Nehad Selaiha compares a revival of Mikhail Roman's Isis, My Love to a salvage operation I know of no director who can rival Mahmoud El-Lozy when it comes to staging the social and political dramas of the 1960s. He has an amazing knack for spotting what remains relevant in them today -- the fine components that never rust under the tides of time. These usually lie buried deep under thick layers of topical references that have long lost their edge and significance. Like a dexterous, seasoned pearl fisher, he dives into the text to salvage what is of enduring value, then displays it in cunningly crafted, visually eloquent and extremely powerful stage compositions. And because most of the 1960s plays are deeply embedded in the moment of their creation, which makes them seem to date whenever revived, bearing the cast and hue of distant times, El-Lozy invariably updates the temporal context of the drama he chooses with subtle touches so that whatever the issue it treats seems very much of the here and now and is invested with a new sense of urgency. El-Lozy's latest dive into the 1960s' drama targeted Mikhail Roman's Isis, Habibti (Isis, My Love). Of all the rebellious playwrights of that 'golden period', Roman was the most passionate, the most outspoken and the loudest and, therefore, the most unfortunate in his relation to the stage. Out of the 19 extant plays he produced between 1962, when he made his dramatic debut with Al-Dukhan (Smoke) at the National, and 1973, when he died (just 3 days before the October war), only five more were performed: Al-Hisar (The Siege, 1965); Al-Laylah Nadhak (Tonight We Laugh, 1966); Al-'Ardahalgi (The Notary, 1967); Lailat Masra' Guevara (The Night Guevara Was Killed, 1969); and Hollywood El-Ballad (Hollywood, Downtown 1972). It was not a bad number considering the rigours of censorship in those days and Roman's consistently uncompromising attitude. With the exception of Al-Wafid (The Visitor), banned after the first performance in 1966, and Al-Mu'ar wa Al-Ma'goor (The Seconded and the Hireling), stopped during rehearsals the following year, his other plays were either suppressed by the censor or shunned by directors for safety reasons, surviving mostly as manuscripts and rarely in print. Fortunately, the plays were posthumously collected in 6 volumes, published by the General Egyptian Book Organisation in 1998-99, with Farouk Abdel Wehab Mustafa, of the university of Chicago, and the late Hazim Shehata (one of the victims of the Beni Sweif holocaust on 5 September, 2005) as editors. This turbulent, constantly interrupted and often thwarted passage of Roman's plays from the page to the stage and the kind of reception given to the few that did make it -- baffled or lukewarm on the part of the public, and ranging from reserved, timid approval to outright, virulent antagonism on the part of critics -- no doubt affected the quality of the writing. In a more sympathetic, relaxed atmosphere, Roman would have perhaps had the incentive, and leisure, to refine his formal experiments, tone down the almost hysterical pitch of the plays, prune their verbal excesses, make his characters more objective and accessible and their dilemmas clearer and more intelligible. As it was, he never felt sure his plays would see the light, or that the play in hand would not be his last, and this led to a degree of self-indulgence, in the form of passionate, personal outpourings, sometimes far in excess of what the situation or dramatic moment requires. Harassed by the censor, distrustful of the public, vilified by some and ignored by others in the theatrical community, Roman's sense of estrangement, of existential alienation and anxiety deepened. When you read him, it is as if you are reading a man writing for his life; he wrote frenziedly, like a haunted man, with the shadow of the gallows behind his back and the howl of beasts echoing in the distance; and whether the rebellious hero (called Hamdi in most of the plays and a palpable persona of the author) expresses fear, loneliness, boundless defiance, mortifying self-doubt or existential anguish, his voice is invariably charged with a kind of personal intensity that often threatens to upset the dramatic balance. It is of such stuff, of such ambiguities, that Isis, My Love is woven. He wrote it a few years after Nasser's reign of terror had culminated in the crushing defeat of 1967. Was it for this, the play partly seems to ask, that for so many years we have born the slings and arrows of a merciless police state -- the secret bugging, the sinister dawn-callers, the mysterious disappearances, the threat of horrible torture, the petrifying fear and crippling suspicion of everything and everyone, even one's own friends and family, and the debilitating, morally corrupting desire to save one's own skin at any price? But there is far more to the play than simple political protest, however vehement and ardently daring. Did Roman suspect Isis was to be his last play, his swan song, his last will and testimony and therefore poured out his soul in it, recklessly venting his anger, frustration and despair and giving free rein to his most iconoclastic thoughts and innermost feelings? Terror and freedom are the two poles of the play and when they collide, the world of the characters is crushed between them, calling everything in doubt. This central idea is dramatically worked out through a dual conflict involving two sets of characters: the conflict between Ali, the head of the intelligence service, his involuntary mistress, the dancer Farida, and her dissenting invisible husband Salih, on the one hand, and the conflict between the self-same Ali and the petty government official Hamdi, who harbours romantic dreams of heroism, and his equally romantic, superficially brilliant but inwardly fragile Gamalat. While the relationship of Ali and Farida follows the proverbial pattern of the cat-and-mouse tactics, or that of the tug-of-war, Hamdi and Gamalat, after five years of marital bliss, reluctantly admit they had fallen into a rut, and the only way to get out of it is by exposing their lives and relationship to some terrible danger. When at the end, the seemingly all-powerful Ali, though he horribly tortures Hamdi, destroys his relationship with Gamalat, has Farida arrested and her beloved husband killed, is revealed to be as much a victim of the inhuman apparatus he himself created as the freedom-fighter Hamdi, terror acquires a metaphysical meaning, becoming almost an eternal principle of creation, and is identified with an invisible, omnipresent and omnipotent god that watches our every action and our deepest thoughts. Freedom, on the other hand, represented by Hamdi, the rebel hero, is revealed as a heady, escapist romantic dream that cannot survive the test of reality, a bright, mystifying halo that hides behind it a selfish, vainglorious wish for self- aggrandizement, even at the cost of self-annihilation. It is this which gives the play its existentialist thrust, making it more than a document of political protest and dissent. Like the typical existentialist hero, Hamdi is far from flawed, and his defiant act in the face of terrible perils is ultimately a quest for self-definition, even if it finally leaves him utterly shorn of all comforting illusions, seeking solace in drink and the arms of a common, albeit honest, prostitute -- a helpless human being just as crushed as himself. I do not know if this is the 'right' reading of Isis, or if there is, or ever will be, one 'right' reading. But it is 'one' reading, and I was thrilled to find it so sharply focused, so purely crystallised in Mahmoud El-Lozy's recent production of the play at the AUC Falaki Studio. Performed verbatim, Isis would take up to three hours, at a moderate estimate, and, more to the point, would come across as an irritatingly fuzzy, deeply muddled, excessively verbose, sensationally sentimental and garishly loud work. I do not doubt that had Roman had the good fortune of having it produced in his lifetime, he would have been persuaded by his director to verbally thin it out and dramatically streamline it. But as I said before, he never had the luxury of knowing that whatever he wrote would be subjected to the critical eye of a director and therefore verbally crammed in all he thought regardless of dramatic considerations. Any director taking up Isis has to make many difficult decisions and exercise the utmost wisdom regarding what to keep in and leave out. Such decisions, of course, will depend on his reading of the play, his temperament, and the demands of the moment. When Samir El-Asfouri took on the play 7 years ago (read my review of the production in the Weekly, issue No. 506, 8 November, 2000) he took great liberties with the text, ignoring its realistic mode, and casting it openly in an epic, didactic form, a la Brecht, cutting out extensive stretches of the dialogue and monologues, slicing the scenes and rearranging their sequence, and filling in the gaps with lots of explanatory slide projections, including Nasser's funeral, not to mention adding a narrator- commentator, a chorus, new characters and a number of sarcastic songs and dances. Though exciting and quite intriguing, in fact, literally dizzying, El-Asfouri's version failed to free the text of its historical boundaries -- if anything, it planted it even deeper in the 1960s. Despite its boisterous vitality and facile melodramatic appeal, it came across as a nostalgic remembrance of times past. Of a different generation and temperament, and working in a different vein, El-Lozy opted for frugality rather than excess. He too took liberties with the text, extensively cutting it, reducing the time of performance to slightly over one hour, and turning bits of the narration in the dialogue into vividly enacted scenes. But the whole design was prompted by a different impulse; whereas El-Asfouri's was politically, sensationally, rebellious, El-Lozy's was existentially reflective, emotionally reserved and wistfully austere. Trimming down the text to its bare, universal essentials, without any theatrical frippery, or facile projection on the present in the name of relevance, seemed the rule of the day, and extended from the adaptation of the text to Stancil Campbell's sparsely ascetic scenic design and lighting and Nermine Saeed's costumes. The colour palette of the whole show was sombre, depressingly muted, with metallic grey and green and two or three splashes of mirthless orange providing the frame -- oppressive high walls and doors formed of square blocks, ranged on top of each other with no windows except the ones ironically drawn by the light on the floor -- and different shades of white, grey and brown in the costumes. The only glaring exception was Farida's red, satin warp in her first scene. But the brightness and exhilarating vitality of the colour are undercut and reduced to a mockery by the grotesque yellow wig she wears and the ridiculous scene from a cheap movie she tries out on her befuddled masseur. Campbell's carefully thought-out set, which allowed for scene changes by the mere flipping of some differently coloured boards in the forbidding walls, provided the right atmosphere, sinisterly suggesting that all the world was a prison however differently the places may look. Whether the setting was Hamdi's home, Farida's flat, an office or a torture cell, it did not matter; all were the same and no one, not even Ali, could escape the windowless walls. Beyond them is a dark void so that when the characters walk in or out it is as if they are materialising out of, or dissolving into total darkness. And what a brilliant idea it was to entrust the slight scenic changes to Ali's two expressionless, leather-clad, robot-like secret agents (in the original they are six) instead of using stage hands. As they (Omar Madkour and Walid Hamid) methodically, mechanically flipped the boards and secured them, removed or brought in the double faced couch, or the stand bearing the sculptured skull, or the bowl of water and towel, they seemed in total control of everything and everyone. Here, setting the stage for the next scene was transformed into the nearest thing to an eerie ritual conducted in the service of some savage, invisible god, intent on fulfilling his design, and the two secret agents were his instruments. In this way, by putting every visual detail to eloquent use, and with the help of an intriguing sound track, which included Abdel Halim Hafiz's famous sixties song Ahwak (I Love You), and Amal Dunqul's equally famous seventies poem La Tusaleh (Don't Ever Make Peace), and left you divided and wondering whether to take it ironically or in earnest, El-Lozy was able to condense a lot of Roman's verbal outpourings into short, cryptic and highly suggestive scenes and powerfully, and quite cunningly, communicate his own reading of the play. The choice of venue here was also quite meaningful; rather than the main Falaki stage, El-Lozy opted for the chamber theatre on the third floor. Roman's Isis, though it has many characters and different settings, is essentially a chamber play where the characters are tragically besieged and have no room to move. Campbell's set would not have had the same eloquence or impact on a large stage, and the restrained method of acting chosen by El-Lozy for his cast would have seemed tepid and lifeless. Acting in close proximity to the audience, in the intimate atmosphere of the Studio, the young actors did not have to strive to be heard and felt confident that every facial expression, the slightest gesture, the merest contraction of a muscle would not go unperceived. Such closeness to the audience can be an ordeal; but here, it worked quite well. Hani Sami's extreme, wiry slimness was a definite asset, creating a powerful contrast between his slight frame and big ideas and reminding one of the old, now proverbial line of poetry which says that the flesh is too weak to support the weight of lofty ideals. As Fraida, Nagwa El-Sa'dani deliberately worked against the familiar cliché of the dancer and vividly communicated the agony and desperate defiance of a trapped human being. And though robbed of the chance to rant and rave in the final scenes of the play which El-Lozy wisely omitted, Ahmed Omar (as Ali) gave a credible performance as the agonized person who has conjured up an evil spirit that he cannot exorcise. Amina Khalil's Gamalat fitted perfectly into El-Lozy's overall conception, mixing flightiness and passion in equal measures and coming out in the end as a person who is too fragile to bear the weight of truth. The rest of the cast -- Amr El-Said, Adham Zeidan and Othman El-Sharnouby, as Hamdi's office colleagues, Mustafa Safwat as his boss, and Ahmed Salah as his ruthless, red-handed investigator, smoothly slotted into the parts allotted to them in this adaptation, treading a difficult, thin line between realism and farcical caricaturing with creditable competence. Watching El-Lozy's Isis felt like taking part in a massive salvage operation or in a pearl fishing expedition. Or, to change the metaphor, let us say that some texts are like huge, massive ships, very impressive to look at, but quite unwieldy and difficult to maneuver. Once you board them and set them on the waves they threaten to plummet to the bottom. The trick is to tinker with them and make them seaworthy. And this is what Mahmoud El-Lozy has done with his beloved Isis.
