Nehad Selaiha watches as six budding directors flounder about in The Tempest "A boat with two captains is bound to sink," says an old Egyptian proverb, and the wisdom of it is echoed in many other languages. What if the boat has six different captains? This is the gruelling test Isam El-Sayed, the supervisor of the 2nd Directors' Workshop organized by the Creativity Centre Studio, set for his bunch of trainees this year, asking all six of them to collaborate on a single production of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Only a confirmed sadist or someone enamoured of shipwrecks and disasters could come up with such an idea. What has suddenly come over gentle, kindly Isam I wonder? True he had shown a degree of arbitrariness in the previous workshop, forcing King Lear on his five students for the final demonstration project rather than letting them choose for themselves. He had, however, allowed them to work separately on the text, assisting each one to explore it and artistically formulate their individual interpretations in rigorously distilled one-hour performances. The result had been more than encouraging; on five successive days we were treated to five different takes on the play, all highly condensed and intriguingly imaginative. While two condemned the octogenarian patriarch as either mad dictator or brutish female-oppressor, two projected him as a helpless clown -- one in a senseless, world farce, the other in a ruthless game of power -- and only one performance rendered him in a tragic vein, showing him as the victim of the unrelenting materialism and spirit of rabid competitiveness that dominates the modern world. The Lear project was not only warmly received by the critics and the public, nightly sending its predominantly young audiences into wild raptures, it also won the Creativity Centre, as producer, one of the three awards for best collective works at the 1st Egyptian National Theatre Festival in July 2006. When Khalid Galal, the CC artistic director (and a stage director in his own right), first told me that The Tempest -- a very tricky play to stage in the best of circumstances and one that has undergone in recent decades many deconstructivist readings and ethical revisions in the light of post-colonial and feminist theory -- would be this year's Shakespearean play, I was delighted and looked forward to a kaleidoscopic theatrical experience which I hoped would be as thrilling and challenging as Lear had proved. Apparently, many shared my feelings; on the opening night, you couldn't see the door of the Centre for crowds lined up outside in avid anticipation. On a large poster on the side, you could see a collective photo of this year's crop of directors, all six of them (Gamal Abdel-Naser, Hani Afifi, Batoul Arafa, Mohamed Ikram, the Kuwaiti Sa'daa' El-Da'aas, and the Iraqi Alaa' Al-Gabir), sitting round a table with their papers and lap-tops spread before them and looking up at the camera overhead, while individual photos of the actors, all graduates of, or students at, the Acting Workshop of the Centre's Studio (Nefertari Gamal, Bayoumi Foad, Mohamed Al-Saghir, Walid Fawwaz, Hamza Al-'Eely, and Hisham Ismael), were lined up on both sides. This poster, however, told me nothing, and I still expected to see six separate shows lasting a total of three or four hours. In the long wait before the performance (it started an hour later than scheduled), I amused myself by trying to imagine what possible interpretations of The Tempest the new generation would come up with and which aspect of the play each would seize on, as they must do perforce if they are to compress it in half an hour. Imagine my shock and dismay when Khalid Galal stood up to introduce the six directors and announce in no unmistakable words that they all co-directed the spectacle we are about to watch. The lights then dimmed and the show began. What was it like? Strangely, it did not turn out to be the disaster you would expect, and insane as it was, it had moments of beauty and its own kind of quirky logic. But it was not The Tempest of course. Rather than come up with a show, the six directors replayed before us their initial angry objections to the arbitrary choice of play, their violent shock at El-Sayed's collaborative proposition and their subsequent interminable quarrels and fierce arguments over the play's interpretation, the dramatic genre it belongs to, its relevance to the present, the mode of acting best suited to it, and how it should be staged on the whole. Such conflicts can never be satisfactorily resolved unless, of course, one director kills the rest. The best you can hope for in such deadlocks is a compromise, which, in this case, amounted to hacking the text to bits, throwing the poetry overboard and dressing up the remains, willy-nilly, in a crazy medley of styles which constantly crisscrossed and dizzyingly swung from the farcically sublime to the grotesquely ridiculous. The scenes which survived this massacre, beautifully translated by Mohamed Enani, were often rudely interrupted by objections or interjections from some director or other, and Ariel's beautiful songs were chased away and replaced by some of the most vulgar local tunes around. Indeed, Ariel here was rudely shorn of all etherealness and reduced to a debased female version of Puck. Dressed in a tight brown and cream suit which highlighted her voluptuous figure, with an orange wig, exaggerated makeup, a crown of tree leaves and matching anklets, Nefertari (as Ariel) looked and behaved more like an earth spirit cum grumbling kitchen maid than a creature of air and fire. It was not surprising, therefore, to find her in the end taking up Caliban's arm and joining the wedding procession. Not surprisingly too, the only scenes which were least interfered with and preserved something of their original integrity were the Trinculo-Sephano-Caliban encounters and intrigues, originally written as farce. Here, the spirit of parody was abroad and unbridled. Like Prospero's tempest it swept and leveled everything before it, holding nothing sacred and admitting no restraint. It ripped through the auditorium, threatening to sink the boat with six directors in it and fiercely rocking the audience with laughter. At the end, however, when it finally subsided, we were left with nothing but debris, the debris of a text, a project, and what we term 'art'. For though liberating, the spirit of parody, left alone, is ultimately nihilistic. No wonder it is the favourite mode of postmodernist art. The question is, however, how many of these young directors wanted to do postmodernist art or knew what they were doing? My guess is that they didn't. The only person in the show who seemed to know what she was doing was stage-designer Marwa Al-Amir (who also trained at the CC Studio). Her simple, two-level, canvass-covered set was like a resting point in a tumultuous sea. It seemed to be guided by David William's sagacious warning, in his essay " The Tempest on Stage" ( in Jacobean Theatre: Stratford- upon-Avon Studies I, London, 1960) that "designers should be restrained from trying to transgress the play's scenic data ("this bare island") and smothering the play with subaqueous gewgaws and the rest of the botanical farrago." Of the latter she only used one tree branch and Prospero's magical coat of green leaves and Ariel's botanical ornamentation here were not her doing, but that of costume-designer Ayman Al-Zurqani, a member of the Studio's 1st Workshop. On the whole, however, Al-Zurqani did a reasonable job in the circumstances and his disfiguring of Canibal was admirably repulsive. Though the show left me mourning Shakespeare's The Tempest, it is still worth seeing, at least for the laughs. It runs at the Creativity Centre in the Opera grounds for another week and you can get on board for free.
