired of dancing and slump into the arms of their partners like rag dolls, we suddenly discover that the group busy with the bridal gown have become old women, extremely short-sighted and with trembling hands. Other unforgettable scenes include: the dying grandfather trying to dictate his will to his culturally illiterate grandchildren who consistently misunderstand him and misinterpret his words; the film audition scene where the actors take off famous movie stars; the old woman in a wheelchair, nostalgically watching black and white slides of an elegant, old Cairo on a screen which soon becomes her shroud when she dies after lamenting the disappearance of a gracefully way of life ; the long queue of grown men waiting at the door of a female civil servant (performed by a male in drag) to be breastfed after a prominent Islamic scholar issued a fatwa, or formal legal opinion, to the effect that men and women who are not married, or related by blood, can only work together in the same place if the women suckle their male colleagues five times until they are quite full, making them through this act into virtual sons; and the fight over the tray of bread which ingeniously parodies the antics of super comedian Adel Imam in a famous revenge movie. Qahwa Saada comes across as a rollicking roller coaster; but underneath the glittering wit and scintillating comedy, it carries a prophecy of doom and gloom which is couched in a quotation from a literary source and aired, albeit indirectly, in two scenes half way through the piece. Though the words of the prophecy come from "The Fire Sermon" in Eliot's The Waste Land, the way they are arranged was the work of Iraqi playwright and director Qassim Mohamed. In his Masks, Fabrics and Fates, a highly intertextual composition, drawing on many sources, he picked out some lines from the third section of Eliot's famous poem, entitled "The Fire Sermon", and rearranged them to read as follows: I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts... I cannot connect Nothing with nothing... I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead... Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him... I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene and foretold the rest... Fortunately for Qahwa Saada, when Masks was staged by Hani El-Mettenawi at Al-Hanager in 2003 (scooping the best ensemble performance award in the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre that same year), Amir Salah Eddin, a member of Khalid Galal's acting workshop at the Creativity Centre Studio, was one of the actors. When improvisations for Qahwa Saada started, Tiresias's speech in Fabrics came to his mind and Khalid Galal found it voiced the thoughts of the mourners as they 'perceived' the present and 'foretold' the future and kept it in. Salah Eddin delivers it as a speech he is preparing for the film audition before that sketch begins, and repeats it at its end, after he is rejected by the producer despite his talent and, instead, assigned the demeaning role of bill-board bearer. Alone on stage, and thoroughly embittered, he delivers it with passion, making it reverberate through the whole play. Qahwa Saada ends on a somber note with a scene which one could aptly call, after the fourth section of The Waste Land, "Death by Water". In this scene, the corpses of the Egyptian young men who were driven out of their country by need and drowned off the coast of Italy, near Palermo, remember their past lives, then hug the sand and sky and finally find peace. It was as if this intensely poignant, poetic scene was directly inspired by Eliot's description of the drowned Phoenician sailor who, "a fortnight dead, / Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss. /A current under sea / Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell /He passed the stages of his age and youth/ Entering the whirlpool." When this scene ends and the corpses disappear, the mourners (who had also, all along, been the players -- a feat of stamina and split-second timing) advance down stage en masse and hold out to us their cups of bitter Turkish coffee in silence, as if asking us to share their grief. It was a stunning end to a stunning show. Qahwa Saada (Unsweetened Turkish Coffee), constructed out of the cast's improvisations and directed by Khalid Galal, the Creativity Centre, 2 --17 June, 2008.
