Adrift on the Nile

A young woman launches an attack on a group of men in order to change them. She must succeed in this by way of art--if not, then the play has no meaning. A serious woman and absurdist men. I require a love story. It would be truly interesting if they were all to fall in love with her and she had to choose one of them; or if she should fall, without knowing it, in love with one of them. There must be a dramatic tension between the love interest and the problem of the serious and the absurd, so that the play does not flag. But will it develop as a love story within the framework of an intellectual conflict? Will it perhaps be confined to intellectual discussions and whispered intimacies? And how, and when, will the plot develop to a conclusion in an artistically convincing way? Will it be based on debate or on emotion? I lack some important, essential thing; what is it? How can absurdists find any kind of creed? And what is the extent of this creed? Is it enough for it to be a belief in society? I mean, is that sufficient for heroism to be created anew?

I am at least aware of the ideas that I must crystallize and clarify to construct a plot. I should now record some basic facts and observations about the characters in this scenario--under their own names, for the time being. Perhaps then I will be delivered from confusion, since it is possible that a plot may arise spontaneously if I can analyze them and determine their basic attributes.

CHARACTERS OF THE PLAY

(1) AHMAD NASR

A civil servant, by all accounts competent, with great experience in the practical matters of daily life. Happily married, with a teenage daughter, and religious, I think out of habit. All in all a normal person; I do not know how he will serve the aims of the play. But there is one important question: Why does he smoke the water pipe? Leaving aside what people say about sexual drives, is there something he is trying to escape? But in any case he must be created anew in the sense that he is, deep down, not convinced that his job and his family should take all his energy. In a corner of his mind, he feels that he is responsible. That he must be responsible for what goes on around him. And because he is a believer, he is the most well-balanced of all of them--but in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, it grieves him that he is a person of no consequence in life whatsoever. Thus we can consider his well-known concern with small problems--as we can his addiction--as a kind of escape from the feelings of absurdity that gnaw at him. He will entertain this secret misery unconsciously.

On the outside, he will remain the steady person, the believer, the efficient and untroubled man--until the heroine shows him his true self, perhaps through his love for her.

(2) MUSTAFA RASHID

A lawyer. No harm in my leaving him as such in the play, to justify his powers of argument. Charming, and cynical in the extreme. Married to a woman he does not love--perhaps out of a desire for her salary more than anything else. Although he is constantly searching for an ideal woman, he does not in fact pursue erotic liaisons on the houseboat. He is a strange man, doubtless harboring some deep secret. Perhaps it is addiction. He is completely aware of his spiritual emptiness, and finds solace in the water pipe and the Absolute. But he is apparently unaware of the deception that he is practicing on himself. He strives for the impossible without any method or any real effort, relying solely on intoxicated meditations. It is as if the Absolute is simply an excuse for addiction, but gives him even so a feeling that he has risen above his real vapidity. Like many whom I meet at social gatherings, he is apparently exquisitely cultured but inwardly hollow, crumbling, stinking of his own miserable decay.

(3) ALI AL-SAYYID

Originally a student at al-Azhar University, he completed his studies thereafter at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, and perfected his English at a Berlitz language school. He is a combative character, and fully aware of his short-term, practical aims. He has two wives, the first from his village and the second from Cairo, but the latter is also a housewife and traditional woman--which satisfies his conservative inclinations to be the master of the house. He makes a lot of his generosity in keeping the first wife, but he is a swine, as can be seen by his strange relationship with Saniya Kamil.