From 2 to 11 this month (May 2013) the Cultural Palaces Organisation held its 22nd Annual Theatre Clubs Festival at El-Samer space (a makeshift marquee theatre pitched on the derelict site of the demolished El-Samer theatre), bringing to Cairo what several selection committees appointed by the central and regional administrations deemed the best pieces produced by theatre clubs in the past 12 months. But before going any further, let me first explain that in the lexicon of the Cultural Palaces Organisation a ‘theatre club' does not signify an ongoing cultural activity located in one of the organisation's venues, be it a cultural palace or home, and conducted for the benefit of theatre amateurs and lovers who join it as members. Rather, it is a mere administrative formula devised by the organization for subsidizing small-budget productions by amateur theatre groups and artists through one of its venues. If the production project presented to a venue is approved, the artist or group is allowed EL.1000 to cover all costs as well as a maximum of 2 performance nights at the venue. At the end of the financial year, all the productions subsidized in this way are reviewed by committees of theatre experts (writers, critics, directors, etc.) and depending on their verdict a production is either included in the annual festival to play for one more night and compete for any, or all, of the 7 extremely modest financial awards (totaling LE.22, 500 in all), or is eternally consigned to oblivion. This means, quite curiously, that a theatre club only exists when a production sports this title and only for the duration of that production. It took me quite some time to understand this and more time to believe it. But theatre clubs were not always like this. As originally conceived by the late theatre director and activist Adel Al-‘Oleimi and subsequently approved in 1983 by Samir Sarhan, the then head of the Mass Culture (later Cultural Palaces) organization, theatre clubs were meant as communal cultural hubs, incubators of theatrical talent, centers of theatrical education and training, and laboratories for theatrical experimentation. Though few in number and widely scattered, they had well-stocked libraries that included theatrical audiovisual material as well as books, regularly offered lectures and training courses, held workshops and seminars and issued bulletins that covered their activities. Freedom of expression was guaranteed in the performances they produced since they were exempt from censorship on account of their extremely short runs. This encouraged many of the young directors employed by the organization to use these clubs whenever they wished to try out something new that would be a production risk for the organization, or to stage shows that would never be passed by the censor if presented through the regular venues. It was a great project and spawned scores of daring productions in its first few years. By the beginning of the 1990s, however, and precisely after the first theatre clubs festival was held, introducing the ideas of competition and financial awards, the focus began to shift from training and education to production. The various venues through which these clubs functioned grew anxious to establish their supremacy over the others by garnering as many awards as possible and the members of those clubs were in turn were infected by the same spirit. Within a few years, the old clubs were dismantled and the Theatre Clubs Department channeled all its modest funds towards producing shows for the annual festival contest through the different venues of the Cultural Palaces Organisation. The result was the present absurd situation in which you find productions attributed to theatre clubs that do not in fact exist. In this regretful process, which requires that a production be vetted by several committees before it can make it to the festival, freedom of expression was naturally compromised to some degree. However, something of the old spirit which originally informed Adel Al-‘Oleimi's project has survived in spite of everything and could be detected in this year's festival in the experimental drive behind most of the shows and their daring political content. In all the 16 entries in this edition, the general theme was protest against oppression, played in a variety of forms, keys and pitches. The texts used included adaptations of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, from Ismailia, Antonio Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del doctor Valmy (The Double Story of Doctor Valmy), from Mansoura, Fernando Arrabal's Fando and Lis, from the Alexandria Club, Eugene Ionesco's Délire à Deux (A Frenzy for Two), from the Rushdi Club, also in Alexandria, Abdel-Karim Barsheed's Faust wa Al-Amira Al-Sal'aa (Faust and the Bald Princess), from Mansoura, and Mikhail Roman's Al-Wafed (The Stranger), from Banha in Al-Qalyubeya governorate. There were also 2 collectively improvised street-theatre scripts: Ihzar, Mantiqat Amal (Warning, Hope Ahead), from Maghagha in Mania, and Haggakum Allah (May God Grant You a Pilgrimage, an Upper Egyptian verbal cliché used as a refrain in Storytelling), from Beni Mazar, also in Menia, a collage of texts by Sherif El-Disouqi called Wahid Asafrah (One Passenger for Asafrah), from El-Anfoushi Club in Alexandria, and 5 modern Egyptian plays: Osama El-Masri's Sheeka Beeka (Shake it Up), presented by the Giza Theatre Club, Mohamed Musa's Tut (as in Tutankhamen), by the Luxor Club, Husam El-Ghamri's El-Kilab El-Irelandi (literally, Irish Dogs, but used here to refer to real ferocious dogs bred in Ireland), by El-Qabbari Club in Alexandria, Ahmed Mursi's Muwatin ‘ala Al-‘Ashaa (One Citizen for Dinner), by the Port Said Club, Ahmed Hassan El-Banna's Yom Al-Thulathaa El-Sa'aa Khamsah (Tuesday at 5 o'clock), by the Mustafa Kamel Club in Alexandria, as well as 2 plays written and directed by the same person: Karim Zahran's Bil Alwan (In Colour), which he directed for the Rushdi Club in Alexandria, and Mohamed Abdel Sabour's Al-Maraya (Mirrors), which he directed for Al-Anfoushi Club, also in Alexandria. Though widely varied in cultural background, form and content, all the chosen plays either featured oppression in one form or another as a major theme, or, in the case of some were extensively adapted to do so, making the whole festival seem like one long choral song of loud protest against both the previous and current regimes in Egypt. The oppression of the working classes by capitalists in O'Neill's Ape was matched by the oppression of political dissenters in Vallejo's Doctor Valmy and Roman's The Stranger, of ordinary citizens by a corrupt political regime, a ruthless security apparatus or a monolithic bureaucracy in Tuesday at 5, Sheeka Beeka and Tut consecutively, of young people by the combined forces of the patriarchal family, the cultural heritage and social prejudices and taboos in Asafrah and In Colour, of writers and intellectuals by totalitarian regimes and of dramatic characters by their authors in Irish Dogs, and, naturally, of women by men in male-centered/dominated societies. Fando's sadistic treatment of Lis in Arrabal's play was given definite political overtones in Mohamed Abdel Qadir's free adaptation which drew on Alejandro Jodorowski's 1968 black and white movie version of the play. In Abdel Qadir's rendering (he also directed), the grim story of the mentally unstable Fando who wheels the crippled Lis across a thick, dark wood in search of the fabled city of Tar, the equivalent of utopia or paradise, wastes a lot of time in senseless conversation to gain the favour of a fierce, dogmatic character who constantly bullies and coerces his 2 companions, and ends up killing her and crying over her corpse, became a grim parable of what happened in the past 2 years, telling us that instead of saving the crippled Egypt, the revolutionaries have misled her with false hopes and promises, wasted valuable time courting the wrong people and are now torturing her prior to killing her. What a bleak, depressing message. Ionesco's Frenzy received an even more drastic treatment and was rewritten, almost out of recognition, by Mostafa Suliman, acquiring the new title ‘A Frenzy for the Cake-Makers' and performed as a metaphoric, satirical replay of the power struggle in Egypt after 25 January, 2011 – namely, the hijacking of the revolution by the Islamists with the collusion of SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) and the defeat and repression of all the liberal forces. The same story was told with no metaphoric veils and with plenty of irony and sour humour in the 2 street-theatre shows featured in the festival. Speaking directly to the audience, engaging them in dialogue, and alternately taking off leading political figures and singing satirical ditties, the writers/performers fully exposed the roles played by all the parties in the conflict, openly attacking their failures and betrayals. What a pity that so much political consciousness, so much creative energy and such wealth of talent can have no outlet except for 2 or 3 nights a year. If only theatre clubs could become a reality!
