Monster mash - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly

Al-Ahram Weekly

2 days ago

Mohamed Adel, a Nineties-born student at the Academy of Arts' Theatre Institute, is one of the most interesting up-and-coming figures on the Egyptian stage today. In an odd, cross-generational handshake, his is an ideological and spiritual extension of the Free Theatre movement of the 1990s.
His works are not on the epic scale (and, for that reason, are free of the flaws) that characterised his spiritual predecessor, the late Mohamed Aboulsoud. Together with the 1990s pioneers inspired by the first CIFET festivals, Aboulsoud formed the Free Theatre Movement, and there is something in the sensibility of Adel's productions, a kind of delicacy and craftsmanship, that recalls Free Theatre pioneers who burst onto the scene in the early 1990s when slide projectors were still cutting-edge technology. Adel, not unlike the late genius, is an auteur in the mould of the Frenchman Antonin Artaud, who predicted that the director, scenographer and scriptwriter would eventually merge into one person. This can be seen in his process: selecting classic texts from the Western and Eastern canon, and producing them through the lens of his own interpretation, with a moody mise en scene and characters perennially vulnerable in their lost and lonely humanity – politics entirely optional.
What is so reminiscent of Aboulsoud is that there is something of the poetry of theatre in Adel's work, something of that intangible presence that sometimes manifests between two actors conversing or a single actor at a moment of vulnerability – the greater issues thematically evoked and manifested emotionally and intellectually. One thing about truly well-crafted dramatic art – I speak here of both theatre and cinema, and perhaps narrative art in general – is that as the story progresses, the individual events, characters, and details begin to recede, making way for the audience to see dimly the larger shapes of theme and concept, like fabric-draped sculptures whose planes can be discerned if you tilt your head at just the right angle and if the light hits them just so.
On its surface, The Monster — shown at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts' Theatre Institute International Festival — is a straightforward Victorian-era stage adaptation of both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and, Adel states, the play of the same title written by Nick Deere, which the director translated, adapted to suit his purposes, and then put on stage. It appears at first to be a costume drama, complete with Frankenstein's spastic creation, Dr and Mrs Frankenstein, together with an odd pair: Rita, a part-time prostitute, and her blind father, who form an unlikely friendship with The Creature (who, the director is careful to note, is a 'creature' rather than a 'monster'). The twist is that Dr Frankenstein (Mina Nabil) is being interrogated on suspicion of multiple murders – dozens, if the prosecutor is to be believed. The prosecutor, Smith (Ahmad al-Ramadi), knows nothing of the creature's existence and is blaming Frankenstein for the murders, scoffing at Frankenstein's panicked protests that 'the monster did it!' Mrs Frankenstein (played with aplomb by Nevine Hossam el-Din), a cold and ambiguous collaborator, now condemns, now supports, further muddying the waters.
The structure appears at first like a whodunnit: there have clearly been numerous murders committed, brutal and bloody murders, and the audience is never quite sure at the start whether Dr. Frankenstein's frantic and emphatic denials, as the prosecutor sneers at his defense of 'the monster did it', are mendacious. Is Frankenstein a murderer? Is his wife an accomplice? What happened? Who killed these people?
In a choppy-montage, vignette-lit, non-linear presentation, the audience is made privy to the sequence of events, cutting between scenes of the prosecutor's interrogation of Dr and Mrs Frankenstein and flashbacks – first of Frankenstein's dubious achievement of creating a human entity and then of that creature's journey through the world. We see the creature's gradual acquisition of consciousness, of language, of some degree of morals and values. We see him discover friendship and open his heart to love; we see him struggle with his father figure's disgust and abandonment, being a target of scorn and derision, being alone in the world without a family or others who resemble him.
The parallel emerges unbidden and undeniable: in his loneliness, in his grief and desolation and heartbreaking innocence, the Creature is the quintessential human; he is every one of us, in our loneliness, our vulnerability, our doubt. He is created from lightning; he seeks the love of his creator, his father figure, but is met with only coldness, cruelty, and scorn; he seeks love and is rejected; he seeks family and finds none. In an ironic misunderstanding, he finally imagines that his only friend, Rita's blind father, has betrayed him.
The ironic and heartbreaking twist in the story is thatm throughout, our sympathies are with the monster (thanks to the boundless charisma of Saïd Salman). We suffer alongside him, see firsthand his genuine, poignant innocence, experience his shy and trembling attempts at love and friendship, and share his heartbreak at finding himself rejected by the one who made him. We never quite believe that he was the murderer, because we believe in his innate goodness and see within him our own humanity. We see his innocence with our own eyes: the shattering of that innocence, and of our illusions, when he strangles the good-natured friend who has never been anything but kind and loving to him, is the shocking climax of The Monster.
It is in the final part of the play that we see that even the kindest and most guileless creature (us? all of us?) can be driven too far, that cruelty, violence, rejection and loneliness can transform such a creature into a monster (or was he a monster all along? the insidious question can only enhance the ambiguity), who starts by killing his best friend and then goes on a rampage, a killing spree. It is revealed in the shattering climax that the creature has even murdered Rita, the woman he is hopelessly in love with, and we see Frankenstein's doomed attempts – at his creation's insistence – to bring her back to life as he once did with the creature who loved her.
The Monster could easily have devolved into sentimental bathos, but restraint rules here with an iron fist. There is no melodramatic screaming, no gratuitous tears, and even the Creature, while aware of his wretchedness, sternly shies away from self-pity. The result is a show that entirely avoids sentimentality and melodrama, and has a kind of self-contained dignity to it, one without which its themes could never shine through.
Having seen this play without set and costumes in a run-through, I can say with confidence that it is the strength of the directing and the acting that makes it, far more than the low-budget set design (the Theatre Institute clearly spent the bare minimum here, to say nothing of the fact that I saw with my own eyes a senior professor striding onto the stage in an attempt to sabotage the dress rehearsal), the costumes, which were less a period reconstruction than an attempt to evoke Europeanness and past-ness with a combination of Victorian and generic poet-pirate style, and the admittedly evocative and occasionally inspired lighting.
Some plays are about painting pretty pictures; some are about capturing humanity in all its hubris and pathos, and this latter function is what The Monster does. Saïd Salman, beyond his spasticity and visible battle to gain control of his body and acquire human speech and mannerisms, has a profound charisma and vulnerability that is evident despite the monstrous makeup, and might have benefited from perhaps less greasepaint. Salman has two likewise deeply charismatic foils: the young prostitute Rita (Nellie al-Sharqawi), and her blind father (Abdel-Fattah al-Deberky). The scenes between Salman and Nellie are riveting, the chemistry between them stealing the audience's hearts and minds in its tenderness and fragility.
In anything like an equitable world, Nellie would be a box-office star within a few years, and likewise Salman and Deberky. The latter's scenes together are just as riveting, the only moments when the lost and lonely Creature finds human care and affection, developing into friendship and eventual tragedy. There is an acting quality that the great director Peter Brook called 'the still point' – the actor's ability to reach a neutrality that can then be inhabited by any character. Every actor on stage had this to some degree, which makes the directorial hand apparent, of course; but the show is undeniably bursting with raw talent.
The Monster would, I think, have benefited from being an hour rather than an hour and fifteen minutes long; it would also have benefited from someone who could smooth out some of the clunky Arabic phrases and correct grammatical errors. Still, it is my hope that this can be remedied for the sake of a play that deserves to be shown more widely than in a festival that is 'international' only in name. It is so-called because it presents foreign ('international') texts in translation. I fervently hope that The Monster can be honed and shown again, with better resources, to an appreciative audience.
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