KAMLA and her beloved, Anees, look happy enough on their wedding night, but then Kamla's old friend tells her about his real feelings for her. She suddenly feels that she's been in love with this old friend for a long time and decides to abandon her husband for him. This is the unconventional plot of Wahm el-Hob (The Illusion of Love), the latest play by well-known Egyptian writer and director Lenin el-Ramli. “The Illusion of Love” is adapted from Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee's Cardenio, which premiered at the American Repertory Theatre in May 2008. Mee and Greenblatt's text is itself an attempt to re-imagine Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio, said to be based on the story of Cardenio and Lucinda in Don Quixote. In “The Illusion of Love”, el- Ramli revisits the question that humankind and its philosophers have been debating forever: whether love is an illusion or an unshakable truth. Indeed, love certainly does seem to be an illusion in this controversial play, which begins with the wedding of Anees, a Western-educated businessman in his mid-thirties. He invites a group of his prestigious friends to attend his wedding to Kamla, an aspiring, young, freespirited painter. The writer tries to give an Egyptian flavour to the foreign text by adding scenes that don't appear to be related to the main theme. The play takes place in one location, the garden of Anees' home in a village. As we see the wedding being celebrated on stage, a farmer and his wife, who are working in the house, tell us about two other weddings also taking place. The first wedding is happening near the home of Anees. There is drama when the farmer's wife rushes onto the stage to announce that the groom at this nearby wedding has discovered that his bride is not a virgin and that they want to kill her. El-Ramli criticisms the bride's family for wanting to kill her on her wedding night for not being a virgin, without diving beneath the surface of this issue, a critical one in a country like Egypt. This disgraced bride seeks sanctuary in the house of Anees, where she meets a young man who's drunk. They chat together for a while and then she tells him that she's fallen in love with him. Again, this is very unconventional and the audience don't sympathise with her. Kamla, the main female protagonist, is also a strange and unconventional character. She's not a virgin bride, as Anees slept with her before the wedding, and she's not ashamed to tell her friends about this. The writer should have focused less on entertaining the audience than on the more important idea of a bride in Arab society who's not a virgin. This idea has been dealt with many times in films, where it's been the main focus, but in el-Ramli's play the main focus is the contradictory feelings that dominate Kamla on her wedding night. We shouldn't say, “It could have been better if…” about a play, because the director or writer should say what they want to say. But, at the same time, introducing too many ideas without dealing with any of them seriously seems to be a useless waste of time. El-Ramli's play Bel-Arabi el-Fasih (In Plain Arabic), which starkly portrays modern Arab society, is remarkable for its biting satire and self-criticism. It was voted the best play of 1992 in Egypt, but Wahm el-Hob is pale in comparison. El-Ramli's works have been performed throughout the Arab world and translated into other languages. He has also contributed articles and columns to popular newspapers. In addition, he has set up two drama troupes, and has educated and directed gifted amateurs. The actors and actresses in the play, which ran for ten nights earlier this month at the Collège des Frères, Bab el-Louq, were talented and expressive. Tamer Abdel-Moneim, the main male protagonist, didn't really get the chance to show off his talent fully – blame it on the script. of time and place – but not unity of action. Perhaps this is why the result is a play that fails to convince.
