Nehad Selaiha hails the first season for independent theatre launched by Al-Hanager at Rawabet Over the years, Al-Hanager, under the direction of the indefatigable, enlightened and widely respected theatre academic and critic Huda Wasfi, has built a prestigious international reputation as a forum for new, daring experiments and an active incubator of new talents. At many points in the course of the past 18 years, since it opened, when theatre in Cairo dwindled and seemed about to give up the ghost, Al-Hanger acted as a vital life-supporting system, keeping it alive, almost single-handedly, by pumping new blood into it and a stream of powerful, stimulating productions. At other times, when theatre seemed hopelessly trapped in a vicious circle of hackneyed texts, sloppy adaptations and, shallow, lackluster and half-baked musicals, you could always go to Al-Hanager and be sure of finding something exciting and thought-provoking there. What other theatrical institution could take on in quick succession such intricate and topically relevant classics as Brecht's Galileo and Mother Courage, Buero Vallejo's The Double Story of Dr. Valmy, Shakespeare's Othello, Max Frisch's Fire-raisers and Jean Genet's The Balcony and, at the same time, introduce three new writing talents (Mahmoud Nessim, Sameh Mahran and Sayed Mohamed Ali) as Al-Hanager did between 2002 and 2005? Where else could a young, unknown director, in his twenties, get the chance to stage Tawfiq El-Hakim's Ahl Al-Kahf (People of the Cave), Harold Pinter's Old Days, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Edward Bond's Lear, Jean Genet's The Balcony, and Saadalla Wannus's Ahlam Shaqiyya (Anguished Dreams) one after the other? Mohamed Abul Su'oud, one of the most brilliant products of Al-Hanager is the director in question, and Wasfi's diligent nurturing of his talent extended to sending him abroad, to Italy, for a year, for further training and experience, and allowing him to stage his own plays when he flowered into a gifted playwright. Abul Su'oud is only one example and Al-Hanager boasts many others -- artists who, like Khaled Galal, Effat Yehya, Abeer Ali, Khaled El-Sawi, Nora Amin, Hani El-Mettenawi, Ashraf Farouk, Tareq El-Dweri and Amr Qabil, among others, found their first feet at Al-Hanager then went on to establish their own independent troupes or work at other theatres, becoming some of the best young theatre-makers on the market. Indeed, Al-Hanager's output of plays over the past 18 years is stunning in number, range and variety, and its series of theatre workshops, conducted along the way by illustrious Egyptian, Arab and European masters, were quite unprecedented anywhere in the Arab world and helped to shape the sensibility, direction and imagination of a whole generation of young artists and hone their artistic skills. This generation owes a lot to Al-Hanager and has, in turn, helped to build the reputation it enjoys today. However far they travel, and some of them, like Effat Yehia and Nora Amin, have gone as far as Brazil and the United States, they always come back to their original home and birthplace in that modest building in the Opera grounds. With such a glorious performance over the years, one would have expected Al-Hanager's budget and working space to have grown and expanded. Not only did this not happen, but Al-Hanager has lately been rendered homeless. The building through which it functioned has been out of use for over a year now, depriving many independent artists of a vital venue. Prior to that, it was shut down for a few months on the plea of securing it against fire hazards after the Beni Sweif inferno of 5 September, 2005 which claimed the lives of over 60 theatre people. When it reopened, its use was severely restricted to the extent of putting it completely off boundaries during the 2006 CIFET despite the vehement protests of local and foreign artists. If it was still unsafe, as it was claimed, then what happened to all the money that was poured into it to make it safe? And before one could get a shade of an answer to this question, the building was suddenly dismantled, literally gutted out, this time on the pretext of restructuring it and overhauling it from top to bottom. It now looks as if a bomb has ripped through it -- a mess of dangling wires, flapping tatters, broken furniture and strewn rubble, and the sight of the stacks of beams lying in pools of dirty water outside it, waiting patiently to be used and slowly rotting in the sun is enough to make you want to cry. When you ask why renovation has not started, you are told that the whole operation was stopped after the corruption scandal at the Cultural Development Fund and cannot begin until this ugly business has been sorted out. But Al-Hanager is not a building: it is people, a living idea, a set of values and shared beliefs, and a mode of operating based on sharing, nurturing and mutual support. That is why it has kept alive and active even when deprived of its theatre, gallery, offices and cafeteria. Wasfi insisted that artists keep on working under its umbrella, helping them to squeeze money out of the government and to find alternative rehearsal spaces and venues. In 2006, Antigone in Ramalla, one of her productions which rehearsed in what was left of Al-Hanager's gallery and went on to represent Egypt in the international contest of the Cairo Experimental Festival, performed at the theatre of the Supreme Council of Youth and Sports then toured in Thailand and Algeria on Wasfi's own initiative; and in 2007, Abul Su'ood's Would You Forget Your Country played at Al-Ghad hall and Azza El-Husseini's production of Maria's Picture, by Croatian writer Lydia Scheuermann, was hosted at the theatre of the Creativity Centre. Wasfi had met with so much trouble securing these spaces which allowed her only two nights for each production that at one time she seriously considered erecting a makeshift tent stage opposite Al-Hanager. By the end of 2007 she could see that the building she had occupied for the past 18 years would not be available for yet another year or more, and had to reluctantly admit that certain quarters were only too glad of the interruption of her work and would be only too happy for Al-Hanager never to open again. But Wasfi is one of those indomitable women who never concede defeat and go on fighting for what they believe in to the last breath. Obstacles seem to fuel her energy and fire her imagination. Determined to keep Al-Hanager alive and very much in the picture, she came up with what some thought a crazy idea: to sponsor and fund a whole season of new productions by the leading independent theatre troupes Al-Hanager had nurtured. Money, as usual, was a problem, but not an intractable one; years of dealing with people at the ministry of culture have taught Wasfi how to wheedle or bully them into loosening the purse strings. The real challenge was securing a suitable venue for two whole months without interruption either free of charge or at a reasonable rent. The best the state theatre organization could offer her were a few nights here, a few nights there, with long intervals in- between. Such an arrangement would effectively put paid to the idea of an uninterrupted season. Besides, to perform the new independent productions commissioned by Al-Hanger's head in spaces owned by the state theatre organization would be tantamount to playing into the hands of this organization which has long resented Al-Hanager's success and popularity and secretly longed to subsume it under its own umbrella. Wasfi also realised that this arrangement would make a mockery of the idea of independence sported in the title of the project and could be construed by some as a selling out to the state theatre. Though itself a state institution, Al-Hanager has acted from the start as a meeting point between the state and the independent groups, adopting a collaborative policy which guaranteed state funding for them and spaces for rehearsals and performance without interference in their work or erosion of their individual artistic identities and names. In a move which amounts to a virtual slap on the face of the state theatre organization, Wasfi decided to house her season at Rawabet, a completely independent space, renting this converted garage for 56 consecutive nights. Not only would this foreground the idea of independence and boost the reputation of this venue, but the rent she paid could also be used in improving it, making it more comfortable and better equipped. All round, it was a perspicacious decision on which she ought to be congratulated. The season was launched last Monday (18 February) with a riveting production of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's masterpiece, Oscar and the Lady in Pink, by Hani El-Mettenawy's Society for Theatre Studies and Training Troupe. It will offer six more new productions by six other independent troupes: Embroideries, a contemporary Iranian satire by Marjane Satrapi, translated and directed by Effat Yehia and presented by her Al-Qafila (Caravan) troupe (26 February to 3 March); Someone is Trampling on my Heart, a new, collaborative text, written and performed by Abeer Ali's Al-Misaharati group (5-12 March); A Taste of Bitter Aloes, a collective adaptation of Sophocles's and Jean Anouilh's treatments of Antigone by Azza El-Husseini's Al-Ghagar (Gypsies) troupe (14-20 March); Happiness, a series of monologues written and directed by Nora Amin and performed by her La Musica group (22-28 March); Richard, Richard, a dramatic collage directed by Mohamed Abdel Khaliq and presented by the Theatre Atelier troupe (20 March to 5 April); and Al-Haraka's (Movement's) A Mouse in our House, written and directed by Sayed Fu'ad (7-13 April). Oscar et la dame rose (Oscar and the Lady in Pink), a work of remarkable beauty and poignancy, was sensitively translated into colloquial Arabic by Mohamed Saleh. At once funny, tender and caustic, it features the last 12 days in the life of Oscar, a 10-year old boy in hospital with terminal cancer, and centres on the warm, affectionate bond which quickly develops between him and 'la dame rose' in the title -- a colourful, blunt-spoken, very elderly and very compassionate lady who works at the hospital as a volunteer, spending time with the children, and always treats him to exotic stories of her marvellous feats as a former wrestler. Oscar knows he has cancer, that his operation has failed, but no one talks to him about his illness or what is likely to happen to him. His doctor and the nurses are kind but distant and uncommunicative, and even his own parents who keep showering him with meaningless presents every Sunday are too cowardly to face with him the fact of his hopeless leukemia and imminent death. Only 'mama Rose', who gets her name from her pink uniform, has the guts to be honest with him and through this manages to give him real solace, to ease his loneliness and pain and help him to get over the trauma of disease and the fear of death. She introduces him to God, persuades him to write a letter to Him everyday, encourages him to strike up an intimate friendship with Peggy Blue, a fellow patient who suffers from a circulation deficiency which makes her look blue, and finally engages him in a game in which they pretend that each of his remaining 12 days equals ten years of life, so that by the end of them he would feel as if he had lived a rich life, passed through all its stages, and experienced adolescence and love, adulthood and marriage, old age and failing health. The text consists of 14 letters addressed to God, 13 of them written by Oscar, which 'mama Rose' finds after his death and reads to the audience, and the last one written by the lady in pink herself to relieve her sorrow and sense of loss. The letters which record Oscar's daily adventures and encounters, projecting them through the make- believe game as momentous events in an imaginary life, are alternately humorous and sad, and combine childish simplicity and philosophical depth. The child's often irrevernt chatter is laced with a deep affection for God and raise fundamental questions, going straight to the heart of what is most essential in human experience -- life, death, love, beauty, friendship, sexuality, family relations, happiness, guilt and suffering. And just before the end, Oscar has an epiphany: God finally visits him as he had long wished him to do and reveals to him the miracle of life, its wonderous beauty, and the experience leaves him grateful and at peace with everything. This delicate, radiant, elegant text, which has been widely translated and performed, is often staged as a one-woman show for a veteran actress. Hani El-Mettenawi, however, chose to make Oscar read his own letters, sitting at a table, with 'mama Rose' close at hand, ready to re-enact the conversations he reports to God, then delivering her own, heart-rending letter at the end. The stark set -- a wooden table, two chairs, two desk lamps and a large, white screen at the back-- matched the power and simplicity of the text, while Rabab Hakim's charmingly naïve illustrations of scenes from the narrative, which were projected at the beginning and end, and in between some letters when the lights faded on the actors, gave the whole performance the look of a children's book. The music which sometimes accompanied the reading or filled the silences between the letters (strains from Bach's cello concertoes 1, 2 and 3) partook of the same simplicity, poignancy and eloquent emotional restraint as the visual framing. The rest depended on the two actors, and while it was to be expected that a professional actress of long experience like Magda Munir would do justice to the character of 'la dame rose' even in a text-reading performance, Mohamed Saleh, as Oscar, took us all by surprise. A pianist by profession, with no previous acting experience, he has a wonderfully expressive face, a well- trained voice and an impeccable sense of rhythm and emotional tempo. Looking a bit like the bald Schmitt himself, and very much like a grown up version of his Bald Egg Oscar, he vividly communicated to us Oscar's often funny innocence and naivite, his tender, affectionate nature, his intelligent insights into the behaviour of grownups, his wistful longings, baffled resentments and steady progress towards death. His inspired recreation of Oscar kept us on the edge of our seats in breathless wonder, made us weep and roar with laughter and left us, at the end, grieving for Oscar as if we had intimately known him and feeling, like the 'lady in pink' that this child has taught us a more profound wisdom than we could find in philosophy books. The fact that Saleh was the one who discovered this gem of a text while in Russia, translated it himself from Russian and brought it to the notice of El-Mettenawy, could partly explain his stunning empathy with its child-hero. When he read the postscript in which Oscar tells God at the end of his first letter: "I don't have your address: what do I do?" I suddenly remembered Chekov's Vanka, another lonely, little boy who wrote a letter to his grandfather begging him to come and fetch him, put it in an envelope he had bought for a kopek, and simply addressed it: "To grandfather in the village." Unlike Vanka's grandfather who would never receive the letter and never come, God responds to Oscar's repeated requests and comes to him. I drew comfort from the comparison, thinking Oscar was better off than Vanka and very much like his own creator who tells us that he has written letters to the dead Mozart since adolescence and that Mozart writes back when the fancy takes him. The Arabic premiere of Oscar and the Lady in Pink was an artistic triumph, a credit to Al-Hanager and El-Mettenawi's team. It has set a standard which hopefully the rest of the troupes will not fall far below. The moral of the story, however, is this: building or no building, Al-Hanager will go on. Wasfi is simply undefeatable. First Al-Hanager season for independent theatre at Rawabet, Downtown Cairo, 18 February to 18 April, 2008. Embroideries directed by Effat Yehia will be running until 3 March.
