Fikra’s production “Casino, staged at Rawabet Theater last Wednesday, is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Instead of the famous cathedral, this play is set in a Casino, as its title indicates.
The makeshift auditorium of Rawabet in downtown Cairo had clusters of seats in place of the organized rows of theater seating to create the sight of a gambling club. The chaos in the space was emphasized further by the performers’ movement in the auditorium, using all entrances, doors, wings and sides for their entrances and exits.
In spite of all the hustle and bustle, there was no real drama, either on stage or in the auditorium. With no compelling acting or any worthwhile stage effects, there was nothing to contemplate but the convoluted storyline.
Writer/director Tarek Al-Seba’s adaptation revolves around a belly dancer named Nour (Wedad Abdel Mon’em), the Egyptian counterpart of Hugo’s gypsy dance Esmeralda. All the other characters of play function in relation to her. They desire her, want to use her, abuse her or envy her independence.
The thin plot lines go off on tangents and promise what they cannot fulfill. They also change courses abruptly with no dramatic purpose. For example, Nour’s pimp, “The General (Mohamed El-Arabi), who brought her to the Casino years ago, suddenly expresses his interest in her body. When she refuses vehemently, he accepts calmly and decides to use her again in a planned burglary. Though she protests, and gives lip service to honesty and honor, she eventually agrees to participate in the theft. Then the theft is dropped from the drama, and is never heard about again, while the performance takes another direction.
The main antagonist, the General, is surpassed by another villain, the manager of the casino (Mohamed Youssef). The manager also desires Nour, and forces his assistant, the drunken hunchback (Mohamed El-Sokkary) to bring him the belly dancer in one unfortunate night. The hunchback tries to coerce her and fails. His failure to accomplish his assignment results in a dramatic whipping of the hunchback, in a surreal dance-like scene, with strange lights and annoying music.
Nour finally finds what she is looking for, in the officer, Sherif (Mamdouh Zaki). She pronounces him the love of her life, yet strangely, she volunteers to marry one of the other employees of the casino, a monkey-trainer turned singer, after a pregnant sex-worker rejects his proposal. Al-Seba’s doesn’t explain Nour’s decision of marrying him.
Though she is married, Nour decides to give her body to the officer. While making love, the two lovebirds get attacked. The following scene offers a comic gay character and another female dancer in the casino confiding how they were both led astray. Their conversation reveals that Nour is accused of murder.
The manager, who is clearly behind the murder, expresses his dissatisfaction with the impact of the murder on the reputation of the casino, and decides to take the law into his own hands and punish Nour by locking her in the basement of the casino. Down there, the manager confesses his love to her, but she refuses him, telling him that she prefers to be dead than be with him.
The hunchback comes to comfort her, telling her that there are ways she can escape, bursting into a song about the different routes she can take.
The officer suddenly appears on stage again, looking pretty healthy. He has come back to the casino to confront the bad guys. After exposing their plans, he declares his disinterest in Nour, claiming that he’s only concerned with uncovering the criminal network.
The focus shifts back to the dancer in the basement, and after an odd dance by the manager, he tries his luck with her again to be faced with the same unyielding rejection. Several predictable tragedies ensue and the play concludes with an uninspiring poem by the hunchback asking why people accept injustice.
Al-Seba’s appalling adaptation was not salvaged by any other stage element. Many of the actors’ movements were not only inexplicable but also affected their projection, making their words inaudible. The strange lighting effects, in many instances, made following the performers a challenge.
Large parts of the performance could not be seen from most of the auditorium, due to the director’s lack of awareness of the concept of perspective: When you stage action or movement on a floor level, it is below the sightline of everyone in the audience apart from the first row.
The dispassionate, difficult-to-believe characters with confusing plot lines, in addition to the blasting pop music, odd sounds with loud screeches, made this performance painful to watch. This is not amateur theater; this is the quintessence of clear, unjustified incompetence.
