THE PROPHET

by Hassan Abdulrazzak

The Prophet received its UK premiere at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill on 14 June 2012.

In 2011, Egypt erupted into revolution. Layla and Hisham, a middle-class couple in their 30s, live in downtown Cairo. On 28 January, Layla (head engineer at a telecommunications company) decides to join the revolutionary protest. However, Hisham (a writer) chooses to attend a meeting with an important literary agent instead. The agent takes him to an abandoned building where he is tortured for a confession (as a student, Hisham betrayed his best friend, Wael, to the authorities and eventually married Wael’s girlfriend, Layla). Later we learn that the guilt-ridden Hisham only imagined his torture: in reality, the agent cancelled the appointment. This monologue is spoken by Hisham’s invented torturer, METWALI. Even a torturer has hobbies.

METWALI

I’m just here to loosen you up a bit. Open up those closed channels to your brain. It’s my job. It’s what I do. And I’m good at it. Because I take pride in it. It’s not my passion though. Do you want to know what my passion is? I mean besides beautiful women.

Pause.

Well I’ll tell you. Pigeons. (Pause.) What? You look surprised. A man like me can’t have such a hobby? Why not? This is what you opposition figures never appreciate. My job is stressful. Getting confessions out of people is very stressful. My hobby helps me to deal with that stress. There is nothing more relaxing after a hard day’s work than to go back to my apartment block and head straight to the roof.

METWALI speaks of his pigeons with great tenderness.

I keep my pigeons in a cage that I built with these two hands. I feed them every day. Sometimes they get in a fight and they’ll have wounds that need attending to. I take care of them as if they were my own children. I love those birds. I love them. I’ve got around twenty now and I set them free to soar high in the Cairo sky. Sometimes I imagine where they go, I’m with them, I’m flying above the noise and the pollution, above the garbage of my neighbourhood and its filthy worn down pavements, soaring so high into the air and who knows where they go, maybe as far as your neighbourhood and the apartment block you live in with your beautiful wife. You and I, we are not so different after all. We live in the same city, breathe the same air. Similar thoughts, good or bad, cross our minds. Yet there is one difference. You judge me. You give yourself the licence to judge me. I don’t. I take you as you are.