Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-Four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else

Fairly lengthy silent opening. The three Ahmeds enter one by one, and, under the direction of the “real” Ahmed, begin performing various imitative exercises. Ahmed demonstrates what must be done, and the understudies do it. The first understudy is constantly upstaging the second one, trying to do more and better, introducing little flourishes, etc. The second understudy, who is always nodding in agreement and indicating that he has understood everything, either reduces the exercise to its skeletal form, to almost nothing, or does something else. Improvisations on this theme, everything needing to happen rather quickly. A sense of comic gymnastics.

AHMED. You guys haven’t exactly been brilliant today. You’re quite far from being able to play an acceptable Ahmed. I think you don’t understand very much about rehearsing.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. We’re not repeating! We’re asking what it means to repeat! And all you can do is repeat what I say about repetition!

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. But I’d understood very well! You said: “Rehearsal is when you repeat.” And since I agree with you, so that our master should understand your thinking, I repeated what you’d said. So he clearly saw that when I repeat what you say about rehearsal, it’s a repetition.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. But you repeated it like a cretin, whereas I’d said it intelligently. Therefore you repeated nothing at all. You produced a piece of cretinhood where there had been true thinking.

AHMED. That’s the whole problem right there! That’s the difficulty in a nutshell! If you repeat what someone has said, it’s by definition no longer the same thing. Because he didn’t repeat it, he said it quite simply. If you resay it, it’s a repetition, but since what’s resaid has a different meaning from what’s said, finally, repetition doesn’t repeat, it changes. It’s like me. Me, I’m Ahmed. If I do such and such thing as Ahmed, and if you, my understudies, repeat it, it’s no longer the same thing at all, because you’re not Ahmed, just his understudies. For example, I hit this gentleman with my stick.

AHMED (to the audience). Did you see that? Did you observe it? He didn’t hit him Ahmed-style. It was too spiteful, it wasn’t free and elegant, like my own hits.

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. I’m going home. Seeing as how our master has shown that we can’t repeat him. It’s no longer worth the trouble to rehearse, repeating things over and over.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. Yeah, he showed it to you on my back! Numbskull! Can’t you see that he’s pulling the wool over your eyes? He’s telling you that repetition serves to show that repetition doesn’t exist! You’re not out of the woods yet.

SECOND UNDERSTUDY (returning to the stage). That’s convincing. I no longer have any good reason for getting out of the woods.

AHMED. And why not? Why can’t we be in the woods here? We can repeat here everything that happens in the woods! Check this out!

Ahmed’s elaborate improvisation on the woods, woodchoppers, woodchucks, woodpeckers, etc. In the process he can make use of the understudies. This all has a Harlequinesque aspect.

AHMED. Repeat that for me, both of you! And remember, while repeating it, that you can’t repeat it. It’s in nonrepetition that you have to conduct the maximum repetition. That’s where repetition goes, not someplace else! The better it’s repeated, the more it changes!

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. Ain’t that the truth! That’s just what my grandmother used to say, with her voice trembling: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Taking it to its logical conclusion, anything is the repetition of anything else.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. You’re saying the opposite of your revered master, bonehead! He said: the more it’s the same thing, the more it changes. The more artfully you repeat, the more original you are.

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. You’re repeating me perfectly. Finally, the more things change, the more things change. And the more things stay the same, the more they change too. And the more you change what’s changed, the more you do the same thing. Repetition doesn’t succeed in repeating, and nonrepetition doesn’t succeed in changing things.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. We’re going to teach this pretentious Ahmed character a lesson. Because all he did was repeat some old Harlequin shtick. We’re going to repeat his repetition and so we’re going to change everything.

SECOND UNDERSTUDY (enthusiastically). Exactly! As my grandmother used to say! We’re going to change everything, everything, everything, and everything!

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. He can’t even manage to repeat twice in a row what his grandmother used to say! You just said she used to say that nothing changed, that it was always the same thing! What an airhead this understudy is!

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. But I completely agree with you! Since nothing ever repeats anything, when my grandmother says, “It’s the same thing,” she means, “It’s completely different.”

AHMED. Be careful! When one doesn’t want to repeat someone repeating something, it’s quite possible that all one ends up doing is to make no changes whatsoever in the thing that he, at least, was repeating.

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. Don’t worry, sir. I have no intention of repeating your repetition of Harlequin. Are you with me, monkey-ass? You’re going to be Little Red Riding Hood in the woods, and I’m going to be the wolf.

An elaborate improvisation by the two understudies, the principle of which should be that, little by little, between the overacting of the first understudy and the hapless inertia of the second understudy, we can no longer tell what is happening and we completely lose the theme of the woods. The scene more and more clearly turns into a story of a grotesque visitor to a brothel. At the end, exhausted, the two understudies lie down on the ground, panting.

SECOND UNDERSTUDY. Exactly! As my grandmother, who ran a restaurant in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, used to say, keep an eye on the waitresses or, before you know it, they’ll be turning tricks instead of tables!

AHMED. And what about you? You played the wolf like a bumbling customer in a provincial whorehouse. Could it be that you had a grandfather who frequented that type of establishment?

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. A great-grandfather. Everybody used to snicker and call him Horace. Let me tell you, the memory of that snickering isn’t easy for me to shake. But my art is far above the family’s dirty laundry!

AHMED. I’m not so sure about that! Indeed, perhaps one really repeats none other than one’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents …

FIRST UNDERSTUDY. Adam! What a nincompoop this understudy is! We’re descended from apes, not from Adam! Your grandmother must have looked like this when she was running her shitty restaurant.

Now Ahmed imitates an ape. The two others look at him, then repeat what he does. All three of them exit, one by one, acting like apes.