There is something refreshing about watching a conventional drama with character, plot, conflict, and a thrilling climax leading to a happy resolution. This applies, unfortunately, not only to Black but to the drama enacted at the gates of the AUC Falaki building as we tried to reach the performance.

I arrived at 9:45 for 10, only to find a crowd of about 30 people clustered outside the door on the street, barred from coming in. Now, I’m usually on the side of law and order, but it is probably past the time to complain about the arbitrariness of trying to enforce strict rules for audience entry in limited-time theatre performances where (a) theatre security enforces only the most superficial appearance of order; (b) behind the scenes, everyone lets in everyone they want through the side doors anyway; (c) theatre-goers are treated like the rabble with alarming disrespect; and (d) literally no other theatre in Egypt or abroad that I’ve seen enforces such a policy, where the favoured few are let in early, the seats in the theatre fill up, and instead of allowing standing room (which I saw in Vienna, so it’s not some sort of “barbaric Egyptian” invention), letting people to simply leave if they feel the view won’t be optimal – which would save us all a lot of grief – security resorts to blocking the entry of people who have been standing since long before the performance started, but denied entry due to the privileged few – friends, family and critics – being let in through side doors.

In the case of the Falaki Theatre, the AUC refused to allow us to enter through the main gate for students and faculty (so as to spare respectable AUC folk the sight of the theatre-going rabble) and relegated us to a narrow passageway onto a side door for a fire exit. Now, I am the first to admit that back when Nehad Selaiha was the Al-Ahram theatre critic and on most juries for such festivals, I rode in on her coattails and never looked twice at the rabble thronged at the gate. As I stood in the early-October heat and waited for the whims of security to let me through (with absolutely no transparency – I later went in to find that the upper balcony was completely empty and could have accommodated us, and in fact did, with absolutely no trouble), I not only keenly missed Nehad but felt a sense of kinship with critics without clout such as Maysa Zaki, who sustained an injury in her arm during the last Experimental Festival while trying to enter Nora Amin’s show as the security guard attempted to close the door in her face.

“But why don’t people just take no for an answer and go home?” you may ask. This is certainly a solution – I did the same a month previously at the Italian Cultural Centre when we were made to wait in the street even though we had arrived in a timely manner, for the performance – but the thing is, the security and ushers are frequently lying when they say that the house is full, and as audiences, we know this, (I am talking, of course, about shows with free admission where there are no tickets or seat numbers).  A simple solution would be, instead of the Stand/Walk of Shame in the street outside the exterior gates (!), let us walk in and see for ourselves that the house is full, and either seat ourselves on the stairs, stand in the back, or give up and leave.

“But fire safety!” Well, at this point, as an Egyptian, I have nothing to say but “All I have to say is that they don’t really care about us.” Today’s generation of theatre makers will not remember – and perhaps it’s just as well – the Beni Sueif disaster of 2005, when fire broke out at the Cultural Palace in that town, killing 50 theatre-goers and decimating Egypt’s theatre critic population, as well as injuring dozens of others who later died from inadequate burn care. The Ministry of Culture, taking the easy way out, blamed this catastrophe on the use of candles on stage. While the candles did set fire to the stage set, the theatre-goers and cast would’ve easily escaped the theatre had the caretaker not locked the audience into the auditorium and gone to have tea. The fire service five minutes away took 50 minutes to get there, and found no water to pump through their hoses when they did eventually arrive. Meanwhile, the burn victims staggered out of the theatre to lie on the sidewalks with no ambulances anywhere in sight. From eyewitness accounts, I also hear that the under-serviced, outdated air-conditioners exploded. Some people were literally charred to ash in their seats, the sign of a terrible explosion that gave no time to run. And in case you say, “Oh well that explains why they won’t let too many people in”, let me assure you that the scramble to keep the audience out, and the closed-door policy, existed long before this horrific disaster, going back to the late 1980s at the very least. The audience in Beni Sueif were in modest numbers. It is the total lack of fire safety, maintenance, respect for the audience (cf. locking them in) and the egregious absence of rescue services and burn care that led to a catastrophe of such scale – not letting in a few dozen standing-room audience members.

I realise that what I’m saying will not make too much sense to some Western readers, accustomed to different ways of doing things. Which is not wrong – a chacun son style – but pretending to care about audiences when you only care that it looks bad for your photo-op, or violates your strict notions of how “security” should be handled, is a special kind of hypocrisy that I have no truck with. The issue – bear with me for another minute, please? – is a credibility gap. No one is going to believe that the theatre is full, because whenever we go inside after being kept outside on the street for quite a while, we find many empty seats in the theatre and realise that we were being lied to. This is a long-standing ploy on the part of theatre security to keep seats open for mythical VIPs who never arrive but are being kept free on the off-chance, and honestly for no reason that I can see: the AUC Falaki Theatre, at the time we were being denied entry, was half-empty. To cut a long story short, security said, “we will only let in 10 people at a time” (for some incomprehensible reason) and cut off the line between a guy and his girlfriend, the guy lost his temper, the security guard lost his temper, they started screaming at each other. “I swear to God I’m getting in!” “And I swear to God you’re not getting in!”

***

By the time we arrived inside, I had had my fill of drama and conflict around open doors. But conflict, in the form of traditional and rather lugubrious drama around opening the doors of learning to a disabled girl, was what Black was all about. The script, according to the makers of the play, is based on an Indian movie of the same name. Bollywood movies, or film hindi as we call them in Egypt, are usually synonymous with three-hour-long, over-dramatic tear-jerkers with rampant melodrama and copious hand-wringing. Black, while mercifully short at just an hour and ten minutes, did not stray overly far from its Indian progenitor. This is a far cry from William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, which I watched at AUC in the 1990s long before the Falaki theatre was even envisioned, a mostly silent play focusing on the struggle of Anne Sullivan to break through to deaf-blind Helen Keller. This is a traditional Egyptian drama that would not be out of place on television or as a miniseries, whose rather simplistic melodrama wrung cheers from an audience clearly raised on fare that is devoid of subtlety or nuance. Creatively, playwright Israa Mahgoub transplants Helen Keller’s family to Egypt in the time of the 1952 military coup and renames her Samira, and treats us to the exact tragic moment when her mother, holding the baby, with much wailing and tears, is brought the news that her daughter will never see or hear again. At this point I very much feared that the evening would be downhill all the way: naturalism is only palatable, in this era of television and movies – at least to me – when it is whisper-quiet, with less dramatic declamations and finer distinctions and shifts from one emotional tone to the next. While this was absent from Black, rescue arrived in the form of Solaf Al-Shennawi, the child actress playing the seven-year-old deaf-mute Samira. She was a breath of fresh air. The show’s director Taghreed Abdel- Rahman makes much of the instruction the two girls playing younger Samira and older Samira received from sign language expert Leqaa Al-Serafi, and their dedication to learning it was admirable. One might point out that not all blind people are perpetually looking up and to the side, and that some of the limping body movements seem out of place on a deaf-mute who does not suffer from cerebral palsy; one could also say that falling into clichés in portraying disability does a great disservice to people who live with them. However, these clichés and a certain lack of subtlety aside, Solaf was a joy to watch and lifted the show out of the realm of the quotidian. Not only the actress but the director are to be congratulated for infusing a great deal of variety into pre-verbal Samira’s shrieks, grunts, and cries, which never seem repetitive and continually take on new meaning as the events of the play develop. The jury apparently thought so as well, giving Solaf a special prize for her acting in Black.

The original Indian movie, a retelling of the Helen Keller story in an Indian context, starred international superstar Amitabh Bachchan as a gender-bent Anne Sullivan in the role of the deaf-mute girl’s teacher. Leqaa, the scriptwriter, renamed the teacher Refaat Effendi, in keeping with the post-1952 setting (the father of the child actually complains about nationalisation and the confiscation of his lands). Mahmoud Suleiman stars as Refaat Effendi. According to the director, Suleiman refused to watch the movie starring Bachchan, which I can only see as a credit to him. Putting aside my own issues with reworking a canonically female role based on Anne Sullivan, a historical figure, into a capital-m Male role in a world already overstuffed with Male roles and lacking enough good female parts – putting aside my own issues with this, as I say, I can only congratulate Suleiman on portraying a very sympathetic, passionate, and rather broken-down recovering alcoholic teacher committed to rehabilitating his protégée at any cost, although he does have moments of raucous shouting that could be handled more delicately. This lack of delicacy is largely where the show, as a whole, weakens, devolving slightly into stridency and melodrama: Samira’s father, frustrated by her lack of progress, dismisses Refaat Effendi after he has achieved some progress with Samira and insists on putting her into a sanatorium. But the father’s unexpected two-week absence leaves open a window in which Refaat can successfully break through to Samira. This entire segment, although the father comes round in the end, is filled with melodramatic shouting and ultimatums. The father lacks nuance, miraculously coming round when Refaat Effendi throws Samira out into the public thoroughfare to bump into all sorts of people, be bullied by passing children, trip and fall and flounder in the dirt, in the name of “learning how to feel.” In the midst of this completely illogical and execrable scene comes one of the few powerful moments in the play: the portrayal of her realisation that the finger-gestures represent the letters of the alphabet. As Samira realises this, a projection screen on the stage lights up with Arabic letters, falling like raindrops to collect at the bottom of the screen. It doesn’t seem like much, but it successfully expresses a powerful moment. In The Miracle Worker, the actress playing Helen Keller freezes and says her baby-talk name for water “wah-wah”, the one word she learned before losing her sight and hearing – a scene that struck like a thunderbolt when Caroleen Khalil played Helen Keller at the now-defunct Wallace Theatre at the AUC. Full circle, indeed.

I later learned that this show was first produced two years ago as Taghreed Abdel-Rahman’s postgraduate directing project at the Academy of Arts, and this can definitely explain some of the heavy-handedness of the performance. Still, some moments – a singularly embarrassing scene where an inexplicably angry Raafat bellows at a now-adult Samira, “You have URGES, Samira! Do you know what that MEANS?!” and I’m not quite sure if his unexplained rage is supposed to be shaming her for sexuality or encouraging her to explore those urges (of course) within the sacred institution of holy matrimony. If the play were more subtle or nuanced I would imagine that Raafat harboured some unrequited feelings for Samira, but the entire production works very hard to ensure that we think no such thing. Disability and sexuality are a thorny and fraught issue at the best of times, and certainly not easily subject to exploration in a performance with an audience so lacking in subtlety that when Samira is asked by a university examiner, “what is knowledge?” and she answers, “it is Allah!” the entire auditorium burst into enthusiastic cheers.

Another classic aspect of melodrama is comic relief, supplied by the bubbly and personable Aya Khalaf and Mohamed Samir as the servants who end up being married. The comedy is laboured and rather circumscribed by the directing, not to say clichéd, but the actors are having so much fun that we can only smile along, relieved to be buoyed up by them. The performance ends with a recording of Helen Keller herself, which, in a few minutes of video, delivers every atom of the delicacy and subtlety we so desperately needed.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.