Amira El-Naqeeb is gripped by the conjunction of Iraqis and Swedes "I will explode, any minute now I will explode." Thus Hassan, one of the main characters in the Swedish-Iraqi musical Hello, a production by the Scarabe Group - based in Malmo, Sweden - staged in both Arabic and Swedish on the Gumhouriya Theatre stage on 17 November. The show, paradoxically, starts with a film screening. Framing the dimly lit stage, it introduces the premise of the play: 10 mad artists have been confined in an exclusive asylum for 10 years, during which time they have developed their own magical sense of mind, time and instinct. The institution authorities, feeling they are ready to face the world, are finally releasing them: they are to give a performance of their own before a "normal" audiance: us. And what topics to present to us other than mind, time and instinct? Each chooses an element to represent on stage. In a particularly powerful scene, the history of Hassan - or, as he decides to call himself, in reference to a clock or time bomb, Tick-Tock - is traced back to "that explosive area of the Middle East; Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria". Hassan Hadi: actor, writer and director of the show. He represents the element of time."He lost his entire family to a bomb before his own eyes," the actor later explains to Al-Ahram Weekly ; "he is Arab in general, Iraqi in particular. He was left alone after they died, that's why he went crazy." Pushing a giant buggy with the word "Bank" garishly inscribed on it and the beautiful, seductive Hanna - instinct, within, Hassan engages in a madman-wise dialogue with her "to point out that we have corrupt managements in our countries. I also wanted to point out that the Arabs have lately developed another instinct; which is the immigration instinct where everyone wants to leave his home country, and run away." The scene concludes with Hanna, lying down, putting forth on lust, pleasure, and orgasm. In the course of the soliloquy we learn that the one she was lusting after her younger sister Laura, whom she had developed a sexual relationship with - and that is why she was institutionalised. "I tried to identify instinct with what America does to the world," Hassan says, "dealing with everything through her instincts - and I don't mean [just] sex but the drive to overrule, the ability to do anything to get what you want." Then comes Ya rai, the Rachid Taha song, reflecting the aforementioned immigration instinct. Here as elsewhere for the duration of the show, songs are thoughtfully selected, perfectly timed and beautifully performed by, among others, the Swede Persson Hillevi, evoking a mixture of surprise and nostalgia. One particularly powerful interlude was the zar scene, in which the three main dancers - Hanna, Aida and Anna - set the stage on fire. An all-female, grassroots exorcism ritual, Aida, the production manager and the mind component in Hello, explained: "The dance embodies the attempt to be normal, and feel normal. It'is as if we're trying to exorcise the 10 years spent in the asylum." Aida was obsessively attached to her father, a writer, whose death made her slip into insanity: "I wanted to monopolise the audience's attention for the zar, so I played it very smart." Hanna had just completed a monologue crying out to her sister - "Laura, where are you? I look for you when I see people, I'm looking at the audience and I cannot find you. Please come and set me free of my guilt, come and take away all this pain. It's love that is leading me now. I miss you, Laura." - and the dance made for an effective counterpoint. Act Two involved the characters, led by Hassan, imaginig their own deaths, followed by a dance with candles that left the audience breathless, especially when the three girls carrry a tray of candles on their heads, their bodies swaying, their arms seeking out a space beyond theor reach. This recalled the Iraqi custom of calling on the beloved by the river, using a try and various spices. Such scenes, according to Hassan, were meant to build the audience's confidence, as it were, building up to and justifying the scene in which the three girls, peculiarly dressed, perform a scene supposedly not in the script. Hassan is initially angy, but he eventually forgives them. It is more or less at this point that Hassan, making eye contact with the audience, is disappointed with their response to the writings and sufferings - "the poetry", he presentes them with - and he decides to stay on in the asylum after all. "They applauded only when the girls danced, they did not want anybody to talk to them about problems ." A major let-down. Except for Aida, everyone decides to stay on with Hassan. Aida is self-obsessed: even after everyone is gone, she goes on dancing alone and is angry whenever the music stops. "It is the applause that gives her courage," Aida, the actress, explains, "and the confidence to live without help from her fellow inmates." Still, having packed her bags, Aida cannot bring herself to leave them after all, and the mad artists are happily reunited. Based on poems by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer and the Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh, the play reflects the Sarabe philosophy of interaction with east and west. As Hassan puts it, "I'm very interested in dramatising poems, and that is what I've been doing since 2003." Al-Sayegh's specialty being "the oppressed human being, imprisoned in his own country", he struck an excellent balance with Transtromer's ultra-rational narcissism; statements on instinct were composed by Hassan himself, however. "There is no poet I know of who expressed instinct the way I wanted to convey it in the play." Eschewing plot and melodrama, Hassan manages to reach the audience via "an alternative door", in the end.
