Nehad Selaiha rounds up her coverage of the 22nd edition of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre Experimenting with classical texts of various sources and the masterpieces of world drama has been a constant feature of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre since its first edition in 1988, giving us some truly memorable performances over the years. With 3 productions based on ancient Greek myths and plays, a Chinese opera for one voice that projected Shakespeare's Macbeth as a nightmare experienced by the eponymous hero's 'Lady', a Bulgarian reworking of Hamlet, interspersed with echoes from Macbeth, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida as well as Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine and called Hamlet, or Three Boys and One Girl, a new treatment of Brecht's modern classic, The Good Person of Szechuan from Moldova, a play from Bangladesh called At the Threshold that borrows two major scenes with their characters from two well-known Ibsen plays, and a dramatization of Constantine P. Cavafy's poem Waiting for the Barbarians from Syria, this year was no exception. Of these, the most popular and enthusiastically received was Italy's Oedipus on Top, A Play Without Words, by La Casa Dei Racconti (House of Tales) theatre in the Provincia di Rieti. Visually conceived, scene-scripted and directed by Duccio Camerini with a rock soundtrack composed and arranged by Fabrizio Sciannameo and played live on stage, choreographed by Valeria Andreozzi, and stage designed by Alice Pizzinato and Leonardo Vacca (set), Roberta Orlando and Livia Fulvio (costumes) and Marco Laudando (lighting), this Italian free adaptation of Sophocles's Oedipus the King sought to revive the simple tale it tells, strip it of its cultural, psychological and literary superstructure, give it a contemporary setting, ridding it of any supernatural elements (the oracle, the Sphinx, etc.) and transmit it through dance and movement, mime and music. Adopting an 'aesthetic of the ugly', as it were, and reveling in what Julia Kristeva calls 'the abject', Camerini set the story in a rubbish dump, with the stage at Al-Gomhoriya theatre stripped completely bare and covered in filth and detritus such as old tires and boxes, and had it performed by mute, grunting tramps, dressed in rags and tatters and looking drab and dirty. Two musicians stood at the far back with their instruments, while the tramp playing Laius sat downstage, on an old wicker chair, on top of piles of grimy sacks and black, plastic garbage bags, alternately napping and bawling while closely guarding his bag of bread from predators. In contrast to the graceful movement of the modern bourgeois couple who represented Polybus, the king of Corinth, and his wife Merope (Oedipus's adopted parents in the myth), which mostly took the form of ballroom dancing, the movement of the other characters, including Oedipus, who was projected here as a sort of 'schlemihl', a Buster Keaton/Chaplin poor, little fellow, constantly buffeted by fate and baffled by what happens to him, was consistently coarse, rough and violent. Rather than have Jocasta commit suicide and Oedipus pluck out his eyes at the end, this Italian Oedipus ends with all the characters blinded and pathetically feeling their way out in a line, led by the blind tramp impersonating Tiresias. The truly amazing thing about this show was its ability to create an enthralling theatrical experience out of the grimy and revolting ugliness on stage. Moreover, this show, which won the 2008 Drama Prize of the City of Rome, represents a new departure for La Casa dei Racconti. Having so far specialized in narration and storytelling, it here takes a new direction, experimenting with scenic language to tell stories in images. Equally compelling was Cyprus's For I Dwell Here Too, Anti-war Songs, a one-man show conceived and performed by Marios Ioannou, designed by Melita Couta and set to music and directed by Emanuele Balzani. Though it consisted of 3 anti-war monologues by Euripides, spoken by 3 of his female characters, namely Iphigenia, Cassandra and Helen, it was solely performed by Mr. Ioannou, recreating for us the feel of ancient Greek theatre when male actors took on the parts of women. Standing close to us (in the small Yusef Idris hall of Al-Salam theatre), in a single spotlight that picked up and deeply shadowed his face and body, with nothing around him except the bare walls, the darkness and a few bags of sand dimly visible at the back, this superb actor delivered the monologues in succession, in a stylized, hypnotic manner, using minimal movements and gestures. His studied stillness and silences, minimal facial expressions and body language were at once profoundly eerie and tragic, hinting at a suffering deeper than any words could speak. Drawing on the techniques of ancient Greek and Asian acting, both of which he studied at the hands of renowned masters, Marios Ioannou transcended his gender, turning his face into a succession of haunting, finely chiseled tragic masks that subtly reflected the horrors of war and its effects on the human soul. No wonder he was nominated as Best Actor, though the award finally went to Gbessi Adji from the Cote D'Ivoire for his performance in Monsieur Dieu et les Ecervelés (Mr. God and the Madcaps), a one- man show written by Koue Bi Tian and directed by Adji himself. Unfortunately I missed this show, but from what I hear, Mr. Adji must have been absolutely wonderful. Another reworking of a classical source which I deeply regret missing is Italy's Orpheus by the CRT Scenamadre company, written, directed and performed by Daniela Giordano, choreographed by Lamine Dabo and lighted by Guiseppe Falcone. Introducing her work, Giordano writes: "I return to visit the Orpheus myth in the only contemporary reality that I feel I know and is close to me: Africa." This is not surprising since Giordano is an expert on contemporary African drama and the founder and artistic director of Festa d'Africa International Festival of Contemporary African Culture. Her Orpheus was designed as a dialogue between the poetic text she wrote and African music composed and performed live on stage by two African musicians -- Ismaila Mbaye and Gjibril Gningue. I also missed Moldova's version of Brecht's The Good Person of Szechuan, directed by Boris Fosca for the Republican Theatre "Luceafarul", which scooped the awards for Best Director and Best Ensemble Work. It is no consolation that I caught China's Lady Macbeth by the Chuanju Opera troupe, adapted by Xu Fen and directed by Tian Mansha, and Bulgaria's Hamlet, by the "Alma Alter" Theatre Laboratory, adapted by the famous Polish critic Jan Kott and directed by Nikolay Georgiev. The former, though gracefully performed in gorgeous costumes, was too traditional and monotone to satisfy someone who has seen superiour specimens of this type of performance in its country of origin, while the latter, though intricate in conception, highly vivacious and energetic, with the actors given plenty of freedom to improvise comments on the action and address the audience extempore, seemed too confused and verbally over packed and aroused laughter at all the wrong moments due to the way the actors pronounced their English lines. Still, to my surprise, this Bulgarian Hamlet won a nomination for Best Performance! Less ambitious in conception but more coherent and moving was Bangladesh's At the Threshold, by the Nagorik theatre troupe, written by Syed Shamsul Haque and directed by Ataur Rahman. The play begins with 3 people, a woman and 2 men, waiting at a railway station at the far end of the stage. As they step forward one by one and replay, with the help of the other two, their last stormy scenes at home before they left, we discover that the woman is Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, the older of the two men is Dr. Stockmann in his An Enemy of the People, and the younger is a character from another play by Syed Shamsul Haque himself called Irsha (Jealousy). At the end of the 3 scenes, which are simply and competently played and punctuated by the sound of trains whizzing by, the characters withdraw to the station at the back, the figurative threshold to a new life, and wait. Though they are alone and uncertain of what lies ahead, they seem to embody and affirm, both physically and spiritually, Dr. Stockmann's declaration at the end of An Enemy of the People, which is voiced here repeatedly in English, that "the strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone". By comparison, Syria's Waiting for the Barbarians, a dramatization of Cavafy's poem of that name, seemed void and unimaginative. The poem ironically describes a city brought to a standstill in anticipation of the arrival of an army of barbarians. Rather than mobilize the people to resist the invasion, the city's emperor, senators, consuls, praetors and orators deck themselves out in their finest robes, jewelry and decorations and prepare to propitiate the leader of the invading army with laurels and honorary titles. The poem which begins with a series of questions (What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?... Why isn't anything happening in the senate? / Why do the senators sit there without legislating? ... Why did our emperor get up so early, / and why is he sitting at the city's main gate / on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? etc.) to which the answer is always "Because the barbarians are coming today", ends with a bitter, satirical twist: rather than feel delighted at the news that "there are no barbarians any longer", the people anxiously ask themselves: "And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution." Unfortunately, Walid Qowatli who staged this poem for the 'Al' troupe used the first half of the poem as a prelude to the actual show and the second half as a finale and had both sung/recited by a female singer in high heels and a richly embroidered 'Abaya who wandered aimlessly around the stage acting as narrator. The gorgeously attired and decorated life-size, flat dolls which the actors held before them at the beginning were soon put aside and forgotten about. The main body of the show was made up of a string of dances, in a wide variety of styles, performed at the orders of a clownish king, sumptuously dressed and placed on a throne on the raised platform at the far end of the open air theatre at the Opera and attended by a farcical assistant. Without uttering a single word, the king rang a big bell placed beside him at regular intervals to order a new dance sequence. Though the dancers were competent enough, it was obvious that Qowatli failed to engage with the text dramatically and used it merely as a pretext to showcase the skills of his dancers and singer. When the king, his clown and dancers withdraw at the end and the singer appears to tell us that the barbarians will not be coming after all, we wonder what she is talking about; by that time we have completely forgotten the first part of the poem recited at the beginning. Photocopy, Syria's other entry in the competition, was also based on a foreign text, this time Murray Schisgal's off-Broadway hit, The Typists, which, when presented with The Tiger in a double bill in 1963, won him recognition and the Drama Desk Award. Adapted and reset in Syria by Maher Salibi and Anna Akkash (who also played the two main characters), Photocopy presented two people, a man and a woman, doomed to spend their lives cooped up in a dingy government office, doing a routine, soulless job, and all the time yearning for love and freedom. Time passes by and the world around them changes, but they remain the same, only getting slowly but visibly older until they are finally resigned to their fate and dodder off stage, leaning on each other for support. Though extremely simple, this play about wasted lives, failed dreams and frustrated longings was at once deeply poignant and hilariously funny. It also struck me as profoundly Chekhovian in its bittersweet tone, gentle humour, generous sympathy with the failings and weaknesses of humanity and tragic-comic mood and poetic structure. As in Chekhov's plays, which he subtitled 'comedies', this performance was able to weave poetry out of the banality of daily life, to present emotional turbulences and sheer despair under a cool surface of mundane reality, to reveal time as a merciless force that stealthily erodes our lives and dreams and to redefine human heroism as simply the ability to go on. Though the characters here are far from heroic in the traditional sense and are often comically ridiculous, they touch a deep chord in all of us and we go away loving them and admiring their courage and endurance. If there was a prize for 'pure pleasure' in this festival, I would give it to the Syrian Photocopy without a moment's hesitation. That it was deemed unworthy of any awards was a grave slip on the part of the jury in this edition and deeply disappointed many people. Daily life with its mundane routines, chores and accidents was also present in Spain's M3, A No-Space Odyssey, but imaginatively transformed and poetically recreated into 'something rich and strange'. This delightful 45- minutes mime and movement one-man comedy show was conceived, co-directed (with Jorge Sanchez-Cabezudo) and performed by Fernando Sanchez-Cabezudo, with video projections and sound effects by Miguel Angel Rodriguez de Cia. Drawing on the traditions of surrealism and the theatre of the absurd, it features an ordinary, middleclass man trying to lead a normal life and go through his daily routine of washing, dressing, eating, watching television and sleeping inside a one cubic meter flat. To make matters worse, all the hi-tech gadgets that are supposed to help him seem to acquire a will of their own and turn viciously aggressive. Out of his tiny window, all he can see are tiny, lighted flats, the size of matchboxes, inhabited by similarly lonely and frustrated people. Finally, as the man dreams of leaving all this behind and going to the South Sea Islands, it rains hard outside and water begins to seep inside his one cubic meter box, rising to his neck and nearly drowning him. Stunningly imaginative and absolutely funny, the Spanish M3 was nevertheless a sad, satirical comment on the quality of life we lead in our modern, big cities and the ever the diminishing spaces we are allowed in them. Poland's A Sentimental Piece for 4 Actors, based on the improvisations of the Montownia theatre troupe, directed by Piotr Cieplak and designed by Paulina Czernek, was also a silent show about human loneliness and ordinary daily life and matched the Spanish M3 in imaginative flair and inventiveness. Here too the whole world was contained in a box placed on the stage. The Polish box, however, had no walls, was slightly larger (3 cubic meters) and solely constructed out of bamboo sticks, pegs, strings and different types of paper, cut out, shaped and painted to represent practically all the object we use and are likely to see around us in daily life, including doors, windows, beds, desks, drainage pipes, coffee mugs, briefcases, animals, shoes, showers, clouds and road signs of all kinds. Accompanied by two live musicians on a violin and a clarinet, sitting outside the box on one side, who supplied incidental music as well as all the needed sound effects, the four actors in the title, alternately wistful and hilarious, mimed the daily routines of four single men of different characters, habits and pursuits, including a tramp, exchanged parts and characters at a certain point and took turns at dexterously manipulating the different pieces of the set to change the scenes and create new ones. Though highly intricate and complex in design and requiring the utmost precision in performance, this wonderful Polish creation, a real specimen of the poetry of theatre, constantly evinced an amazing childlike freshness and endearing naïveté. Ecuador's The Town of Lonely Women, by The Alley of Water theatre, also focused on the sad lives of four single people, this time women. Inspired by a newspaper report about a town in southern Ecuador solely inhabited by women, old people and children, the play, written and directed by Jorge Mateus Baleseca, strongly criticizes the male emigration phenomenon by displaying, with the help of songs and dances, the suffering, loneliness and frustration of the women left behind. The play, strongly reminiscent of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba, was simply and economically designed, with only 3 long strips of painted scenery descending from the flies at the back, and was competently performed by 3 young actresses and an actor in drag, impersonating an old woman who tries to contain the women's rebellion and keep them under the sway of the inherited patriarchal traditions. All were exotically dressed in colourful, richly embroidered costumes, and while the old woman/ man occasionally waved a patchwork counterpane, which when flicked over became a black mantle, the 3 young women carried around small bouquets to represent their longing for life, joy and beauty, as well as window frames with bead curtains as symbols of their imprisonment. Whispers in the Dark, by the National troupe of Nigeria, written by Noel Greig and directed by Segun Adefila drew on Nigeria's rich traditions of storytelling, music and dance to dramatize the threat of imperialism and foreign exploiters to the national cultural heritage and way of life. It was a lively, charming piece, performed in local costumes, with indigenous songs and dances and live drums. Sudan's A Railway at the Back of the River, written and directed by Zu alfakar Hasan Adlan for the National Troupe of Acting, was equally charming and enjoyable despite its grim message that warns of the grave economic consequences for workers of economic globalization and the privatization of public facilities. Though the stage design was extremely poor and even primitive, the director cleverly mined the rich artistic resources of his all male cast, particularly the wonderful trio who represented not only the workers fighting to prevent the sale of their beloved railway line and only source of livelihood to private investors, but also the train itself. Strangely enough, I enjoyed Nigeria's and Sudan's simple performances far more than Tunisia's infinitely more elaborate, studied and sophisticated Suitcases which was voted Best Performance, won the award for best actress, and was nominated for Best Director and Best Ensemble Work. The reason could be that I saw the play at the wrong place, at the wrong time -- that is, in the big hall of the Opera house, on the night of the closing ceremony. A play about actors, their problems, dreams and frustrations, interspersed with scenes from Euripides's Medea, Sophocles's Antigone and Shakespeare's Othello, and skillfully performed with plenty of verve on a completely bare stage with evocative lighting, it must have looked vastly better and less artificial in the intimate space of the Creativity Centre where the jury saw it. And so, until I see it again in a similar space, I shall withhold my judgment.
