A large number of policemen in civilian and military clothes break into Rashid's bedrooms while he sleeps next to his son at his home in the Egyptian city of Helwan, frightening the father and son. Security forces violently pull Rashid in a daze and tie his wrist from behind before taking him to the police station. Rashid was unable to attend his wedding, which was scheduled on the day of his arrest, and finds himself accused of the murder of his boss and sentenced to 16 years in prison, while his son from a previous marriage is placed in an orphanage in the series "Rashid" by Egyptian director Mai Mamdouh and produced in 2023.
The story of the series is based on the famous novel Le Comte de Monte-Cristo by French writer Alexandre Dumas Sr. in 1844, which revolves around a young man who is imprisoned on trumped-up charges and escapes from prison to learn of the betrayal of his friends and prepares a plan for revenge. This literary work has not lost its luster since the invention of cinema and television, and it is still adapted in film and series stories from the silent cinema era of 1912 in the United States to the present day.
It is one of many works of fiction that have made their way towards cinema and television drama in a one-way path from the narrative text to the dramatic text, so that the latter becomes a simulation or shadow of the original work. No matter how professional those in charge of the artistic work are, they cannot produce a product that matches or competes with the original literary work, and then the debate revolves around the ability of the image to express the aesthetics of literature or not, and this is not the crux of the discussion in this article, which deals with the dramatic text as an independent literary text.
In a radio interview between the late Egyptian actor Abdel Warith Asr and the late writer Naguib Mahfouz, Assar asks if the writer has to study something of the script to write the script for his literary works himself, or at least supervise them, to express honestly and clearly his literary text. Mahfouz replied that the script is an independent talent that differs from the talent of the story, novel and play, and that he is a supporter of specialization, because each has its own taste, culture and different ways of expression. He added an important point related to specialization, as he pointed out that each of these arts accommodates a full life of study, assimilation and work.
This talk answers the crisis that haunts all those working in the artistic field in the Arab world, from the ocean to the Gulf, which they express as the problem of paper, that is, the dramatic text or a good script that is suitable for artistic representation on the screen. When you want to get a good dramatic text, attention is directed directly to the novel in an attempt to reproduce the success of the literary text in the work of art, which if they do not fail miserably, they do not succeed in the desired success.
Reading literature and perspective literature
The success of television drama depends on dealing with the dramatic script as an independent literary text, and although it is part of a broader production process in which the director, actor and director of photography participate in a large share, it maintains its position among these elements. The artistic leadership role of the director, for example, does not negate the importance and creativity of the director of photography and the director of lighting, both of which can lead to the success or failure of a work of art.
The centrality of the author's role in the work of fiction and the centrality of the director's role in the dramatic and cinematic work obscured the vision from evaluating the essence of the works themselves and evaluating the rest of the creative roles of the team. The author's theory in cinema, which appeared in the forties of the last century, wanted the director to play the role of the novelist and not to quote him, and for this the French critic Alexandre Astroc expressed this function by saying "the camera is a pen." Cinema has largely succeeded in actually using the camera as a pen, while the television drama director in the Arab world has been in the orbit of literary quotations with few exceptions.
To its credit, the Arab drama experience has made many attempts in this field to overcome the crisis of the script, such as the series Memory of the Body, based on the novel of the same name by Algerian novelist Ahlam Mosteghanemi by Syrian director Najdat Anzour and produced in 2010. Unlike most of the series adapted, the series preserved classical Arabic in the dialogue, and even preserved the hero's narrative as it is. The series made a serious but unsuccessful attempt, because it could not adapt the classical language to serve the sincere expression of the feelings of the heroes in a way that convinces the viewer of the events, and the rhythm of the series passed very slowly without good employment of dramatic plots.
Another rare attempt to turn a poem into a drama series is the late Iraqi poet Badr Shaker al-Sayyab's Rain Song into a series of the same name by Palestinian-Syrian director Bassel al-Khatib, produced in 2003.
And because the poem, despite its drama and poetry, did not carry clear events or characters, the dramatic text was inspired by the atmosphere of the poem from clouds and rain to print the general scenes of the series, in addition to the character of tragedy and sadness that hangs over the poem and the events of the series. Thus, it can be said that the quotation in this case was very limited, but it is commendable, and the series also did not reach the fame that the poem enjoyed and remained a serious attempt to draw on some of the success of the poetic work.
The Oxford University Dictionary provides a broad definition of literature that includes oral, dramatic and broadcast structures, making room for other literary genres that fall under the definition of literature. Thus, it can include television drama texts, which are a good line with the changes of the times, because the art of the novel itself is one of the new literary arts that moved to the Arabic language, and some great writers such as Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad saw it in a lower rank than poetry and the scattered statement.
Today, now that the novel has assumed the place we see in Arabic literature, it is time for the dramatic text to take its place in the world of literature and to update the standards of teaching and evaluating television drama texts in this context.