Nehad Selaiha tries to make the best of the 5th Egyptian National Theatre Festival, held from 17 to 28 July Established in 2006 to showcase the best that the Egyptian theatre annually offers, whether in the mainstream or the fringe, the National Theatre Festival is a good opportunity not only to catch the plays one has missed, but also to monitor the ebb and flow of technical standards, artistic trends and general preoccupations in the theatre from year to year. Sadly, this 5th edition, held from 17 to 28 July, has proved the weakest so far; out of the 34 productions it featured, only a few were worth dwelling over, and most of these came from the fringe and either relied on well-known and over-used foreign texts, sticking to their traditional interpretations, or tiresomely rehashed conventional themes and material from the popular heritage, technically treading the same familiar paths and adding no fresh perspectives. A feeling of artistic exhaustion and shrunken horizons marked the whole occasion. It was no surprise, therefore, that a student production from the Theatre Institute of The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, Antonio Buero Vallejo's famous Spanish play about political torture, scooped the top awards for Best Production and Best Director, as well as a joint award for Best Actress, another joint award for Best Rising Actor and a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, putting to endless shame the whole arsenal of the State-theatre Sector. Though technically 'correct' in most respects, with decent acting, a simple, economical stage design (by Mahmoud Sabry) that merged realism and expressionism, made good use of the front stage area and represented the world of the play as one big chamber of horrors, as well as intelligent dramaturgy that reduced the performance time to less than two hours without palpable damage to the overall conception and a shrewd directorial plan that carried the action into the auditorium, roping the audience into it as both witnesses and prospective victims, The Double Story of Doctor Valmy came across as an excellent academic exercise that stuck closely to the book and had something of the air of the classroom about it. It was obvious that director Safwat El-Ghandour, who presented this production as a post- graduate project at the Theatre Institute of the Academy of Arts in June, has plenty of talent and great promise; however, his winning the Best Director award in this festival was not so much a celebration of his talent as a sign of the bankruptcy of the mainstream professional theatre in Egypt and of the general quality of the shows on offer, which, unlike in former years, were mostly tepid, lackluster, banal and facile. Another good academic exercise, which given the general standard of the festival deserved more recognition from the jury than a mere nomination for Best Set Design, was a stage version of Radwan Al-Kashef's famous movie Arak El-Balah (the name of a coarse spirit distilled from dates), adapted and directed by Abeer Mansour for the students of the Theatre Department at the University of Hilwan. Embroidered with songs, dances and rituals drawn from the folk traditions of Upper Egypt, it was vivid, colourful and brimful of youthful energy. The most remarkable thing about it, however, was its unusual daring in airing and representing the sexual frustration experienced by women when their men leave them in search of better jobs and more money away from home. Of the same category, and equally unfairly ignored, was the Cairo University production of Malhamat Al-Saraab (Epic of the Mirage), a difficult and complex play by the late, great Syrian dramatist, Saadallah Wannus (it was actually his last), which portrays the seduction, corruption and destruction of a whole community at the hands of a businessman who, Faust-like, has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for power and riches. As an epic play, it has many characters and winding stories, covers a long span of time, requires many scene changes, mixes comedy and pathos and shifts between the real and supernatural. It took director Hussein Mahmoud a lot of imaginative resourcefulness to overcome the text's many pitfall and challenges, not to mention the constraints of the notoriously small budgets of university productions. But though his efforts were rewarded by the top prize at the national university theatre competition earlier this year, they left the honourable members of this festival's jury quite unimpressed. Sadly I missed Ein Shams University's Al-Layla Macbeth (Tonight, Macbeth), directed by the brilliant and irrepressibly ebullient Mohamed El-Saghir whose tongue-in-cheek parody of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, presented by the theatrical troupe of the faculty of law at Ein Shams university at the 3rd edition of this festival in 2008, won the Best Rising Director, Actor and Actress awards and shared the top award for Best Production with the National Theatre's The Shoemaker as King. In that hilarious version of Romeo and Juliet, El-Saghir had recklessly resorted to drastic cutting anf farcical exaggeration, visually embroidering what remained of the text with a series of ingenious mimes that run contrary to the drift of the words and accompanying the serious speeches with comical music or outrageous buffoonery (for a detailed description of the show, see "In the balance", Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue 907, 24 July, 2008). I wonder what he has made of Macbeth, but it seems to have been sufficiently interesting to win his team a special jury award worth EL. 5000, as well as a nomination for Best Production, together with The Double Story of Doctor Valmy and two other productions. My vexation was compounded when I also failed to catch a production of Titus Andronicus from Alexandria University, directed by Rami Nadir, and another of Alfred Farag's masterpiece, El-Zeir Salem, from Cairo University, directed by Mohamed Allam. The fact that neither got any mention in the list of awards or nominations does not count for anything since many of the jury's decisions seemed egregiously misguided or flagrantly unfair. Compared to Arak El-Balah, Epic of the Mirage, or, indeed, The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, the university of Ain Shams's Muhakamat Al-Ikhwa Karamazov (The Trial of The Brothers Karamazov), adapted by Mahmoud Gamal and directed by Mohamed Salah, and Cairo university's Al-Wad Ghurab wa Al-Qamar (The Story of a Boy Called Ghurab with the Moon), by an unknown writer, directed by Mohamed Labib, seemed a sad waste of time and human energy. While the former was static, heavy-handed and extremely verbose, consisting of a string of monologues that rambled on and on to tell us in the end that the four brothers in Dostoevsky's famous novel were different facets of their depraved father, the latter seemed like an endless television soap opera that started on an Oedipal note with a prophecy of patricide in the presence of a chorus, took a sudden turn into Yehia El-Tahir Abdalla's novel, The Collar and the Bracelet, sending Oedipus's prospective mother to an ancient temple in Upper Egypt to get impregnated when she discovers her husband's impotence, then developed into a full-fledged, overblown rural revenge play, full of conventional intrigues and melodramatic discoveries. I failed to discover who wrote this curious text, but at least I found out that the teams of both productions got into the festival under false pretenses, masquerading as independent troupes when their universities disregarded their productions. The genuine independent theatre troupes were represented by no more than two productions, and both from Al-Hanager's current season of independent theatre at Rawabet, which started on 13 April and goes on till 2 August. The first, Hikayat min Aziqat Al-'alam Al-Thalith (Stories from the Alleys of the Third World), a sardonic black comedy about the dehumanizing effect of poverty, set in a poor African country, was a revival by the Studies and Training Society troupe, founded by Hani El-Mettinawi in 2005, of an earlier production written and directed by the late Iraqi director, Qasim Mohamed, and presented at Al-Hanager in 2003. The second, Na'ima, by 'Al-Ihtigag' (Protest) theatre troupe recently founded by director/dramaturge Sa'id Soliman, who has done several works for the state theatre before deciding to go 'independent', was billed as a free, musical reworking of Naguib Soroor's frequently revived, 1964 epic drama, Mineen Ageeb Nas (Where Can I Find People). As it turned out, Soliman's version had more to do with the old folk ballad about the two star-crossed lovers, Hassan and Na'ima, on which Soroor had based his play, than with the play itself. Soroor had used the story of the murder and decapitation of the singer, Hassan, by Na'ima's father on the orders of the tyrannical chief of the village who wanted to marry her himself, and Na'ima's subsequent hiding of Hassan's head after his body was thrown into the Nile, as a starting point for a symbolic journey through Egypt which Na'ima undertakes in search of her lover's body, to unite it with his head and bring him back to life, as Isis had done for Osiris in the ancient Egyptian myth. Gradually, however, the journey in space becomes a journey in time, through modern history, and gives Na'ima a new political consciousness, teaching her to identify Hassan with all the martyrs and freedom- fighters who defy oppression and to see her personal suffering as part of a larger affliction that involves all the wretched of the earth and that has to be resisted. In Soliman's hands, Soroor's text was drastically simplified, divested of its historical setting and political dimensions and reduced to a tragic love story that could not withstand the pressures of society and traditions. All Soroor's characters were removed, leaving only Na'ima on a raised platform, on an almost bare stage, to tell the story herself, while a singer, representing Hassan as she recalls him, sat on one side, providing a song every now and then, and projections of him, lost in the crowds on the busy streets of Cairo, alternated with the image of a decapitated male body, floating on the Nile, on a back screen. It is as if in reworking Soroor's text, Soliman meant to prick its political bubble, to tell us that its revolutionary heroics and political optimism were completely out of tune with our reality and disillusioned times. Rather than look for Soroor's text in Soliman's Na'ima, one should put the two plays side by side; only then will it become clear that Na'ima is a rueful comment on where the heady promises and hopes of the 1952 revolution embodied in Soroor's text have landed us. But despite its monologic mode, air of melancholy, pensive tone and almost defeatist mood, Na'ima was a lively, charming piece in which singing alternated with narration and mime, puppets were used to impersonate absent characters, simple objects were manipulated to create powerful stage images and ancient magic spells and rituals existed side by side with projections of scenes of contemporary life on the streets of Cairo. Set to music by Mohamed Al-Wareeth, who also accompanied the performance on the lute, with Wahid Fawzi and Sayed Samaka on the flute and drum, and all three occasionally joining in the singing and acting as chorus, Na'ima featured an excellent performance by singer/actress/storyteller Heba Asem, as the eponymous heroine, with Wa'el El-Sayyad competently supporting her as Hassan. To my mind, Heba Asem more than deserved the award for Best Rising Actress. This award, however, went to Amira Abdel-Rahman for her performance as Ophelia in Sa'daa' Al-Da'aas's last year's Hamlet-hunna (Women's Hamlet) -- a production of the Creativity Centre in which Shakespeare's text was cut up, rearranged and presented as a story obsessively remembered and recounted/reenacted by Gertrude and Ophelia after death (for a detailed description of the show, see "Hamlet galore", Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue Issue 963, 3 September, 2009). It is not that Abdel-Rahman lacks promise, but Asem seems to me to have more performance skills. Besides, if the acting in Women's Hamlet deserved an award, it should have been shared by the actress who played Gertrude as well. Another acting award that shocked many and left me quite flabbergasted was the Best Actress Award, which went jointly to seasoned actress Aida Fahmi, for her performance in Al-Ghad theatre's Odeeb (Oedipus) and Shafiqa, and to fledgling actress Yusra Karam, for her part as Mary in The Double Story of Doctor Valmy. How can one compare the two? Not only is Fahmi a formidable actress of great talent and long experience, she has also surpassed herself in the cited performance, moving with confidence and agility from the part of the once great and famous actress, now aged and fallen on hard times, who joins a third rate travelling theatre troupe, performing farces and vaudevilles to vulgar audiences, in the frame-play, to the part of Jocasta in Sophocles's Oedipus, in the play- within-the-play, which is triggered by a chance meeting with her old acting coach and mentor. It is true Ahmed El-Ablag's frame play, about Shafiqa, an orphan girl adopted by a café-owner and his wife, and chased after by a rich and powerful old man who not only turns out to be her uncle, but also to have been the cause of her parents' separation, misery and death, is relayed inconsequentially, in intermittent shots that alternate with scenes from Oedipus, with the actors constantly jumping between the 2 stories and doubling in many parts, so that at times the play seems so muddled and confusing that one fails to make sense of what is going on or to grasp the connection between its eponymous hero and heroine. It is also true that the name Shafiqa is extremely misleading, since it features in the title of the popular folk ballad, Shafiqa and Metwlli (about a brother who comes back from the war to find that his sister has become a prostitute and kills her) -- a ballad that has been made into a play and immortalized in a film starring the late Soad Husni, thus leading the audience to expect yet another dramatization of the ballad only to find no trace of it. It was like being sent on a wild goose chase. However, despite all the faults of the text, it served as a wonderful vehicle for displaying the actors' talents, versatility, artistic control and technical expertise. This was especially the case where the 3 main actors, Aida Fahmi, Nahid Rushdi and Mustafa Tulba. Their vitality, ebullience and colourful stage presence were simply overwhelming. And yet, Fahmi had to share her award with a budding actress of modest skills and no experience, while Rushdi and Tulba found cold comfort in their nominations for best supporting actress and actor. But at least veteran comedian Sami Maghawri did not have to share his award for Best Actor with some upstart actor of raw talent. This was one prize that was unanimously cheered. His role as the greedy, despotic sultan in Sayed Mohamed Ali's lively folk comedy Al-Shuttar (The Sharp or Clever/Crafty Ones), another production of Al-Ghad theatre, directed by Mahmoud El-Alfi, was delicately tuned and embroidered and displayed the subtlety and finesse of a superb comedian (see my review of the play in "Of clowns and puppets", Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Issue: 990, 18 March 2010). And it would have been only fair if Sayed Mohamed Ali had got the Best Dramatic Text Award, or at least the one for Best Rising Playwright. Though, like El-Ablag's play, and indeed like most folk plays, Al-Shuttar uses the 'theatre-in-the-theatre' formula, has an episodic structure and involves role and costume changes, mostly done on stage, in full view of the audience, and allows the actors room for improvisation, it is much more coherent, less pretentious and infinitely wittier than Odeeb and Shafiqa. And it is also more imaginative and technically sophisticated than most of the Egyptian plays seen in this festival, including Ahmed Abu Kheneiger's Yasin, a pretentious, amateurish reworking of the folk ballad of Yasin and Baheya that questions the image of Yasin in the popular mind, which won the Farshout branch of the Cultural Palaces a special jury award for ensemble-work, and Ahmed Abdel-Raziq's loose and rambling and verbally uninspired Naltaqi Ba'd Al Fasil (We'll be back after the break), which won the award for Best Rising Playwright. Naturally I was sore that the Cultural Palaces' Lady of the Dawn and the Youth Theatre's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, both of which I recently celebrated on the Culture pages of the Weekly (see "Look out for the Lady" and "Time for dreams", Issues: 1002 and 1004 on 10 and 24 June, 2010), were passed over. There were other disappointments, but also and a few bright spots, like the Creativity Centre's Egyptian version of Durrenmatt's Shade of the Donkey, which won 3 joint awards, for Best Rising Director, Best Rising Actor and Best Costumes. But more about it later.
