Nehad Selaiha hails a theatrical project commemorating Yusef Idris It is exactly 17 years since Yusef Idris died in August 1991 at the age of 64. To mark the occasion, Al-Ghad theatre is currently playing 4 dramatizations of his novels and short stories and two of his plays. Since the length of the performances ranges from 30 to 100 minutes, it was unfeasible to cram them all in one evening, though I personally would have liked that very much. But even if the audience were willing to spend 4 or 5 hours in the company of Idris, such a plan would have put a tremendous strain on the cast, many of whom appear in all 6 works, often doubling in different parts within the same performance. It was, therefore, agreed to divide the works into 3 slots, according to their literary genre, with each playing for two nights alternately with the others. This means that every other day you can go and watch a different section of the 3-part project. Such a schedule is most unusual in Egyptian theatres, would look odd in ads, and is bound to cause some confusion. Unless you carefully consult the programme, you could turn up at the theatre one evening to see the plays and end up watching the short stories or the novels and vice versa. This does not bother director Amr Qabil who thought up this project and did all the adaptations, providing many of the lyrics into the bargain. He is confident that whomever watches one portion is bound to come back for more, provided they like what they see, of course. Though mainly targeting Idris's dedicated fans -- to bring them all together to celebrate his memory in an atmosphere of love and in a way he himself would have appreciated -- the project was also intended to offer what amounts to an introductory crash course for the younger generation and the adult laymen/women who know little or nothing about the multi-faceted world of this great writer. Even the stray viewer who attends only one evening is bound to take away with her something and may be tempted, at some future point, to revisit Idris's world, Qabil believes. The education bent of the undertaking is quite obvious since every night a 10-minute recorded narration of the basic facts about Idris's career, including comments on his works by such redoubtable figures as Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz, as well as a few reflections by Idris himself, is read in a voice-over (by movie and TV star Hisham Abdel Hamid) every night before the show, accompanied by slide projections of photos of Idris at different stages of his life, scenes from old productions of the plays and the covers of his most famous works. This makes Amr Qabil's Wogooh El-Sahir (Faces of the Magician) more than an ambitious triple-part production and gives it an important cultural dimension. Coming after last year's Layali El-Hakim (Nights with El-Hakim), another magnificently ambitious and horrendously taxing venture in which Qabil chose five representative plays from Tawfiq El-Hakim's vast dramatic output and staged them successively, over a month, in Zaqaziq, the capital of the governorate of Sharqiyya, with a predominantly local cast (see my coverage of that event in Weekly, 5-11 April, 2007, Issue No. 839), El-Sahir, except for the producing agency (here, the state theatre organization, formerly the Cultural Palaces), seems a continuation of the earlier project and establishes a new tradition of theatrical/cultural events. I had closely followed the earlier experiment and know how much Qabil suffered in order to make his dream come true. He had hoped to continue working in the provinces, with local companies, introducing the deprived and much neglected audiences there to their dramatic history and best playwrights through concentrated doses of theatrical pleasure, but the petty bureaucrats running our cultural organizations would not let him. After his Zaqaziq experience, I thought he would give up and, as a gifted young director, settle down to building a career with no such heavy costs. But Qabil is incorrigible; a dreamer who, like Idris, would follow the dream no matter how much it cost him mentally, physically, financially and intellectually. Like a child, intent on making his dolls speak and his horse gallop, despite what the 'grown-ups' say, he chases after his vision. And the wonder of it is that wherever he goes, he finds similar crazy, addle-brained dreamers willing to follow him along the journey. To have passion is a great blessing; to be able to inspire others with a similar longing is a god-given gift; and Qabil seems to have it. No person in his right mind would believe that a dramaturge/director, let alone a cast of talented, professional, performers could accept to undertake such a tremendous task as staging 6 works by Idris on such a measly budget as was offered by Al-Ghad theatre. But, there is such a thing called 'labour of love', and in the case of Al-Sahir, this is what has saved the day. The opening night, on Thursday, 14, featured two dramatized short stories picked out of the scores of collections published by Idris. Al-Sitara (The Curtain), a hilarious satire on the moral hypocrisy of oriental males, seems to attract directors. I remember seeing a dramatization of it some years ago at El-Sawy Cultural Centre, prepared by a group of young Egyptian playwrights in a Prohelvetia dramaturgical workshop and staged by a Swiss woman director; her name unfortunately escapes me. In that earlier dramatization, the handsome bachelor who rents the flat opposite the one inhabited by a newly married couple and causes the husband, Bahig, who had hoped for a voluptuous female tenant to flirt with, infinite jealous worry, lurked in the background and was uniformly silent. Here, however, in Qabil's adaptation, he is foregrounded and forms with the husband (played by Abdel Rahim Hassan) a delightfully hilarious duo. Qabil went a step further and split the husband into a similarly dressed trio, with Mahmoud El-Zayyat impersonating the evil, suspicious side of his self, and Ashraf Shukry as the kind, trusting part. With a simple set (by Subhi Abdel Gawwad), consisting of two ground floor balconies facing each other on both sides of the stage, an arabesque sofa back right against a plain wall and next to it a painted view of houses in a modest neighbourhood, imaginatively transforming the space between the two balconies into a narrow road, The Curtain unfolded like a cautionary tale, in the style of a comic strip cartoon, warning husbands that their moral hypocrisy can easily infect their wives and turn them into wily traitors. May Rida's quiet, low key comic performance as the wife who begins by rebelling against hanging a curtain across the balcony and ends up restoring it, of her own free will and to the amazement of her remorseful husband, and using it as a shield to spy on her handsome neighbour, acted as a foil to the obviously stylized comic routines of Abdel Rahim Hassan and the vivacious Tareq Sherif as the new tenant. Akher El-Donia (The End of the World), the next item in El-Sahir 's opening double bill, is a poignant tale about a lonely, motherless boy who treasures a coin given to him by his father, who works in an unspecified, distant place, referred to by everybody as 'the end of the world', loses it while playing on the train tracks, searches for it frantically, and at the moment he finds it is run over by a racing train. In Qabil's hands, this heart-rending story came across as an anguished narrative delivered by four actors (Tareq Sherif, May Rida, Nashwa Ismail and Mohamed Shakir), with video projections of the child Khalid Khalifa, in a voluminous, white galabiyya, floating in a sea of rural greenness, crisscrossing with ominous, intermittent shots of a train advancing in the distance and a number of emotive lyrics composed by Qabil himself, put to music by Bahir El-Hareeri and sung by Ahmed El-Haggar and Fatma Mohamed Ali. The deceptively cozy narrative was also punctuated by fitful appearances of Abdel Rahim Hassan as the memory of the absent father, Randa Ibrahim as the granny who looks after the child and also as the craved for fairy godmother, and Hisham Ali as the evil, tempting jinni. On Saturday, it was time for the novel. Idris's Al-'eib (Shame) and Al-Haraam (Sin) both rendered in film versions and, therefore, quite well know even to the illiterate viewer, were knocked together and dramatized in the form of a dialogue between two stories and two heroines. The performance was geometrically conceived and severely schematized. The stage was divided into two areas: a front one representing the office where the heroine of the first novel meets temptation and succumbs to it; and a back area representing the village where the heroine of the second novel pays a terrible price for a moment of weakness. The two novels come together at three points in the show: first, at the outset, when we see the two heroines -- May Rida and Nashwa Ismail -- slumped on the floor, back to back; then midway through the show when they resume this initial posture while characters from both novels inundate them with whispering accusations; and finally, when Aziza, the heroine of Al-Haraam, takes on Sanaa', the heroine of Al- 'eib, in an impassioned discussion about the definition of 'honour' and 'sin'. That poverty and need are the roots of all evils is the message of both novels and their dramatization. And it was delivered in a quasi- realistic mode, similar to that of the cartoon strip, albeit in a grimly somber mood. Tomorrow I shall watch the third section of this ambitious project, Gomhoriyyat Farahat (Farahat's Republic), which Idris himself turned into a play. More to tell you next week.
