Seven days into the 2nd Women Directors Festival, Nehad Selaiha finds much to deplore It's happened at last. After many delays and last minute postponements, the 2nd edition of the Women Directors Festival opened on 11 November at the Opera house, in what used to be its 'open-air theatre' before it was permanently roofed in with heavy, water-proof canvas, becoming more of a tent. The dark canvas with its grim iron grid clashes painfully with the architectural design of the space -- its white marble floor, broad, low steps, side arcades, and the vaulted, altar-like platform which faces you at the far end as you enter. Rather than make the place fit for use all the year round, as intended, this ill-advised 'improvement' has made it hot and stuffy in summer, cold and drafty in winter, and an eyesore at all times. No more can you sit there and see the stars above you, or feel the breeze caressing you and gently ruffling your hair. With the sky shut off, the place has lost its airy charm and its name has become a mockery. Last year, the festival's venue was the less posh, less forbidding and more homely Fatma Rushdie Floating theatre in Giza and the transfer to the Opera has negatively affected the whole event, reducing not only the size of the audience, but the number and quality of the shows as well. Lacking a proper stage (Fatma Rushdie had one, albeit floating), this venue was deemed unfit by many artists and that sent them away; those who stayed and struggled to make it fit had to resort to almost Procrustean measures. Some of the plays on show here -- Riham Abdel Raziq's Kalam fi Sirri (Unspoken Thoughts), Mona Abu Sedeira's version of Françoise Sagan's The Thorn, and Marwa Farouk's Gunoun 'Adi Gidan (A Very Normal Kind of Madness) -- I had already seen in the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre in September, in proper theatres, with the kind of picture-frame, or Italian-box stages they were originally designed for; watching them here squashed on a small, cramped platform, with terrible acoustics and meager lighting facilities was a painful experience, like watching the mythical Procrustes stretching, or lopping off the limbs of his poor victims to make them fit into his bed, or a Chinese female with shriveled, bandaged feet, encased in iron from birth to stunt their natural growth. But the size and technically primitive conditions of the Opera's open-air theatre were not the only factors which made this year's festival seem amateurish and sadly shrivelled compared to last year's. The long delay of the event (which should have taken place in July, same as last year) and the air of uncertainty which hung over its fate for months seem to have wearied everybody and dampened their spirits to the point of apathy. There is such a thing as carrying tantalization too far, and too many false starts have robbed the festival of its bloom before it even started. There was also the problem of money which caused some ugly squabbles between the organisers and local artists, and finally led to dismissing the idea of inviting women directors from other Arab countries to take part in this edition. That the idea was dropped after the invitations had been sent and accepted and people made plans did not seem to bother the organisers. In my article, "Homeless Festivals", published on this page on 16 August (issue no. 858), I told you the ugly story of director Abeer Ali with this festival, how she had worked hard for close on a year to expand it into a pan-Arab encounter of women directors only to be thwarted, humiliated and shoved aside at the end. I wrote that article when I had given up on the festival ever materializing this year and deeply resented the wasted efforts of people like Abeer and the great disappointment the many young artists who had prepared to participate would feel. Now that it has taken place, I find that a lot of my criticism of the management of this event, and of the management of the Cultural Palaces organization as a whole, still stands -- if anything, it has been better corroborated. That the festival is more interested in propaganda than theatre is obvious everywhere -- in the inordinate number of honorees on the opening night, the horde of television cameras that greet you as you enter, the expensively printed, glossy catalogue and daily bulletin, the contingent of paid speakers invited to the roundtables and seminars, and in the redundant army of bureaucrats and petty officials enrolled for the event, supposedly as assistants, to get a little extra money. I wouldn't object to any of this if the artists were treated fairly and with dignity. But to scrimp and scrape on technical preparations and pay the artists a pittance for their performances, the real substance of the event, making the top ceiling LE.500 per performance, seems an utter disgrace. No wonder this shabby treatment has alienated some of the best artists around. Imagine a gifted theatre- maker, like Effat Yehia, being asked to prepare a small production for the opening and promised a certain amount of money, then being told at the last minute, after weeks of preparations and rehearsals, held at her own home for lack of another place, that the agreed budget was too much and would be more than halved. What the organisers had banked on was that Yehia, like all young, independent artists, would never miss an opportunity to air her talent and, therefore, would knuckle down and comply. But Yehia is also a professional, and a woman of honour, and having promised her actresses a certain fee, she could not go back on her word. The outcome of this mortifying episode was that the opening was robbed of Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries -- a delightful, contemporary Iranian satire which Yehia herself had dug up and translated -- and that, like Abeer Ali, this diligent, exciting theatre-maker, who scooped the award for best rising director at the last National Egyptian Theatre Festival, was conspicuous by her absence throughout. This would perhaps explain why actress Nihad Abul 'Enein, who had been involved in Yehia's project, delivered, in public, on the opening night, an impassioned, venomous tirade against the festival and its organisers. That in it she recklessly and quite vociferously overstepped the limits of propriety and crossed many red lines does not defeat the justice of her argument -- mainly that the Cultural Palaces theatre department neither cares for theatre nor for theatre-makers. Now Abul-'Enein, who has spent all her professional life as an actress in the employ of the Cultural Palaces, faces a disciplinary committee and is in danger of being suspended or sacked, thus losing her main subsistence line and source of income. When I talked to her, she said that she regretted the manner, but not the drift of her harangue. She had seen Abeer Ali sink into depression, stay in bed and refuse to answer her phone after she was laid off and had watched Effat Yehia vomit incessantly the whole night following the fiasco of the opening project. I don't know if one can really blame her for her rash outburst. With such murky shadows, such a small number of shows, most of them hopelessly underdone, pathetically na ve, or clumsily executed (Samira Ahmed's A Piano for Sale, Naguan Wahid's Other People's Worries and Rania Zakariyya's Family Voices are prime examples), it seemed as if the spirit had completely gone out of the women directors enterprise, as if the original glow of enthusiasm had irretrievably dimmed. Luckily, however, something completely unexpected, unplanned and unscheduled happened: one evening Croatian writer Lydia Scheuermann Hodak suddenly appeared on the scene. She had been in correspondence with actress and director Azza El-Husseini since the latter had staged a beautiful translation (by Sanaa Seleha) of her harrowing war-play, , at the Creativity Centre in September. When she learned that this production would surface again in the Women Directors festival, she decided to come to Cairo. Though the festival was postponed several times, causing Azza great embarrassment, Lydia still wanted to see what an Egyptian Maria would look like and compare her to the other dozen pictures of her she had seen in different languages and countries. When the festival finally started, Azza sent her an invitation so she could get a visa and offered to host her in her home during her visit. Lydia paid her own passage. All she got from the festival organisers in return was a roundtable in her honour. As for Azza, she only got EL.500 for her beautiful performance and she tells me that if it had not been for Lydia's intense desire to see it she would never have agreed to put it on for such a niggardly, insulting fee and in such technically deplorable circumstances. I could see her point. She had devised a technically complex production, with an intricate lighting plan, choreographed sequences and lots of video projections which require split- second timing. Originally, the play was written as a one-woman show, a long monologue by a woman in her late thirties who, with her adolescent daughter, get raped and are forced to leave their home during the Balkan wars. Both get pregnant; but while the mother mercifully miscarries during a long march through a mined stretch of the countryside, the daughter delivers a girl in hospital and dies. The mother is urged by her psychiatrist, herself a victim of cancer who had to flee her home with her haemophilic son, to keep her granddaughter rather than put her up for adoption. Initially, the mother, who is still haunted by the scenes of her own and her daughter's traumatic violation and abuse, vehemently refuses. The child would be a constant reminder of her shame and humiliation, she protests. Gradually, however, as the poignantly lyrical monologue unwinds, other memories of the past, happy, gentle ones, begin to float up and edge away the images of blood and horror. By the end of it, the mother, inspired by her psychiatrist's stoical fortitude and profound humanity, gives in to her daughter's dying wish, the only words she ever uttered throughout her confinement, and decides to keep the poor, helpless infant. Azza El-Husseini reworked the text, allowing the absent characters to speak their reported words and appear before us, either in the flesh, as shadowy silent figures, or as images flashing on a screen. She herself played the mother, a part perfectly suited to her looks and voice, while the ethereal-looking Yasmin El-Hawwari, her teenage daughter in real life, impersonated the dead daughter, Lucia. As Katrina, the psychiatrist, whom we only see performing a live, vigorous dance bespeaking defiance then melting into darkness, or talking gently on the screen, Nora Amin performed with suppressed intensity and graceful poise. Though there were endless technical hitches in the sound and lighting and the set looked a bit crowded on this tiny stage, came across as a powerful, absorbing and intensely moving theatrical experience thanks to the poetic quality of the writing and the three actresses' finely tuned, superb performance. But for , performed on the 7th day, Nora Amin's solo piece, Memory of a Life, presented the following day, and Lydia's warm, friendly presence on both nights -- an undeserved gift to the festival which unjustly boosted its image in the media -- the 2nd Women Directors Encounter would have been a ridiculous farce and an affront to women.
