Oh, you who is climbing the tree

Oh, the one who climbs the tree Author: Tawfiq Al-Hakim Publisher: Dar Al-Kitab Al-Lubnani Small size cover - stamped - yellow paper 192 pages Book overview: Now, Pocket Theater presents the play "Oh, the one who climbs the tree" by Professor Tawfiq Al-Hakim, which is the play that baffled critics and interpreters ever since it appeared in a book and before it was performed on stage, especially since its skillful author increased their confusion and disturbance when he wrote a comprehensive introduction in which he talked about the absurd and his own perspective on life and the living, claiming that our popular literature itself knew the absurd and issued from it in some of its melodies such as the melody "Oh, the one who climbs the tree," which Al-Hakim interpreted literally to see the absurd in the climber of the tree who will come with a cow, and this is a clever and malicious interpretation. And we do not think Tawfiq Al-Hakim missed that this melody is not from the absurd but from symbolism that folk literature resorts to, sometimes as a disguise and sometimes to hide embarrassment, as this melody is spoken by a poor man asking those who have become rich — meaning the one who climbed the tree — to be generous and give him a cow to milk some of its milk. And this is not at all from the absurd but from the intelligent conscious mind capable of symbolism and hiding modesty behind it. Similarly, in the play "Oh, the one who climbs the tree," it does not depict a picture of life that the author sees as unreasonable or incomprehensible or understandable, but it is a play that deals with a issue that occupied Tawfiq Al-Hakim throughout his life, and he previously addressed it in other plays, most notably "Pygmalion" and "Shahrazad," which is the conflict between art embodied in an artist husband who tends to the tree of art in his garden, and a wife busy with life's affairs, especially having children. Due to each of them being engrossed in what concerns them, understanding between them becomes impossible, as if there is a gulf between them that they do not want to cross, until the conflict in the artist husband's soul reaches a point of subconscious urge to kill his wife and use her corpse as fertilizer for the tree of art. Druish came and revealed to the artist husband his sinful subconscious fears as if he were the voice of his conscious conscience, and yet those sinful fears were soon realized when the husband actually killed his wife, even though he later decided not to bury her at the roots of the tree of art to fertilize it, but instead buried the magic of the woman symbolized in the lizard. Based on this, the play addresses or embodies a reasonable issue that occupied Tawfiq Al-Hakim throughout his life, even though he combined in his method of treatment between symbolism and the absurd. And knowing that we saw nothing of the absurd in this play except for one scene, which is the scene where the husband sat beside his wife as if they were talking, while each of them was talking to himself about the subject that occupied him. The wife talks about the fetus she aborted in the fourth month before it was fully developed, while the husband talks about the orange fruit that fell from a tree of multiple fruits before it could fully grow. Thus, we feel that language has lost its function in this scene as a means of dialogue and understanding between people, where the dialogue — that is, the monologue — turned into solitary prayer, or "Siliouk." This is one of the favorite themes of absurdity among a great writer of absurdity like Eugene Ionesco, as seen in his play "The Bald Soprano," where a husband and wife sit side by side or seem to be side by side, while in fact each is talking to himself about a matter that concerns him. When they finish their absorption, they discover they are a couple. The skillful art in Tawfiq Al-Hakim's play is that he used the absurd scene we mentioned to support understanding, meeting, or coexistence between them. The husband symbolizes art, preoccupied with the fruits of his production, while the wife is preoccupied with the fruit of life, which she aborted prematurely. There is no way for them to meet or understand each other as long as each is in a different realm entirely. Apart from this scene, I find it easy to understand and interpret the rest of the events and scenes of the play based on the mental symbolism that Tawfiq Al-Hakim excelled in, despite the changing times and places and their interweaving, and the repetition of the main event in the play, which is the husband killing his wife. All of this can be interpreted symbolically, as the first murder did not happen in reality but in the husband's subconscious and mind, and the second happened afterward. Based on this, I cannot accept the interpretations and directions that Professor Tawfiq Al-Hakim included in the introduction to his play, which I consider to be devilish means of misleading critics and scholars, intentionally misleading for some reason or another, which is not the place to discuss now. As for the method used by Professor Saad Ardash in directing this complex play and the performance style of the great actors: Salah Mansour in the role of the husband, Nagwa Ibrahim in the role of the wife, and Dr. Ibrahim Sakar in the role of the Dervish; all of them, as I saw and felt, reached the pinnacle of artistic glory, and they created roles worthy of eternity and recording in the history of our art altogether.