Nehad Selaiha scours the theatrical scene before Ramadan, consuming all she finds Ramadan will be soon upon us; indeed, by the time you read this, we will have been a few days into it. And, as usual, for the first 10 or 15 days at least, all theatres will dim their lights and take a holiday. Concerts of Arabic music or recitals of religious chants are the most you can hope for in the way of live performances during that period. Knowing that come Ramadan, drama packs its bags and migrates to the small screen, I made it my business last week to revisit all the plays I had seen only once before and report to you about them before they slip out of my memory or get shoved aside by the hectic preparations, already underway, for the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre which starts on 10 October, immediately after Ramadan and the Bairam holiday. Of the three plays I revisited, (Farahat's Republic), though the oldest, proved the most enjoyable. Adapted by Idris himself from a short story he had published earlier, it was first staged by Fattouh Nashati at the National in 1956, in a double bill with his other one-act play, Malik Al-Cotn (The Cotton King), directed by Nabil El-Alfi. Almost a decade later, in May 1965 to be exact, it was successfully revived at El-Hakim Theatre Club, in an English translation directed by Laila Abu Seif. Set in a police station, it contrasts the sordid reality of every day life as experienced by an aged, grumpy police sergeant (the Farahat of the title) with his dreamy vision of a socialist, almost communist utopia -- a dream he intermittently relates to a sympathetic political prisoner whom he takes for a visitor in between investigating scurrilous complaints, loutish offences and crude crimes. In the years following the 1967 defeat, the collapse of Nasser's national project and the switch to an Islamist-oriented conservative ideology and a laissez-faire economy at the hands of Sadat, the play was predictably neglected. A socialist utopia had no place under Sadat and seemed a ridiculously antiquated idea after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the downfall of communism. For more than 40 years, Farahat and his 'Republic' seemed doomed to oblivion, or, at best, to having only historical value as remnants of bygone days. Only a person with a stupendous faith in the artistry and dramatic talent of Idris could risk reviving the play now, when society has become fundamentally and irreparably tainted with the worst aspects of globalization, and Amr Qabil is such a person. Not only has he revived it, but (as I told you in my last Weekly article, dated 21-27 August) he has also made it part of a big theatrical event celebrating Idris's genius and featuring dramatisations of two of his short stories and two of his novels, besides Farahat's Republic. Here, as in the case of the dramatised stories and novels (discussed in the above-mentioned article), Qabil opted for realism and a simple, gimmick-free style of directing. He trusted that, played straightforwardly, with good actors and in the right key, this vibrantly humorous text would reach well beyond the time it was written and touch a deep chord in Al-Ghad's predominantly middle and lower- middle class audience, particularly in these days of soaring prices and universal economic stress. After an aural overture of raucous street noises, followed by grim orders, harshly shouted in the dark, muffled cries, the sound of scuffles and muted objections, the lights come up to reveal the reception area in a police station. Subhi Abdel-Gawwad's soullessly plain white-beige-and-brown set sported many ugly spidery cracks in the walls and looked fittingly grimy and dilapidated. With no windows in sight, one could almost smell the musty air, and the whole place seemed to reek of despair. Upstage, at the centre of the back wall, dominating the whole drab scene like a mock- throne, was a rickety old desk, railed in with low bars on three sides, making the gruff, irascible Farahat who sat there, barking questions and curses, look himself like a prisoner. Two side exits, in line with the desk, led in opposite directions, inside, to the cells, and outside to the street, while downstage left, a rough waiting bench faced a forbidding, black-bordered white door on the right which led into the office of Farahat's superior. Unfolding in this set, the play continuously moved between the planes of dream and reality, alternating narration with dialogue and shifting the mood from gentle pathos to coarse vulgarity. With vivid, beautifully detailed performances from all the members of the cast, led by the highly sympathetic Abdel-Rehim Hassan as Farahat, the play came across as a rare and delightful mixture of boisterous farce and wistful comedy. Though naively phrased in a way that sparks off laughter at almost every point, Farahat's utopia struck me as poignantly sad and seemed a bitterly sarcastic comment on what has become of my generation's once cherished socialist dream. In this sense, it is as topically relevant now, in our ruthlessly globalized world, as it was when the play was first staged. But while to the 1950s' audiences it held, despite all the comedy and naïve chatter, a prophecy, a future promise, a glimpse of a paradise well within one's reach; to us now, it seems a sad reminder of a paradise lost and whips up waves of painful nostalgia. That hordes of spectators flock to Al-Ghad theatre every night, mostly in family groups, with lots of children, to watch the different Faces of the Magician is fresh proof of Yusef Idris's perennial appeal and a tribute not only to Amr Qabil who masterminded and directed the project, but also to his devoted and enthusiastic cast and crew. While Subhi Abdel-Gawwad competently designed all the works, Yasser Abul 'Enein and Mohamed El-Khayyam helped with the adaptation of the two novels -- Al-'eib (Shame) and Al-Haraam (Sin) -- and Baher El-Hareeri, Ahmed El-Haggar and Fatima Mohamed Ali provided all the musical and lyrical accompaniments; the cast was led by bunch of magnificent performers, with Abdel-Rehim Hassan taking on Farahat in the Republic, Fikry Effendi and the chief clerk in Al-'eib wa Al-Haraam, and the jealous husband and the absent father in the short stories -- Al-Sitara (The Curtain) and Akher El-Donia (The End of the World), both adapted by Qabil himself; May Rida as the heroine of Al-'eib, the wife in Al-Sitara, the grotesque, man-hungry widow in the Republic and one of the narrators in Akher El-Donia ; Nashwa Isma'il as Aziza in Al-Haraam, the slovenly scruffy slut in the Republic, and a narrator in Akher El-Donia ; and Tareq Sharaf as the new neighbour in Al-Sitara, the rakish police officer in the Republic, a narrator in Akher El-Donia, the corrupt civil servant and seducer in Al-'eib and the village libertine in Al-Haraam. Supporting them was a superb team of actors which included Mahmoud El-Zayyat, Ashraf Shukry, Randa Ibrahim, Hisham Ali, Mohamed Shakir, Yasser Abul 'Enein, Hassan Abdallah, Walid Abu Gemei'ah, and Romany Michel. As they moved from one work to the other, changing roles and characters, Qabil's actors, whether leading or supporting, displayed an amazing amount of talent, immense technical versatility, boundless vitality, an infectious kind of enthusiasm and an impressively wide emotional range. Compared to them, the actors in both the Youth Theatre's production of Mahfouz Abdel Rahman's vintage one-act drama Ma Agmaluna (How Beautiful We Are) and the National's expensively staged Romeo and Juliet (directed by Sanaa' Shaafeh) looked pale and emaciated and quite out of their depth. Set in an ancient kingdom, ruled over by a petulant, ineffectual king, his powerful, willful queen and wily, intriguing brother, and violently rocked by internal political unrest, caused by a popular leader who foments rebellion, Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman's play is a parable about the evil hypocrisy and moral complacency of people in power and has the atmosphere of a legend and the structure of a detective story. When the king retires to a rural palace to rest his nerves, taking his court along, a soothsayer turns up at his door and the king admits him to his presence, thinking to while away the time and have some fun. Within a few minutes, however, the hooded visitor takes on the role of implacable investigator and forces the company to delve into the past, prising gruesome confessions out of them and dragging out into the light all the ugly skeletons they have carefully hidden in their secret cupboards for so long. The investigation, which centers on the murder of one of the king's courtiers, and a favourite friend, while in prison, gradually yields thrilling revelations: first, that the dead man was secretly married to the queen's closest companion and lady-in- waiting, and had a son by her who disappeared soon after his father's death; second, that he (the dead man) was in reality an illegitimate step-brother to the king and, therefore, secretly feared and resented by him and his lawful brother and minister as a possible pretender to the throne; third, that he was secretly desired by the queen but had spurned her love, preferring her maid of honour to her, thus inspiring in her a murderous jealousy; and, to top it all, that he was in fact the secret leader of the much-feared rebels whose aim is to overthrow the king and his corrupt court. 'Which of the three has killed him' is the question which propels this drama of revelations. In this kind of drama, of which Sophocles's Oedipus Rex is the prototype, the revelations should reach their climax in a recognition of guilt coupled with remorse and cause a reversal in the characters' fortunes. But not here. Though it uses a potentially tragic form, Ma Agmaluna cunningly manipulates it to produce a subtle satire in which nothing changes at the end and where the characters, though they have discovered the truth about themselves and each other, pretend that nothing has happened and stick together in the interest of preserving their power and 'beautiful' public image. Not only does the investigation fail to conclusively reveal the identity of the murderer, it also dismisses the prying soothsayer as a figment of the characters' collective imagination. When he suddenly disappears at the end, unnoticed by everybody, including the audience, and a guard walks in to ask the king if the soothsayer whose arrival he had announced at the beginning of the play and who has been waiting at the door since then should be finally admitted, the royal characters suddenly realize that they had never admitted the soothsayer in the first place and that, though the crimes they confessed were true enough, the actual investigation had never really happened. Breathing a sigh of relief and shaking off their collective nightmare, they step forward, all smiles and bonhomie, to pose for a public photo, telling each other how beautiful they all look. That the play ends exactly the way it began, with the same elegant tableau vivant, despite all the harrowing revelations in-between, triggers a huge irony and clinches the author's message. Mohamed Gaber's evocative set made good use of the cramped, rectangular space at Yusef Idris hall, covering the floor of the performance area with imitation flagstones, lining its two long side walls with carvings of animals and huge, primitive masks, and placing a blood-red throne at the back, against an empty sky, facing a stone fountain up front, with real running water. This last, small detail was put to intelligent use by director Ahmed Ragab; by making the water stop running at the entrance of the soothsayer and resume flowing once he departs, he symbolically identified it with the flow of regular time, placing the action outside it, and stressing its imaginary nature as a collective dream. Ragab also moved his six young actors well around the small space and tried to draw the best out of them; though inexperienced, they could have acquitted themselves quite well were it not for the fact that every time they opened their mouths they literally mangled Mahfouz Abdel-Rahman's elegant classical Arabic. The same defect marred the performances of the equally young and inexperienced cast of the National's grand production of Romeo and Juliet (at Miami theatre), and Sanaa Shaafeh's reluctance to cut the text made it more distressingly obvious. The only time it did not offend your ears was when the actors' weak, undeveloped voices made it impossible for you to hear what they were saying, or when ballet, fencing, or recorded music and operatic singing took over. At such times you could really appreciate their fresh, youthful looks and physical agility and vigour. But the really irritating thing was Shaafeh's romantically soppy and platonically chaste directorial conception which robbed the play of any hint of sexual passion and made it feel like an insipid fairy tale completely divorced from reality and quite irrelevant to the present. With neither passion nor relevance, and even though it boasted a colourful, emotive, musical sound track by composer Tareq Mahran (assisted by a full orchestra, 3 sopranos, 2 tenors and a bass), a stream of elegant Italianate sets by Mustafa Sultan which kept going up and coming down, sumptuous period costumes by Huda El-Segeini and graceful choreography by Atef Awad, this Romeo and Juliet failed to come to life or take wing. It looked as if Shaafeh could not make up his mind whether he wanted a musical or a grand, classical production; apparently he wanted both and ended up falling between two stools. Gomhoriyyet Farahat (Farahat's Republic), by Yusef Idris, directed by Amr Qabil, Al-Ghad Theatre, Ma'agmaluna (How Beautiful We Are), by Mahfouz Abdel Rahman, directed by Ahmed Ragab, Yusef Idris Hall, Al-Salam Theatre, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, directed by Sanaa Shaafeh, Miami theatre, July-August, 2008.
