Nehad Selaiha is sucked into the preparations for the Second Egyptian National Theatre Festival due 1 July May and June, not Eliot's April, are, for me, the cruelest months -- a period of virtual theatrical drought when all theatres close their doors and dim their lights and the Khamaseen winds linger on street corners, among the tree-tops, sporadically spreading a fine pall of sand and dust, a vivid reminder of mortality, over the whole sweating city. Not even Walid Aouni's annual festival for dance theatre, the 8th edition of which opened on 5th June this year, could slake my growing thirst or relieve this deadly boredom, and twice I drove into the provinces, north and south of the capital, braving the smouldering heat, only to find them equally arid. Only the prospect of the second national festival for Egyptian theatre held a glimmer of hope. Though it will only showcase the best of last year's products, all of which I am sure to have watched, some of them more than once, and reported on this page, it could still hold some surprises on the fringe. Even a ferocious addict like me is bound to miss some of the best dope around and I felt excited. But the fates proved even more merciful than I had hoped, and last week I was invited to chair a small committee of critics and directors to view the work of the 14 independent theatre groups who applied to take part in this 2nd Egyptian National Theatre Festival. Of the 14 hopeful applicants, I was instructed, only the top three would be allowed into the contest; the best of the rest, at most another three or four, will be relegated to the fringe. We, and all the other selection committees appointed by every theatre producing body in the country, governmental or otherwise, were told to be very strict and ruthlessly exclusive. Rather than last year's fifty competing production, this year the contest will be limited to only 30, to be viewed by the jury at the rate of 3 a day. To tell you the truth, I first balked a little at this restriction. After all, value-judgments are historically notorious for being relative and ideologically suspicious, and, whatever the quality of their performance, fledgling artists need to be publicly exposed and tested if they are to grow and develop healthy, sturdy muscles. A free-for-all performance time, with all the regalia and thick media coverage of an official festival would be ideal. But this will mean no contest, and, like it or not, people have a passion for contests and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Contests generate feverish excitement and euphoric feelings that can build a simple event into a roaring national issue. But contests also involve mean selection committees, exclusions, secret agendas, a hectic currying of favour and wielding of authority directly or by proxy with members of the jury, a degree of nepotism, of favourtism, ideological prejudice and all the rest. Wherever there is a contest, there also exists bad blood and a modicum of subjectivity and/or corruption. But since a contest is what people, including the most deprived and underprivileged artists, want, a contest they will get, with all the ugly rigmarole that goes with it. That budding artists are thirty for public recognition is understandable; but that they little care who bestows it upon them, who judges their future career opportunities and gives them the insubstantial, glitzy, media-magnified laurels of victory is grotesquely tragical. That in their blindness they pin their hopes on some judges of integrity, thinking they wield absolute power and possess the feather of Maat, and that, somehow, they will miraculously engender honest followers and disciples to carry on in future the torch of enlightened, sound judgment, long after they have departed from this world, is a pathetic romancer's dream, a naïve dip into the dark that lies ahead. The invitation to sit in judgment on independent groups was at once a curse and a blessing: a curse since it went against my most deeply-seated beliefs; and a blessing since it allowed me to promote some of the most talented and hard-working groups that I know of and whose progress I have been following for years. And since we must have a contest, by a majority vote, exclusion was indicated, and exclusion is what I practiced perforce throughout last week. I knew our committee's decisions will anger many of my protégés and young friends on the fringe; indeed, every committee's verdict this year is bound to provoke a furious backlash and accusations ranging from sheer stupidity to rank corruption. Nevertheless, since we must have a contest, I cannot but applaud the decision of the festival's board to restrict the number of contestants this year to 30. I was in last year's jury and know what a hell of a job it is having to cram four or five plays every evening, starting at 4 pm, sometimes earlier, and always finishing well after midnight. To further accommodate this year's new jury, the chairman of the festival, Ashraf Zaki, who is also the head of the Egyptian theatre organization, extended the duration of the event by two days, so that it opens on 1 July, same as last year, but ends on the 12th rather than the 10th. This allows 10 full days for the festival proper, to be aired at several venues, leaving both the opening and closing ceremonies free for festive celebrations and the awarding of credits and prizes. At the opening ceremony, which will take place at the big hall of the Opera house this year (an improvement on last year's Al-Gomhouriya), the festival will honour, in the presence of the minister of culture, ailing critic Ragaa Al-Naqqash, octogenarian director Hasan Abdel-Salaam, the beautiful, ever seductive comedian Shwikar, her tragically paralyzed comrade George Seidhum, and the name of the late playwright, critic and theatre scholar Samir Sarhan. The site of the closing ceremony has changed too, and rather than Al-Gomhouriya, this year's lucky winners will receive their awards at the National theatre, the formidable fort and classical bastion of the Egyptian theatre, as it is often rhetorically referred to. Indeed, it is to this old, beautiful building downtown that I have been driving every afternoon, for the past four days, braving the crazy rush hour traffic in one of the busiest spots of Cairo, to catch up on what a number of the self-styled independent theatre groups have been doing in recent years.Predictably, a few of these shows I had already seen, being an ardent follower of the fringe, and even covered on this page. One of them was Al-Gawab (The Letter), the first playwriting venture of the wonderful aristocrat turned proletariat champion, Nagui George, who died on 28 April, 2002 of a heart failure at the age of fifty-six. He possibly wrote it in 1967, just before he became a political prisoner. When it was performed years later, in 2003, I wrote of it on this page, a year later, in an article called "Remembering Nagui George", the following: "In the autumn of 2002, a gifted Nubian director, Amir Salaheddin, staged it with a group of amateurs at the French Cultural Centre in the course of a festival for young, creative talents in theatre." The production was among the prize-winners then, since Salaheddin and his talented actors were able to bring out and crystallize the freshness of Nagui's dialogue, its wit, compactness, directness, and its weird way of investing a simple, didactic message with elusive universal meanings.Then I went on to describe the play: "In a small village around Al-Kharja oasis, at noon, Sweilem, a railway worker on sick leave with an infected, puss-swollen foot, receives a letter. Illiterate, he calls on Shafiqa, his daughter, for help. She regularly receives letters from her fiancé, the teacher of the local primary school who is spending the summer vacation with his family in nearby Assyut. It transpires that Shafiqa is equally illiterate. What about the stories she keeps relating from the letters then? he asks. 'The paper is blue and soft and the writing so beautiful,' she answers; 'I just gape at the squiggles and they tell me everything.' Asked to gape at the squiggles in her father's letter, she draws a blank. The only person in the village who could read is Abul 'Enein (in Arabic, 'father of eyes'), the blind Imam of the village mosque. There are of course the village kids, the pupils of Shafiqua's fiancé; they, however, declare that without pictures they cannot read. From then on, pictures, the visual aspect of letters and how people recognise them by relating them to objects familiar in daily experience become the point and the substance of the pathetic, but nonetheless hilarious dramatic action. After hours of intense, farcical labour, the company succeeds in deciphering only one word, Assyut. When the drunken local vet arrives, Sweilem and his daughter know the bitter truth: he has been sacked from his job for exceeding his leave of absence (for which he had paid twenty-five Piasters as a bribe to the doctor's assistant) and Shafiqua's blue, soft letters were no more than abusive, jilting missiles."Though the play ends with the village Imam urging people to learn to read and write, the well-drawn characters, evocative dialogue and poetically textured atmosphere go well beyond this mundane message, and though the play rings with hilarity and laughter at every twist, it has faint echoes of the world of Greek tragedy. "The realistic, well-rounded characters carry the play beyond the content of The letter, transforming that piece of paper into a poignant, intriguing symbol of the unknown." This is how I summed up the play in 2003 and do not feel I can better that description now. And this is what the independent groups committee saw on a CD at the National theatre one afternoon last week. Though recordings are far from welcome, and live shows are infinitely preferable, the committee could not but acknowledge the superiority of this production over all the rest, except for one, and, ironically, that one too was seen as a CD. Effat Yehia's Dhakirat Al-Miyah, a brilliant adaptation of Shelagh Stephenson's beautiful play The Memory of Water, first staged at the AUC Studio theatre, 13- 15 January 2007, then two weeks later, on 2nd and 3rd February, at the cold, drafty garage of Rawabet, an independent artists' space next to the Townhouse Gallery, caught the committee's imagination and tugged at their hearts. And, indeed, how can anyone resist a play triggered by such a shattering tragedy as a mother's death, coupled with shocking, agonized revelations (including adultery, an 'Urfi, or common-law cohabitation and a misplaced bastard son begotten by a 14 year old girl), and yet conducted with such sidesplitting hilarity, such tender lyricism, with alcohol and dope thrown in as dramatic energizers? This is what I wrote in my review of the play for the Weekly earlier this year. Memory will play one more time at Al-Ghad hall, next to the balloon theatre in Agouza during the very early days of the festival, sometime between the 2nd and 4th day, since some members of the cast have to leave Egypt for the summer on 5th July. Though I saw the play four times already, I cannot have enough of it and will be at Al-Ghad to see it a fifth time. And having seen all that the Egyptian theatre had to offer this year, and not kept it a secret, telling you all about it in issue after issue of the Weekly (I shudder to think how many trees I have consumed over the years in the form of paper), I earnestly urge you not to miss it. Of the other 12 productions, I had only previously seen, Araq, also at the Rawabet space, this time in April, when the tin-roofed, cement-floored garage felt like an oven. Adapted by Yasir Badawi from Radwan El-Kashif's memorable film, Araq El-Balah, directed by Kamal Azzam, and performed by his independent group, Raheel (departure), the play came across as a wallowingly mournful, black-swathed. dirge-like piece, emotionally overpowering but with no coherent message. The selection committee watched a live run through of this work in the nude, so to speak, with no set, lighting, and one important actress missing. Still, it made a strong impact thanks to the atmospheric soundscaspe created by the chanting Rabab player and the masterful performances of Azzam's four actresses who spoke the dialogue as if they had been bred and reared all their lives in the southernmost part of Upper Egypt. Nerverthelss, Araq did not match either Dhakirat Al-Miyah or Al-Gawab in matters of technical proficiency and artistic integrity, and so, was relegated by the committee to play on the fringe. So were also the late Nabil Badran's Bye, Bye, Arabs, a rabid political satire staged by a group from Ein Shams university and directed by budding director Ahmed Metwalli, and Salah Abdel-Sayed's Al-Arshefgi (The Archives Clerk), a postgraduate project presented by Amina Salem presented last month to the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts. Of the best of the rest, the productions which have some promise but still need a lot of honing and refining, were Sherif Mursi's Hilm Rewa'I Qaseer (A Short, Dream-like Feature Film), an inventive, multimedia production that could fare very well in the Experimental Festival, and Rahee;'s Habiba (Beloved), directed by Iman Hassan whom I advised to carry it over into the forthcoming Cultural Palaces Female Directors Theatre Festival due in late July. I was grateful I could see those shows, and others, even though they did not get into the festival, and this led me to think that the whole point of the festival was allowing audiences to catch up on what they missed. Right now, as I was concluding this article, I got a call from Ashraf Zaki telling me that, may be, in the opening ceremony, the audience will watch Tareq El-Dweri's anti-war theatrical ode, Al-Mawqif Al-Thalith (The Third Position), a National theatre production which opened last September at the Cairo Festival for Experimental Theatre and had a modest run earlier this year at Miami theatre. Indeed, this is the time for catching up on what you missed theatrewise.
