A modern Isis stalks

Nehad Selaiha follows Naguib Sorour's Na'ima on her quest for Hassan's headless body at Al-Hanager

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Yassin and Baheya (staged at the Pocket Theatre by Karam Mutawi' in 1964), Ah Ya Leil Ya Amar (O, Night, O, Moon, directed by Galal El-Sharqawi at Al-Hakim theatre in 1967) and Oulu li 'Ein El-Shams (Tell the Eye of the Sun, directed for the National by Tawfiq Abdel-Latif in 1973) -- it is written in a mixture of verse and rhymed prose, in both colloquial and classical Arabic. Like them it draws on songs and narratives from the folk oral tradition and Al-Samer, an old popular mode of communal entertainment, to fashion a new kind of epic, poetic drama -- on the model of Brecht -- through which the poet can project his reading of modern Egyptian history and air his ideological beliefs in effective theatrical terms. Mineen Ageeb Nas li Ma'nat El-Kalam Yequluh? (Where Can I Find People Who Can Spell Out the Meaning of Words?), currently at Al-Hanager, is the last play of Naguib Sorour's quartet of peasant verse dramas. Like the first three --

Written sometime between 1973 and 1978 (when he died), its tone -- though still passionate in defence of the poor and oppressed and in denunciation of their oppressors -- is more conciliatory and has nothing of the bitterness and despair of the earlier plays. It is as if in this last play Sorour was replaying earlier themes and motifs in a new key and groping for some kind of final reconciliation -- for a kind of wisdom that would explain all the unnecessary pain and suffering and make sense of it as part of a quest for integrity and salvation. The tragic love story of Yassin and Baheya, immortalised in the Mawwal (popular ballad) that carries their names and gives the first play in the quartet its title, is replayed in a different variation through the Hassan and Na'ima ballad.

In the earlier Yassin and Baheya, where the action begins at the beginning of the tale, with the tender love story and marriage plans of the hero and heroine, the chronological progress of events always creates the illusion that something may yet happen to stop the course of events and avert the tragedy. But here the play begins when all is lost and nothing can be saved, redressed or retrieved: Hassan, the singer, has already been slaughtered by Na'ima's kinsmen and his beheaded body thrown into the Nile. This creates at the outset a mood of quiet resignation -- of the kind of repose that accompanies despair -- and the action takes on the character of a quest for solace through making sense of the tragedy and reading some deeper meaning in it. Still dazed with the shock and numbed by grief, Na'ima sets out on her journey in a state of befuddled incomprehension. She sees what happened as a cruel and senseless tragedy which concerns her alone rather than as part of a bigger design, a bigger evil. All she hopes for, in her wanderings with her lover's disembodied head, is to find his headless body, not (like her counterpart Isis) in order to put him back together again and bring him back to life, but merely to give him a decent burial, thereby getting some kind of closure (in modern terms). As she tells the good water nymphs who try to console her, if the body is not buried whole the spirit, in the form of a bird, cannot find its way back to it for the resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Throughout most of the first part, even though Hassan's body is sighted once or twice, the tone remains muted and never becomes suspenseful.

The action takes the form of a quest, at once realistic and metaphoric, and proceeds like a picaresque narrative. What the search for the body yields, however, is nothing material. As Na'ima wanders through the valley, meeting different kinds of people -- peasants, fishermen, shepherds, factory workers, the ghosts of soldiers killed in senseless wars and buried in the desert, an escaped convict, unjustly imprisoned and tortured and, finally, the students of the famous Abbas Bridge demonstrations (a famous incident in 1941, when British troops opened the bridge, killing scores of protestors) -- the journey in space becomes a journey in time, through modern history, and she progressively gains awareness. Gradually she learns to identify Hassan with all the oppressed and freedom-fighters she meets and to see her personal suffering as part of a larger affliction which involves all the wretched of the earth. To lift the oppression requires defiance and human offerings, and she finally perceives that Hassan's defiance and death was not in vain. Like the soldiers whose blood mixes with the desert sand, sprouting palm trees and cotton blossoms, the students whose bodies fell into the Nile like the human sacrifice the Ancient Egyptians used to throw annually into the river, Hassan's death becomes a kind of primitive fertility rite in which his blood mixes with the water to feed the soil. It is at this moment that Na'ima, accompanied by the three water nymphs who have throughout acted as her guardian angels, saving her from the demon-like Zionist gang, reaches a point of reconciliation and accepts to intern Hassan's head in the earth, knowing that it will join his body through the living earth and the eternal Nile.

The message here, embedded in both the language and dramatic structure of the play, is that without clarity of vision and complete awareness, symbolised by the severed head which must return to the body, there can be no salvation. It is a message we come across in many plays in the 1960s and is by no means unique to Sorour. In such plays, what is known as dramatic development does not consist in the elaboration of one action but, rather, takes the form of the development of the hero's or heroine's political consciousness. In the case of Na'ima this is marked by a realisation of her identity as an extension of Isis and Baheya, and that of Hassan as both Yassin and Osiris. Finally, she grasps the meaning of the riddle that says "death is sometimes the only road to life."

The current production, directed by Murad Munir at Al-Hanager is, for the most part, a revival of his own staging of the same play for the Modern Theatre company in 1985. From the previous performance he kept more or less the same sets, costumes, blocking, the mixing of historical fact with theatrical poetic metaphor, especially in the battle and demonstration scenes, the grotesque, larger- than-life masks, the musical framework and even the same singer. Except for the change of heroine and most of the cast and a few minor alterations here and there, introduced to give the old performance a face- lift and topical relevance, one could easily imagine oneself back in 1985. The same set-designer of the previous production, Ibrahim El-Moteli, kept the childish-looking painted partition representing the Nile flowing from Upper Egypt down the valley. Thank heavens, however, this time Walid Mounir took the wise decision of removing the Styrofoam head smeared with blood which the previous Na'ima carried around all the time and the grotesque spectacle of Hassan's headless body fitfully materialising to slide down the partition like a decapitated Frankenstein creature, which were a source of much mockery and laughter in the 1985 production. An improvement was flanking the stage on both sides with what looked like parts of the exterior walls of houses and temples carved out of rock. To approximate the appearance of the popular Samer, he added steps covered with straw mats leading down to the auditorium, with a seating platform on one side for the live Oriental band (takht).

The acting style was intended to involve the audience, in the 1960s agit-prop tradition. Unfortunately, however, more often than not, this tends to manifest itself as haranguing: Ahmed Maher, whether as the escaped prisoner or revolutionary leader, consistently barked his lines at us. One cannot understand why actors invariably choose to demonstrate their patriotic spirit by hectoring the hapless audience. It was a positive relief to hear Wafaa Sadiq speak; she adopted a naturalistic tone and stuck to it throughout, which made her grief and moments of distress at once convincing and moving. Her frail appearance, gentle beauty, raven hair and black dress made her every inch the damsel in distress. In one respect this was a pity since it made her performance one-dimensional, always pathetic and pitiful. One missed the more vigorous performance of the older, more seasoned Mohsina Tawfiq in the 1985 production where you could more vividly sense the shift from innocence to knowledge and from weakness to empowerment. However, it is hardly Wafaa Sadiq's fault, as simplistic thinking dogs this production like a relentless nemesis. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the ludicrous scene of the Evil Zionist gang, performed with oversized, grotesque masks of Sharon, Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir (by Nagla Ra'fat), a Jewish menorah, a huge Star of David and a voluptuous dancer in a skintight, off-the- shoulder black leotard, hissing and writhing around the prostrate Na'ima. It gave me a start when Ali El-Haggar walked on-stage and said something to the effect that now, having paid lip-service to the Palestinian cause and watched Na'ima being saved from the clutches of the Zionist enemy by the timely intervention of the good water nymphs (cold comfort for the Palestinians), we were now entitled to some fun -- whereupon he burst into song and a group of motley hash-smokers staggered in, accompanied by a hip-wiggling woman in pink satin!

On the whole there was a zestful esprit de corps among the actors, who efficiently doubled and tripled in many parts. Their liveliness and gusto effectively countered the slow rhythm of the first part of the performance, relieving the tedium. Ali El- Haggar -- as Hassan's surrogate -- beautifully delivered old songs from the Egyptian popular tradition, particularly Sayed Darwish, as well as new ones composed by Mohamed El-Sheikh. But the performers best efforts and those of the technical crew cannot forestall the question: since Al- Hanager presented Naguib Sorour's Yassin and Baheya just a year ago, one wonders why this forum, originally intended for youthful experiments, is now going for the tried-and-tested crowd-pleasers, texts by established playwrights, staged mostly by veteran directors? Could it be nostalgia for the 1960s?