Nehad Selaiha meets Muhammad 'Ali posing as tragic hero at Al-Ghad Theatre Abul-'Ela Al-Salamouni's was first staged by director Saad Ardash at the National in the mid-1980s. It was an impressive production which lucidly dramatised the author's imaginative investigation of the mechanisms which turn some popular heroes into ruthless autocrats and/or victims of their own subjective idealism. In a manner strongly reminiscent of Jean Anouilh's Becket, ou L'honeur de Dieu, in which the fate of Saint Thomas Becket is defined by his turbulent relationship with king Henry II, Al-Salamouni's inquiry is worked out through the connected fates of two historical figures embroiled in a similar relationship: Muhammad 'Ali and Omar Makram. But while the focus in Anouilh's play was on the martyr, with the king taking second place, A Man in the Citadel, as the title indicates, reverses the case, positing Muhammad 'Ali as a tragic hero, burdened with a deep sense of guilt, and Omar Makram as the friend he betrays and who continues to haunt him. Implicit in the title is an ironical allusion to the dual status of the Citadel as both seat of power and prison, and the author exploits its positioning high above the city, developing it into a metaphor of the isolation of the ruler from his people which, according to the play, turns him into a tyrant and leads to his downfall. Throughout the play, the spatial opposition of Citadel and city, high and low, is used to reflect the changing relationship of ruler and subjects, of the sovereign Muhammad 'Ali and the popular leader Omar Makram. This generates an ironical paradox in which the meanings of "high" and "low" are redefined to say that a ruler can only remain on top if he does not rise above his people. Significantly, when the Turkish Sultan finally bows down to popular pressure and appoints Muhammad 'Ali his viceroy in Egypt, the first thing Omar Makram, as Naqib Al-Ashraf (head of the Sharifs or descendants of the Prophet) asks of him is to stay in his old house in the city, among the people, and not go up to the Citadel. Fearing the power of Makram who, in the play, leads the popular rebellion against the former viceroy, Khurshid Pasha, and persuades the representatives of the nation, the Azharite 'Ulama, and the guild leaders of artisans and tradesmen to back Muhammad 'Ali, the newly appointed ruler obeys him for a while. The two men, however, have different dreams: while the popular leader envisions a just, democratic state in which the people rule themselves through chosen representatives, the new ruler craves individual greatness and absolute power. Predictably, Muhammad 'Ali grows jealous of Makram, resenting his sway over the people and his curtailment of his authority. The crucial turning point in the drama arrives when Muhammad 'Ali decides to desert the city and move up to the Citadel -- a decision that while defining him as the unspecified "man" in the title, ironically robs him of his distinction as a popularly-chosen ruler and makes him one with all his imposed autocratic predecessors. The popular uprisings, first against the French, then in support of Muhammad 'Ali, are seen by Al-Salamouni as a historical moment when it was possible to establish a form of democratic government for the first time in the history of Egypt. To explain why this historical opportunity was missed and, indirectly, why a national hero like Gamal Abdel-Nasser eventually turned into a tyrant, the play invests the so-called "founder of modern Egypt" with two overriding passions: a towering, obsessive ambition to match the glory of Alexander the Great and the conquests of Napoleon, and a jealous love for Egypt which he regards as the nursemaid of his ambition. As the sole protector/owner of Egypt, as he comes to regard himself, he can brook no opposition and eliminates anyone who presumes to interfere with his plans, including his close friend and former ally Omar Makram. When Makram's resistance of his policies threatens to gain ground, he engineers his downfall. Omar Makram, however, bears a share of the blame: he fails to read the Albanian's true mind and, worse still, is no politician, but an idealistic dreamer who trusts everybody and thinks they share his patriotic motives. He sees himself as a selfless defender of the people's rights who would rather die than compromise his principles. When a meeting is held at the legislative court to discuss his unyielding stand against what he sees as Muhammad 'Ali's growing dictatorial tendencies, he stays away fearing that his presence might influence the deliberations, and trusting that, in his absence, his honourable history would speak on his behalf. To his chagrin, his colleagues, many of whom Muhammad 'Ali had wheedled to his side, vote him out both as a member and as Naqib Al-Ashraf and Muhammad 'Ali promptly issues a decree exiling him to Damietta. To a friend who regrets that Makram did not take his case to the people who would have rallied to his support, he says that it would have been a betrayal of the democratic principles he fought to establish. Such proud, almost fanatical selflessness can be construed as a form of subjective idealism, not dissimilar to Muhammad 'Ali's and equally detrimental. Both men, each in his way, betray their dreams by putting an idealised image of the self before the interest of the people, and both end up disillusioned and alone, Omar Makram in his exile in Damietta, where he died in 1828, and Muhammad 'Ali in his prison of a Citadel. Muhammad 'Ali, however, is the central figure in the drama, and to present him as tragic hero and endow him with a sympathetic human dimension, Al-Salamouni opens the play, in the hallowed tradition of classical tragedy, at the end of his hero's career, after he retired from office in 1848, and well after the 1841 treaty which, though it granted him and his family the hereditary rule of Egypt and the Sudan, robbed him of his conquests and brought him once more under the sway of the Ottoman Sultan. The Muhammad 'Ali we meet at the beginning of the play is a doddering old man, suffering from depression and hallucinations -- a pathetic, solitary figure, wandering among the ruins of his dream and impelled by a sense of guilt to haunt the tomb of Omar Makram, the loyal supporter he had betrayed. Unlike classical tragedy, however, the past is here recaptured not through the dialogue, in verbal flashbacks, revelations, or messengers' reports, nor by a process of investigative interrogation, as in Sophocles's Oedipus Rex ; rather, it is reenacted in the form of a double play-within-the-play which unfolds on three different temporal levels simultaneously. In what amounts to a technical tour de force, Al-Salamouni harnesses widely divergent dramatic conventions, placing a tragic hero within a meta-theatrical frame with a palpable epic dimension. The play opens in the present with a Brechtian chorus announcing that they will perform a play about Muhammad 'Ali for our edification. The next scene takes us back to 1848, where we briefly see Muhammad 'Ali at Omar Makram's grave, talking to the dead man and trying to justify himself, then carries us to the Citadel where the state of Muhammad 'Ali's mind arouses the anxiety of both his wife and his chamberlain, Diwan. At the wife's suggestion of a Zar party to exorcise the ghosts which haunt her husband, Diwan proposes a more rational cure: a kind of cathartic psychodrama into which Muhammad 'Ali, as well as Omar Makram's grandson, who resembles his grandfather to a tee, and his sister Zeinab are roped in as actors. At this cue, the chorus march in as a group of itinerant actors, hired by Diwan for his project, and get busy preparing their wigs and costumes. When the play starts, we move further back in time, to the months immediately preceding Muhammad 'Ali's accession to power. This reenactment of the past engages most of the text and performance time and cleverly balances empathy and detachment, dramatic illusion and open theatricality. As he relives the past, Muhammad 'Ali realises that his tragic mistake was isolating himself from the people which lost him their trust. Shorn of their backing, which had brought him to power, he becomes an easy prey to the Turks and their European allies. When they gang up against him, he looks to the people for help, but gets no response. His dream of turning Egypt into an independent, powerful state founders on his expansionist ambitions and autocratic government. How true this imaginative reading of Muhammad 'Ali's character is remains debatable and does not really bother the author or affect one's reception of the play. Al-Salamouni was not seeking to retell history, but, rather, to dramatically make sense of a controversial historical figure who fascinated him, and to use him to project a critique of Nasser's reign. Implicitly in the play, and obliquely intimated by the chorus who belong to the present, is a comparison between the fortunes of the two men -- the most influential and controversial rulers in modern Egyptian history. With its episodic structure, meta-theatrical frame, plethora of characters, many scene changes, triple time-scheme and constantly shifting moods, A Man in the Citadel is devilishly difficult to stage and requires a huge cast, technical facilities and a big budget. In the production at the National theatre, these demands were adequately met and the cast was carefully picked from among the most seasoned and distinguished actors. Ardash, however, who was the first director to introduce Brecht in Egypt in the 1960s, foregrounded the didactic element in the text and overplayed the epic dimension at the expense of the tragic one. No wonder the production, impressive as it was, seemed too detached and austere. In 1994, A Man in the Citadel surfaced again at Al-Tali'a theatre in a new, low-cost production, funded by the Cultural Palaces Organisation and directed by Nasser Abdel-Mon'im (see review in the Weekly, 7 May, 1994). The director here only had a small hall, could not afford expensive sets or costumes, and had to work with a small cast of young, virtually unknown actors; and yet, amazingly, he turned all defects into advantages. Unlike Ardash, Abdel-Mon'im worked creatively on the text, lopping off disposable scenes and characters and compressing it into a neat one and half hour of fast-moving drama punctuated with telling songs. This helped to crystallise the central conflict between the two heroes, and their complex relationship gained in force and poetry. To build the significant confrontation between city and Citadel into the visual structure of the performance, Abdel-Mon'im sat the audience on two sides of the hall, facing each other across a passage which leads at one end to a small stage with a throne on it, representing the Citadel, and at the other, to another, slightly lower platform, with an oriental sofa and latticed windows, which serves as Muhammad 'Ali's house in the city as well as court room where the people's representatives meet. This design not only disposed of the need for scene changes, allowing the drama to flow smoothly with no interruptions, it also allowed the director to visually translate a lot of the meaning and dramatic tension into the physical movement and placement of the actors, generating many delightful ironies. My favourite is that whenever Muhammad 'Ali tries to look out of the window behind him on his beloved Cairo, he literally has to turn his back on its symbolic representation at the other end. The need to constantly turn one's head from side to side to follow the action, while physically stressing the irreconcilability of city and Citadel, makes the passage facing us a welcome point of rest. But the passage is also a point of separation and connection -- separating the people of the city, represented by the chorus, Makram's grandchildren and the palace servants, from the seats of power on either side and bringing them closer to the audience by placing them on the same level. And because the passage is the only place in the play which brings people together as equals, it becomes the only place the two heroes can meet. In a last encounter with Muhammad 'Ali, Omar Makram significantly says: "I am leaving for my exile; it is not an ascent, I know. But it is not a descent either. It is a level road." The placing of this scene in the passage, together with the scene at the tomb of Makram, connects the popular hero with his people, making him one with them and us, and undercuts the negativity of his end and gives a positive side to his exile. This brilliant production has been recently revived to mark the bicentenary of Muhammad 'Ali's accession to power and is currently playing at Al-Ghad hall. Nasser Abdel-Mon'im kept Gamal Attiya's incidental music and melodies, Ibrahim Abdel-Fattah's lyrics, Mohi Fahmi's stage design, and used the same costume-designer, Na'ima Agami. And though he could not muster the original cast, he was lucky to have Tawfiq Abdel-Hamid and Ashraf Tolba who played Muhammad 'Ali and Omar Makram respectively in the 1994 production. They are now eleven years older, and have gained in finesse and emotional depth. While the memory of Abdel-Hamid's earlier rendering of the part can still give me a thrill, his current performance strikes me as a marvellous creative feat. He starts as an old man and as he is drawn into the action, he is required to physically shed in minutes more than forty years then gradually put them on again as the action progresses. He manages this with stunning versatility, finely tuning his voice and body to every stage and shade of meaning. As in the earlier production, Tolba does his best to match Abdel-Hamid's prowess and, together, they make a powerful, harmonious duet. The rest of the cast, including a young chorus who competently take on all the minor parts, are all newcomers to the play, but they blend so well with everything you would hardly notice it. A production of this calibre is truly worthy of a great man like Muhammad 'Ali who, with all his faults, was a real master builder; its revival is the best tribute theatre can offer to his memory.
