WHEN the curtains went up at Al-Masrah Al-Hadith (the Modern Theatre) in downtown Cairo last week, late playwright Naguib Sorour must have turned in his grave. An unskilled director, in collaboration with a group of greenhorn actors, recently staged an allegedly contemporary version of Malek al-Shahatin (The King of Vagrants), which the Egyptian playwright had adapted in the 1970s from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. The director's version of this three-act work was disorganised and inconsistent. To make matters worse, the cast kept forgetting their lines and getting them mixed up. Sorour wrote his work to condemn the social and political circumstances in Egypt in 1971, when the country was still licking its wounds and trying to recover after being defeated in its war against Israel four years earlier. Infamous for being a devoted leftist, Sorour set his opera at a time when Egypt was reeling under the yoke of the British colonial rule and the monarchy ��" long before the Egyptian Revolution in 1952 ��" in order to escape the wrath of the Government of late President Anwar Sadat. Despite the fact that Sorour's Malek al-Shahatin is wildly regarded as one of the late playwright's gems, it seems that the director of the contemporary version, Mohamed el-Kholi, can hardly have read the full text before starting to coach his actors onstage. Some critics have suggested that the director wasn't even interested in the play. One angry critic, who works for a weekly magazine, said: “[El-Kholi's] vision is misconceived, while the untalented and uninspired cast were given carte blanche to say and do what they liked onstage. The only thing they didn't do was act.” In his adaptation, the late Egyptian playwright appreciated Brecht's philosophy and arguments about the seedy underworld populated by vagrants, whores and thieves. Sorour's principal character, Abu Deraa, tightly controls an army of beggars. His wife, is a drunken whore: once she's got a drink inside her, she's anyone's. The husband she keeps cheating on doesn't care about what she gets up to; the couple's daughter is just as promiscuous as her mother. Abu Deraa hates his son-in-law and a British general, who represents authority, exploits their animosity. He's bribed independently by each of the two men to get tough on the other. (This is reminiscent of the British policy of divide and rule ��" they constantly tried to turn King Farouk and his prime ministers against each other). As the play draws to an end, the daughter appeals for help to end the exhausting war between her husband and her father. Sadly, el-Kholi's version aggressively overlooks the interesting subplots. It is all the more regrettable that prominent actors and actresses such as Sami el-Adl, Lekaa Seweidan, Mahmoud el-Gendi and former bellydancer Nagwa Fouad have all contributed to this gross injustice done to the late Egyptian playwright.
