Saadallah Wannous’ texts are no stranger to the Egyptian stage. The prominent Syrian playwright (1941-1997) had a prolific output that has found its way into the repertoire of both mainstream governmental and independent theatre. The Elephant, O Monarch of the Ages (1969), based on an Arabian folktale, has been performed all over the Arab world, not least at the now-defunct Manf Hall Theatre where I remember seeing it in the early 1980s; The King is the King (1977), dealing with the unchanging nature of absolute power, was performed several times in Egypt as well as in his native Syria; The Head of Mamluk Gabir is also frequently performed all over the Arab world and was most recently put on in 2024 at the newly-renovated Samer Theatre.
The Rituals of Signs and Transformations and Drunken Days are two of Wannous’ most iconoclastic plays, the latter completed in 1996 less than a year before his death. Both were performed in Egypt in full, the second at the Hanager Theatre.
As a playwright, Wannous was preoccupied with issues related to power. In his earlier plays, he was preoccupied with political power in the sense of the monarch or absolute ruler and the authority exerted by such a figure, notably in Elephant and Jabir. However, by the time of Rituals and Drunken Days he had moved on to explorations of power in a Foucauldian sense, where sexual politics and the customs that constrain society force people into rigid moulds upheld by our own fellow-men and women.
Rituals has consistently caused outcry due to its sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual man on stage, which even in the historical setting of the play is enough to enrage audiences. Drunken Days is arguably Wannous’ most mature play alongside Rituals, written in a kind of Oedipean journey of discovery set in Syria where a grandson is bent on uncovering the mystery of his fractured family, finally unearthing the truth about his grandmother escaping the constraints of her arranged marriage and oppressive family to start a new life living in sin with her lover. The play is told in a fragmented sequence of 26 scenes, each uncovering a new facet of the tragedy.
This adaptation, Leila’s Dream, is as delicate and ethereal as you can be crammed into a room with 100 spectators. It condenses this difficult and complex play into the story of a single character from the play, the daughter of the grandmother, who loses her voice as the result of being the only one the mother entrusted with her secret. This version makes the grandmother into a mother. Leila and her mother are the central characters, with their third being Adnan (Abanoub Latif), the tortured son who wants to cleanse his mother’s “shaming” of the family by killing her, and the fourth being Leila’s husband, a supporting character.
The achievement of the adaptation and the director is literally making the play smaller — in more ways than one — and more intimate. In many ways, the shortening and condensing of the play is both a requirement and consequence of its performance in the Theatre Institute’s Alternative Spaces Festival. Text-wise, it cuts most of the characters and focuses on the emotional suffering of the central protagonists, culling dialogue to a minimum and making the entire performance last a trim 50 minutes. Setting-wise, it condenses the various places that are visited by the grandson (in the original text) into a tiny performance space — a lecture hall with a central dais — only about 10x10 metres. This space is forced to accommodate the stage (a circular area at the centre with the far ends of the space used as auxiliary performance locations accommodating no more than two actors, and a live dove in a cage hanging on the wall), the audience (in tiers round the stage), the lighting control booth (shoehorned into a corner), and the sound control for the prerecorded music (likewise).
Leila’s Dream is a self-contained, integrated gem of a conception where every element — text (Lydia Farouk with Mohamed Hassan), set design (Heba Al-Komi), costuming (Loubna Al-Mansi), lighting (Mahmoud Al-Husseini), and music (prerecorded by Ahmad Rushdi) — is brilliantly creative on a shoestring budget, creating a perfectly harmonious and cohesive whole.
The setting is a cleverly conceived set of semicircular elements — two concentric circles of bricks with real roses and wildflowers planted in them, with gaps for the actors to move in and out — and two half-circles, like parentheses, of vertically suspended ropes on which hang paraphernalia faintly suggestive, but not overwhelmingly so, of family life — a traditional brass coffee pot, a mirror, and a notebook.
The red colour of the notebook catches the velvety red of the roses and echoes the brick-red, rough matte linen of Leila’s costume, a single piece with flowing lines somewhere between a galabiya and a dress, in the otherwise austerely monochromatic set with various shades of sand, camel, and beige — symbolic of the mother’s bid for freedom in a monotonous life, or perhaps of the one act of rebellion that shattered an otherwise beige existence.
Leila’s husband is similarly dressed in soft fabrics with a rough linen texture, echoing the rugged setting of rural Syria where Wannous’ original play is located. The mother is ethereal and tormented in a beige wool cardigan which she clutches about her in a touchingly self-protective gesture, covering a flowing beige garment. When she leaves her stifling life, she drops the cardigan and lets her hair down, acquiring sexy vitality by virtue of the simplest of costume changes, reminding us again of the vibrancy of low-budget live theatre to constantly play up the theatricality of the elements on stage.
Adnan, the son seeking to avenge his family’s honour, is similarly dressed in rough cotton fabric with a jacket of a faintly military cut (salvaged from a second-hand store by the resourceful costume designer), reflecting his original profession as a police officer, and rough suede ankle boots — nothing shiny here, none of the elements of the set or costume has a reflective surface at all — into which his neutral-coloured trousers are tucked, just hinting, again, at an authoritarian bent or military background.
Set-wise, necessity is the mother of invention: lattice-work engraved on laser lights hanging from low bars, with the windows and doors of the room doubling as wings.
A particularly powerful moment is when Leila’s husband (Omar Sultan) pounds on the door screaming to be let in. (The use of smoke to make the light beams visible, while a good idea in theory, in practice was not the best choice for a room absolutely packed with people). Inside the central circle, there is something achingly poignant about the brilliant decision to use real roses and wildflowers. Artificial flowers, while immune to wilting, could never have had this powerful and heartfelt implication of fleeting, transient life, a gasp — much like the flowers — away from death.
The play’s setting inexorably supports the mother’s decision to flee a stultifying life, while never discounting the human suffering undergone by all involved. There are no villains here, just people broken down by life trying to do the best they can.
Leila (Sandra Malqi), in red, is wonderfully vulnerable as the daughter sharing a special bond with her mother (Heba Al-Komi), who is heartbroken yet bravely resolute. Although one might expect a woman of middle age, the mother is specified in Wannous’ text to be “nearing the end of life” at 35 — not as far from the actress’ age as one might think. Mustafa Raafat is visually suited to the role of the young and desperate son who ultimately ends his life. The caged dove aside the stage symbolises freedom and hope.
I would love to see this show again, except I think this is one of those plays that, in a term coined by US theatre director Laura Farabough, are “site-specific”, that is, born by and indebted to the location in which they take place. It is hard to imagine this little masterpiece swallowed up by a cavernous theatre — although perhaps a slightly larger black box space might be acceptable.
The conception, the brainchild of Lydia Farouk, has a certain delicacy and lightness of touch and attention to detail that, at the risk of falling into stereotypes, I might say is particularly strong among female directors. The presentation of this work — sometimes lugubrious, as I recall from a full-length rendering of Wannous’ original — curtails the ponderous heaviness, still visible through a glass darkly in the spoken text, and transforms it into something altogether more diaphanous.
Leila’s Dream, part of the Festival for Alternative Spaces held by the Academy of Arts Theatre Institute, at the Theatre in the Round.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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