Nehad Selaiha enjoys an Egyptian take on the Greek Antigone myth set in Upper Egypt Broad, black steps, swept upwards from the audience level to a small, raised platform at the back, dressed in a pile of sack cloth arranged to suggest a terrace in a rugged hill, with the tips of the material pinned to a white wall at the back, sporting a crescent, to shape its jagged top. Upstage right (from the audience's view), a step lower than the platform level, you saw a small, semi-circular partition made of reeds. Facing it, on the other side, was a wooden, lattice work screen, of the old, traditional type, with a pale blue male galabiyas, which will become dramatically functional later on, draped on one of its sides. Downstage right, a tiny, rough table, more like an improvised shelf, stood, with an antiquated radio set, a battered, kettle and a few glasses on top and a couple of water pipes underneath. A few wicker chairs would be brought in every now and then by the actors playing the clientele of this rural café or tea shed. Facing it, on the left, sat the folk singer, Sheikh Badr, and his band, with a stretch of colourful khayyamiya behind them suggesting a traditional marquee. The auditorium too carried a hint of this primitive, rural atmosphere in the form of the long, roughly upholstered, backless benches (of the kind provided for guests at rural celebrations) used to seat part of the audience. This was the set devised by Ayman Abdel Mon'im for Azza El-Husseini's Ta'm Al-Sabbar (A Taste of Aloes), the 4th production in Al-Hanager's season of new plays at Rawabet. To successfully design a full-fledged, realistic play which, nevertheless, requires a special quasi-mythical atmosphere, has a cast of over two dozen players, and demands a certain kind of cinematic flow despite its many scene changes, is quite a challenge to any scenic designer. But to do it in a cramped, primitively equipped space like Rawabet needs exceptional imaginative flair. El-Husseini's project of knocking together both Sophocles's and Jean Anouilh's versions of the Antigone myth, kneading into the new mixture the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris and the biblical one of Cain and Abel, and casting the lot into the an Upper Egyptian hot furnace -- and all on a budget of twenty-thousand pounds -- was recklessly, thrillingly ambitious. Such recklessness is not uncommon in the free theatre movement. That it requires months of arduous work, endless sessions of brainstorming, and many sleepless nights trying to work out ingenious solutions to what appears like impossible problems does not seem to bother the independent theatre troupes. Their courage is humbling, and their commitment restorative. Ayman Abdel Mon'im's set was brilliant, economical, efficiently functional and poetically evocative. But it would not have worked without Abu Bakr El-Sherif's sophisticated lighting which sensitively marked the change of mood and location and effected the right transitions between the worlds of dream and reality, of ancient myth and familiar everyday life. In this respect, Iman Salaheddin's recorded incidental music and Sheikh Badr's live singing and the music of his folk band were a valuable asset, helping to orchestrate the flow of the story, highlighting its emotional shifts, and eloquently filling in the silences in the dialogue. Everything seemed to work in harmony according to a preconceived plan: the eloquent, predominantly black and white visual aspect, the simple, traditional costumes of Upper Egyptians, both indoors and outside, and the stirring old tunes, like vaguely remembered lullabies and nursery rhymes, played in seemingly lulling, repetitive tempos, but in calculated pitches and rhythms to suit the mood and give you the feeling of something familiar, yet strange, ordinary, yet legendary -- a vivid here and now which yet seems ancient, as if dredged out of the sand where it lay buried for centuries and wrenched out of the folds of an old, collective human memory. While the set, costumes, music, verbal texture and the accent used by the actors clearly referred you to a specific place, the drama carried you across vast, nebulous, temporal spaces. Work on A Taste of Aloes started five months ago. When Hoda Wasfi, the Hanager artistic director, decided at the end of last year to mount a special season of new productions by independent troupes and commissioned seven of the best and oldest ones, including El-Husseini's Al-Ghagar (Gypsies) troupe, to provide them. Azza, who has lately displayed a predilection for the classics of world drama, staging Ibsen's The Wild Duck in 2006, decided she wanted to have a go at Antigone. Her Antigone, however, would be an Egyptian from the deep south -- a Sa'idiyya (Upper Egyptian) Antigone. The idea of resetting an ancient Greek tragedy in rural Egypt had been successfully attempted before. Indeed, Ra'fat El-Dweri's reworking of Sophocles's Electra in Al-Waghish (The Pest) had alerted many to the similarities in ethos, emotional responses and metaphysical assumptions between old Greece and rural Egypt and has since led some to believe that the tragedies of the former are best received, understood and appreciated when transplanted in the latter. It is then that their characters become alive and their themes lively and relevant. El-Husseini, however, though a gifted actress and director, is no writer. And so, she went and did the right thing, starting a writing workshop in which she roped in the talents of Sayed Al-Ginnari, Attiya El-Dardeeri and Khalid Abdel Samee'. Besides records of the old myth and the treatments of Sophocles and Jean Anouilh, this gifted trio used as source material for their final text not only the Isis/Osiris and the Cain/Abel myths, as I mentioned above, but a wealth of old, funerary chants and lamentations and folk songs. In their hands, Creon became a ruthless, power-obsessed, feudalist lord called Diab, after the anti- hero in the Beni-Hilal folk epic. The name, which derives from the Arabic root Deeb, meaning wolf, suggests a ravenous, perfidious nature. Unlike in the old Greek myth, this new Creon is Oedipus's brother, not his brother in law, and, like Set in the ancient Egyptian Osiris myth and the biblical Cain, is a fratricide. But Diab also kills a brother in law, the husband of his sister Sitt El-Dar (literally 'mistress of the house') when he dares to claim his wife's inheritance. Though she knows of the two murders, of her brother and husband, she is intimidated into silence and seeks solace in looking after Diab's son (Wardan, i.e. the rose-tender, Haemon in the Greek myth), who loses his mother early, and the four orphaned children of her other brother, Zeidan, or Oedipus/Osiris. Again, the choice of name is here significant. Zeidan derives from the root Zad which, as a noun, means food and as a verb means to grow and become plentiful. Zeidan, the father of this new Egyptian Antigone was, as his hired murderer admits, a good man, like Osiris, and carried nothing of Oedipus's incestuous stigma. Curiously, however, though the myth of Osiris is recounted by Sit El-Dar to Antigone (here called Warda, i.e. Rose) and her sister, Ismene/ Yasmeen, while they sit embroidering Antigone's wedding dress, it is given in a folk version where all the characters have Arabic rather than Pharaonic names. In this new version too, the two warring brothers, Eteocles/Gaber (the mender) and Polynices/ 'Aseeran (the one who makes things difficult) do not kill each other but are both shot from behind by Diab's watchman, 'Alyan (the one who seeks to rise high), the same man who murdered their father. Rather than the traditional clash, in both Sophocles's and Anouilh's renderings, between man-made law and divinely-ordained rules, the conflict here goes off at a sharp political tangent and Diab/Creon gets short shrift in terms of audience sympathy. This is nowhere more apparent than in the focal confrontation between Warda and her uncle after she buries her brother. The scene here draws heavily on Anouilh; but rather than Creon's disarming confession in the French Antigone that 'someone has to do the dirty jobs to bring order into life', here, the Egyptian Creon professes a burning, all- consuming passion for power which seems like a tragic curse. He cannot but bend to it and do all the ugly deeds it dictates. Unlike God, he cannot relent or show mercy, being thoroughly human. At the end, the Egyptian Creon is seen as a symbol of all the authoritarian, rabid regimes Egypt has come under and Antigone is seen as a rebel and freedom fighter. To consolidate this political reading of the Antigone myth, the three writers transformed the chorus into a group of passive, helpless, indifferent villagers who, rather than fight the blood-sucking Diab, fritter away their days playing games, sipping black tea and smoking water pipes at the village café. Despite the repeated warnings of Ali, the only literate peasant among them, as the newspaper he constantly carries signifies, they fail to stand up to Diab and though they see Antigone's point and concede the justice of it, they do nothing to save her. Even 'Alian, Diab's watchdog and dirty claw, a beautifully drawn complex character who experiences a dawning of consciousness when his life is threatened and has a moving scene with Warda, fails to rise up to the challenge and actually buries his benefactress. This new, Egyptian, political reading of the old Greek myth is truly bleak. Even Haemon is robbed of his last act of defiance and, rather than join Antigone in death, opts for madness and loses his wits. No one can stand up to Diab at the end. Such dispiriting bleakness, however, was offset by the heartening artistry of the show. Of the 16 performers taking part in it, ten had not trodden the boards before, including the chorus of villagers in the café, Wafaa' Hamdi, who played the Egyptian Antigone, and her real-life sister, Huda, who played her fictional sister Ismene in the play. Where did Azza find such a wonderful treasure of talents? They were the finalists in an acting competition held by the Nile Drama TV channel where she and her husband, Sayed Al-Ginnari, earn their living, she told me. They were lying around, waiting for acting jobs, and Azza scooped them up. Though they got almost next to nothing for their efforts, in financial terms, they were glad of the opportunity and gave their best. Tall, graceful, with strong, Egyptian features and a strong, beautiful voice, Wafaa' Hamdi has proved in this show that she has the making of a real stage star. Her sister, Huda, too, has real stage appeal and plenty of natural charm. Of the rest of the cast, professional in various degrees, Hamdi Abul 'Ela, as the ferocious, fiendish Diab, Yaser El-Zankloni as the complex, mentally tortured 'Alian, and Iman Shahin, as the oppressed but brave Sitt El-Dar, stood out and made indelible impressions. Despite its name and dismal message, A Taste of Aloes was a delightful experience and a popular success; and though some critics thought it was too 'traditional', with little 'experimental' about it, and reminded them of a lot of the 1960s' plays, it was a solid, grand production which appealed to a lot of ordinary people -- people who go to the theatre to see a story well told, enjoy some good acting, and carry away some sort of message relevant to their reality. Coming after Hani El-Mettenawi's Oscar and the Lady in Pink, Effat Yehia's Embroideries and Abeer Ali's Someone's Treading on my Heart, A Taste of Aloes carried a message which says that Al-Hanager is capable of offering all types of theatre and catering to all sorts of audiences. Ta'm Al-Sabbar (A Taste of Aloes) by Al-Ghagar (Gypsies) troupe, directed by Azza El-Husseini, Rawabet, 14-20 March, 2008.
