Nehad Selaiha encounters a strange case of language failure For a long time Dr. Johnson's vexed complaint that bad texts could often result in successful stage productions had intrigued me, leading me to question the relationship of text and performance and the critical criteria of judging both. Until performance theory established itself as a valid alternative to literary theory in the field of theatre criticism, it was difficult to disentangle the work of the director and performers from that of the dramatist. More often than not, the sheer physicality of performance, its baffling visceral appeal and essential ephemerality seemed to resist critical analysis, persuading theatre historians, critics and even theatre lovers to foreground and concentrate on the only durable element in theatre, namely the text. Compared to performance, the text, of whatever quality, seemed to enjoy the kind of serene, a- physical, a-historical eternality that humanity, in its tragic pursuit of immortality, has learnt to attribute solely to such abstract, fictitious constructions alternatively called the 'spirit' or 'soul'. Like our Tawfiq El-Hakim (see Masrah Tawfiq El-Hakim, edited by Fu'ad Dawwarah, Part I, The General Egyptian Book Organization, 1985, p.271), and for the very same reasons, Dr. Johnson had been taught to deeply distrust and despise the acting profession, fearing its elusive, seductive power and compelling attendant physical attraction. In his The Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Johnson's faithful acolyte, noted that: "His necessary attendance while his play was in rehearsal, and during its performance, brought him acquainted with many of the performers of both sexes, which produced a more favourable opinion of their profession than he had harshly expressed in his Life of Savage. He for considerable time used to frequent the Green Room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom, by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle. Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick that Johnson at last denied himself this amusement, from considerations of rigid virtue, saying, "I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities" (Boswell, James, 1986, p. 67). Last week, I found Dr. Johnson's, Boswell's and El-Hakim's remarks jumping to the forefront of my mind and becoming more problematic and prssingly urgent than ever: the authors' superior view of themselves, the inevitable erotic appeal of the performer as part of the pleasure afforded by performance, and the paradoxical mixture of attraction/revulsion, fascination and fear it invariably excites in the mind of the staid, bourgeois spectator. The occasion was a revival of a production I had watched in 2001 and blissfully ignored at the time. Its second eruption, however, has led me to confront the issue of textual failure full in the face and deeply ponder the duality of body and soul, text and performance. There I was, confronted with a bunch of wonerful performers, an evocative and richly symbolic stage design and an inspired lighting plan that created a profoundly haunting atmosphere that cried out for some context to make them all cohere, and the end result was a big Nothing. Karam El-Naggar's Awlad Al-Ghadab wa Aw- Hob (The Children of Wrath and Love), is a rare instance of a textual let down that would have put Dr. Johnson's back up and proved to him, contrary to all his classical beliefs, that, in certain cases, and however much he may resent it, performers can, and do, save the day. El-Naggar, an established writer in both theatre and television, who can boast the only monodrama that that great and immortal Sanaa Gamil did, a play called The Horse, came up in this case with a good idea that he failed to substantiate. The play hauntingly opens with footsteps echoing in a deserted, derelict villa in Sharm El-Sheikh, where a disillusioned director has taken refuge from the trials and tirbulations of his theatrical career, and strives to establish an independent theatrical company that can express the sensibility and worldview of the younger generations. So far so good, especially that the author opted for a play-within-a-play framework. The writing, however, dismally failed to put together a credible plot and seemed to stretch the willing suspencion of disbelief to breaking point. The characters -- the middle-aged director, a down-at-heel, third-rate singer and his farcical belly-dancing fiancee, a sex-starved civil servant, a schizophrenic secretary, a Hebrew- speaking tourist guide, a female teenager in search of a father figure after the death of her father and the marriage of her mother to a man who resents her presence, the director's female assistant, a terrorist who takes refuge from the police in the villa, and the ravishingly sexy and morally upright daughter of a local tycoon -- unaccountably appear on the scene and you cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, explain wherefore and wherefrom they have materialised. Testing their capabilities and talents takes up the whole of the first part of the play, and this takes the form of inviting them to sing and dance and express their problems in mime. The result is a dearth of intelligent dialogue and an excess of delightful singing and dancing numbers that makes you forget that there was ever the slightest semblance of a plot. Throughout, the director placidly watches, barking orders every now and then. How I wish things had stopped at that. In the second part, however, the auther decided to come forward with a message bespelling the conflict of generations and the frustrated anger of the younger generation against the older one whom they believe has betrayed and misled them. Instead of displaying their talents through song and dance, which had in the first part delighted the audience with beautifully and imaginatively choreographed, orchestrated and costumed musical sequences, the hopeful performers become verbally, and quite vociferously expressive, forcing the audience, who had reconciled themselves to an evening of pure, physical/performative enchantment, to turn their attention to the discursive/narrative aspect of the show. And what a tragedy that was! The inanity, banality and artificiality of the verbal texture of that part was thoroughly shocking and disorienting. More embarrassing than anything was the cheap sloganeering and specious moralizing. Here, the one moral slip over which the director is taken to task is his being caught smoking hash once to ease his pain after Egypt's 1967 military defeat. The terrorist's destructive impulse is attributed to his harsh upbringing at the hands of a military father. The Hebrew-speaking tourist guide reveals his unrequited passion for the daughter of the local tycoon, and she, in turn, airs her attraction to the terrorist. By the time the police, alerted by the director's assistant, finally arriveson the scene to surround the villa, the schizophrenic secretary, who was secretly the mistress of the guide, has secured a legal husband in the figure of the sexually frustrated civil servant, the beautiful teenager has discovered that her crush on the aged director was but a transient affair, the betrothed singer and dancer have reconciled themselves to a life of arduous sweating with no hope of stardom and instant riches, and the terrorist has been persuaded to give himself up with a promise of eternal loyalty from the daughter of the tycoon. Not that any of this mattered to us, the audience. As far as we were concerned, the characters thought up by Karam El-Naggar could go to hell. What mattered to us, and what we really carried away with us from this show, was the magical energy of the performers, their zestful, inspiring presence, the powerfully evocative set and lighting plan which treated us to a plethora of arresting visual images and surrounded the performers with a mysterious, elusive and highly suggestive atmosphere, and the all- engrossing beauty and talent of Anushka. These were the elements that I still remembered from my first encounter with this show in 2001; and they were still the elements that kept me glued to my seat in this second viewing. The 9 years that passed have not reduced in any measure the enchanting power of Anushka's performative talents or physical charm; if anything, they have doubled them. Her dark, passionate beauty, husky voice and tall, slim and graceful figure seemed to spread a rare kind of elegance all over the stage and her spiritual energy as she danced, sculpting the space around her and evoking images of distant enchantresses like Thaïs or Cleopatra, spilled into the auditorium, casting a magical spell. Awlad Al-Ghadab wa Al-Hob was at once curiously enchanting and deeply frustrating. One kept wishing that the banal text would disappear, leaving the performers' talents to shine in their magical glory. But, at the same time, the non-verbal components of the show, despite their brilliance, seemed to cry out for a credible dramatic context of some sort. Here it was not a case of a bad text yielding a good performance; rather of a glorious performance coercively tied to a silly text and constantly detaching itself from it.
