Falling short

Sarah Enany, Tuesday 21 Jan 2025

Sarah Enany was underwhelmed by Play at Al-Ghad Theatre

Play

 

Despite lofty ambitions and a cast who give their all, Play, currently running at the Al-Ghad Theatre next to the National Circus off Sphinx Square, lives up to its lacklustre name. The premise of the show is simple: A troupe of professional actors, hard-pressed to find something to perform, come together around a rehearsal table, armed with various classic Shakespearean texts. After some predictable bickering about who is to take the leading role and by-now-standard declarations of self-importance by each actor, the team leader standing in as the director suggests, “what if we improvised a drama about the pressures facing today’s Egyptian family?” They then hand out roles — the Mother, the Paterfamilias, the Son, the Son’s Friend, the Grandfather, and the Attractive Neighbour — and commence.

This in itself is of course not a recipe for disaster. Both metatheatre and social family drama have a rich and long-standing history in Egypt. Luigi Pirandello’s groundbreaking Six Characters in Search of an Author was performed in the 1960s, although I have not been able to run the production to earth, and more recently in the AUC’s 2003 production directed by Frank Bradley. It seems that Play started out taking some inspiration from Pirandello’s classic, which has a similar combination of characters drawn from both traditional family roles and the theatrical profession: the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Manager, the Leading Lady, the Ingenue, and so on. It is also not so hard to see the inspiration of various playwrights who deal with family issues, the most famous of whom has remained Noaman Ashour with his El-Nas Elli Fouq (The Folks Upstairs), written in the 1960s.

Unfortunately Play quickly, not to say immediately, devolves into lacklustre conflicts within the family that are less character-driven than type-driven, and seem to be drawn from soap operas rather than any attempt at achieving depth. The Mother is a housewife with an amusing lower-middle-class accent and mannerisms, and her husband has spent the best years of their married life abroad in an unnamed Gulf country which, judging by his frequent depiction of it as “full of spirituality”, is probably meant to be Saudi Arabia. Having made his fortune abroad as many middle class families do, the paterfamilias keeps a tight hold on the purse strings while his son yearns — like far too many of his generation — to emigrate to Europe. This terrifies his parents, who repeatedly invoke the fate of many Egyptians who have died at sea in the infamous migrant boats, but most especially the Mother, who starts nagging her husband to fork over hundreds of thousands for a membership in a sporting and social club of which the Attractive Neighbour is a member (the name is not mentioned, but there is no shortage of such clubs in Cairo: the Shooting Club, the Maadi Club, the Zamalek Club, the Gezira Club, etc) which she dreams will be their ticket not only to low-interest car loans and social mobility (“We’ll hobnob with a better class of people and our son will make high class friends!”) but also to sporting activities and an outlet for the Son who will then no longer dream of emigrating.

Meanwhile, the Attractive Neighbour hangs out, not at the sporting club, but at a nightclub, where the Son also goes, hanging out with the bartender, his friend, and pretty girls (roles doubled very competently and comically by the other actors). In a flat, broad scene with little to recommend it in the way of dialogue, the Husband makes a pact with the Attractive Neighbour to marry her on paper so as to obtain the rights to her sporting club membership, for a fee, of course, only to die unexpectedly due to the marriage officiant’s shingle falling on him, which makes Attractive Neighbour his widow and entitled to an eighth of his inheritance. The End.

In fairness, Play is intended as a light-hearted comic romp, and by and large achieves this, thanks for the most part to the actors, who infuse these flat family types with characteristics the audience can relate to and laugh at. The director, Sameh Abdel-Rahman Al-Shafei, has adapted Sameh Mahran’s script, originally entitled Disco, to meet their metatheatrical needs. The repeated joke about the main couple’s marriage being on the rocks and the husband’s insistence on “spiritual pursuits” ends up being funnier than such a hoary old chestnut has any right to be, just because of the actors’ sheer enthusiasm.

To attempt to infuse some sophistication into the proceedings, two devices are employed, one with considerably more success than the other. The first is when the actors randomly burst into either single lines or impassioned monologues from Othello, Hamlet, and other Shakespearean plays, in order to (a) show that all drama shares the same roots, (b) showcase their acting ability, (c) Make It Metatheatrical, (d) Be Sophisticated, or (e) some combination of the foregoing. These are all embarrassing, to put it mildly. There is nothing Shakespearean going on in the vicinity except the fact that the actors are adroitly doubling and tripling characters and invoking character with simple, evocative costumes and props.

The second device that seeks to infuse some metatheatricality and comedy into the proceedings is the appearance of the Security Guard, a recurring character who barges in to break the theatrical illusion (such as it is) and berate the actors for not being Shakespearean enough, profound enough, dedicated enough, etc. His frequent costume changes and charisma are enough to relieve the tedium of the pedestrian plot. It must be said that the set and direction contribute a great deal to the deliberate theatricality of the atmosphere.

The black box theatre of Al-Ghad is set up as a very intimate thrust stage, with the audience on three sides of the action, intimately few in number and very close to the actors, at times almost touching. The set leans into the whole improvisation-metatheatre theme with the four small tables that come together to form the family dinner table and pull apart to form the nightclub tables actually envisioned as parts of a jigsaw puzzle that fit together (the chairs are similarly crafted and we wait in vain for them to fit together similarly, but this never materialised). The play drags on even at an hour and fifteen minutes. That said, there is much to be said for sheer enthusiasm and lightheartedness, which saves the day at best.


* A version of this article appears in print in the 23 January, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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