Mohamed Naiem Saad or Life and Death of Drama in Sudan

Sudan Events

By taking a deep look at the current theatrical and drama movement in Sudan, perhaps we will discover, using to this end a critical and complicated approach that looks into the details and the hidden, that the actor, director, drama man, and artistic director, Mohamed Naiem Saad, can represent what I call the downstream or meeting point and at the same time the source of life for the theatrical and dramatic life.
The downstream point, because for and with Mohamed Naiem Saad, acting experiences, directing experiences, script making experiences, and management experiences come together, so with Mohamed Naiem, and here I mean Mohamed Naiem (the creative personality) and not the mere individual. in him come together souls, and I mean the souls here that are unique and unusual… the souls of Abu Al-Rus, Al-Fadil Saeed, Maysara, Makki Sinada, and Hashem Siddiq, Fatahia Zarouq, Tamadur Sheikh Al-Din, Mohamed Sharif Ali, Awad Siddiq, Al-Hadi Al-Siddiq, Farouq Suleiman, Amin Mohamed Ahmed, Ahmed Atef, Hassan Abdel Majeed, Fathia Mohamed Ahmad, Samia Abdullah, Adel Muhammad Khair, of course, but to mention those few… all these souls. all these generations meet with Mohamed Naiem (The creative personality) he impersonate them all, thus he speaks their voice, and the result is that he creates a theatrical performance and a TV show that reincarnate and authenticate all previous theatrical performance and TV shows, he adds up to them in a way that make the3m breath life, modernity and beauty
Therefore, we notice that in the case of Mohamed Naiem Saad and the (Friends Band), which he founded with others in April 1974, that we are not repeating the cliché that what a theater and what a tv drama of the past. this nostalgic phrase, this is not the case because Mohamed Naiem Saad has been an extension for the previous experiences and he added up his own personal touch, thereof he reserved his seat side by side with the like of Makki Sinada and Fatil Saeed and Farouq Suleiman, Aburous, Awad Siddiq, Tahia, Maysara and others, because he achieved a qualitative addition to his contemporaries who came after him, especially in constructing theatrical and television performances. This is a hypothesis that needs proof, and it does not belong here. From here, am inviting researchers and critics to explore how Naiem builds his theatrical and TV performances and how his influence was manifested on some of his contemporaries and on some of those who came after him?? I would also like to point out here that he has created a way of preparing actors, this method of his is what we could claim to be liberating the actor from (hyper –acing). Actors such as Gamal Abdul Rahman, Amir Abdullah, Mohamed Al-Fadni, Abdel Moneim Osman and Al-Tayeb Shaarawi have a way in performing acting that belongs to the school of Mohamed Naiem Saad, they are very spontaneous on television, the National TV station, the Troubles Series, the Dakin series, and the Bare Feet series. They formed what we can call the second wave in television drama, because they were able to break the bottlenecks of television drama on three fronts. The first wave… the first is a front related to questions and Topics: If the first wave was mostly preoccupied with the topics of what is known as family drama and police drama, such as raising topics of crime and drugs to the point of repetition, Mohamed Naiem, through the band of friends, immersed himself more in the topics of daily life and its contradictions with its philosophical, political, and social questions. The second is the “Audience” front. Here we mean a question that many journalists and decision-makers on TV repeat and base their position on continuing to produce Sudanese drama. The question is: Do the Sudanese people love Sudanese drama and interact with it!?The works of Mohamed Naiem were able to answer this question in the affirmative and affirmed that the Sudanese people love Sudanese drama and interact with it, you have as an example, the series of “Troubles” and films such as The Ghost and the Crazy…the third is the marketing front for Sudanese TV drama. We believe that the works of Mohamed Naiem presented many of his works on the televisions of countries such as Eritrea and Djibouti and Chad. This is in addition to meeting the local need, deservedly.
As for theatre, his theatrical show “The Mixed School” and his theatrical show “Cheq Mat” sparked dialogues and discussions.
It is important to talk about one of the most important Sudanese drama makers in theater and television, and it sparked a deep discussion, and I would like to cite here the “The Haunted House” in the Troubles series, or the episode of the girl standing in front of the Ahmed Sharfi cemetery, one of the passerby in his car stops to give her a lift, and in his car he discovers that she had died years back and that the person who was with him was actually her soul .. these two shows were thrillers to the extent that some of the audience have asked the TV chancel administration to stop airing such a type of work… also the performance of the “Hen” in the same series, in which each of Tayeb Shaarawy, Mustafa Al-Khalifa, Amir Abdullah, Abdel Moneim Osman, Sayed Ahmed Al-Hassan, and Iqbal excelled…The advantage of these and other works is comedic, and they expressed thorny philosophical, social, and political ideas… We can say that Mohamed Naiem is the first director to use what is known as cinematic tricks, and that he was the first to unleash the bullet out of the cartridge of a gun, along with other tricks that are considered totally new for the Sudanese TV drama. Also credit him as being one of the initiators in the drama production who took the camera out of studios and into spacious spaces, and this may be due to his cinematic culture.
Mohamed Naiem Saad, born May 1955 and graduated from the Higher Institute of Music and Theater in 1989, has produced in the theater:
Mixed School: Writing Acting and directing
Dish Malak. Idea. Acting. Direction
They kill the groom. Acting
A story under the hot sun. Acting
Island of Wonders, a children’s TV play, 1978…and others.
On television, I will mention two examples.
In series. Troubles. Jabra al saab,
In the TV series, The Ogre.Dakeen
In the short films: April Fool’s Day, The Crazy One
In feature films…Visa…The Ghost…
My title is Mohamed Naiem Saad, or The Life and Death of Sudanese Drama, because the director, actor, author and dramaturg Mohamed Naiem stands out as a defining moment in their journey, and Mohamed Naiem, in my view is a turning point in the its process…It is not surprising to say so, if all the movement of history is important, there are events in history that are more important and carry a qualitative addition, as well as individuals, some of whom history allows and his talents to constitute a qualitative addition in the field in which he works. He is one of the first professionals of this expensive art, which in Sudan brings to its practitioners nothing but poverty and pain, is one of those who gave this art its legality and legitimacy in a country whose authority look for their guns when they hear the word drama.
At the end of these general thoughts, I say: for an artist of the stature of Mohamed Naim Saad to end up as an immigrant ends up in my view as one of the national atrocities, if not national scandals.
The artist Mohamed Naim Saad to you I dedicate my love and respect that you know well.
AL sir al Sayed