“I was photographing the show with my personal camera as a favour for the festival bulletin. I was therefore standing up and this is perhaps what saved my life. It was an extremely beautiful performance with scores of candles arranged round the small art gallery which had been transformed into a black box for this occasion show. It was intended as an intimate performance with room for only 25 spectators. To enhance the intimate atmosphere, the director had had the main door of the gallery that opens onto the street barred and we were admitted through a small, low, side door that leads to it from inside the cultural palace down a flight of stairs. You had to bend your head and squeeze through as you entered, as if walking into a cave or an ancient tomb. When the performance started there was a rush at the main door with people clamouring loudly to be admitted. To stop the din that threatened to disrupt the performance, the director allowed 75 more spectators in and they stood or crouched everywhere. At the very end, when the staid civil servant in Albee's Zoo Story is goaded by the tramp into stabbing him, I noticed what looked like a sheet of flames at the back and took it to be a lighting effect. So did the rest of the audience I think. What happened in fact was that a candle had been accidentally knocked down as the tramp's corpse was dragged out. When the actors were taking their bows, the flames shot up reaching an air conditioner and before you knew what was happening there was a loud bang, then another, and the whole place became a ball of fire. How I made my way through the flames to that small, side door I do not know. There was a general rush at it of course and many were trampled underfoot. The camera had melted in my hands and the skin was dropping off. My hair and clothes were on fire and the next thing I knew was that someone was spraying me with foam from a fire extinguisher.” Eight years after the Beni Sweif holocaust on 5 September 2005 which claimed the lives of 50 theatre artists, students, critics, journalists and fans and badly injured over 20 more, maiming some for life, Gamal Yaqoot still bears the scars of that horrific night on his hands and face. I had long wanted to know what it was really like on that fateful night from one of the survivors but could never bring myself to the point. When I saw Yaqoot in Alexandria last week, with those painful reminders on his skin, I mustered the needed courage to ask. It was the following morning after his frighteningly beautiful, emotionally harrowing production of Antonio Buero Vallejo's The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, and listening to his account, given above, the image of a phoenix rising from the flames popped into my head. Looking at Yaqoot's work since 2005, you get the impression of someone who had walked through fire in order to learn how to create amazing beauty and profound wisdom out of raw pain and absolute horror. He had done a lot of theatre before that of course, writing 12 short plays, 3 of them for children's theatre, performing major roles in university and Cultural Palaces productions between 1982 and 2000, such as Barabbas in Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and Shahrayar in Tawfiq El-Hakim's Scheherazade, and directing many of his own plays as well as concentrated versions of several famous foreign classics in Alexandria for the Cultural Palaces Organisation, including Mario Fratti's Italian melodrama, The Cage in 2002, Arthur Miller's The Crucible in 2004, and August Strindberg's Miss Julia, which opened only a week before the 5 September inferno. Like many Egyptian directors, Yaqoot did not originally study theatre as an undergraduate. He read commerce instead at the University of Alexandria, graduating in 1986. Though he had fully indulged his passion for theatre as a student, he curiously kept away from it altogether for the next 10 years, concentrating on building his own private business – a textiles manufacturing and exporting company. It was a difficult decision, but absolutely necessary, he says. The last thing he wanted was to have to live off theatre-making, with all the compromises and humiliations this would inevitably entail. He wanted to guard his art and have the means and leisure to nurture it. And this is exactly what he has been doing since the late 1990s. To equip himself for this task, he joined the Theatre Department at Alexandria University in the late 1990s, and within 8 years of his graduation in 2003 he had obtained an MA and a PhD in theatre directing from that department and become a lecturer there. During those years he also immersed himself in the theatrical life of Alexandria, directing plays for the Cultural Palaces Organisation theatre clubs there and volunteering to supervise the theatre activities at one of the city's 2 cultural palaces for artistic appreciation. To find a further outlet for his creativity and extend his valuable pedagogical work, he founded in 2004, in Alexandria, his own “Creation Group” – an independent organization for culture and the arts that funds independent theatre productions and artistic projects, offers free training courses and workshops for artists conducted by local and foreign experts, and promotes cultural and artistic interaction through participation in Arab and international theater festivals whenever feasible. Then Beni Sweif happened. Yaqoot did not have to be there. He had no show playing at that event – the 15th annual Theatre Clubs Festival – nor was he a member of the jury. He went to support friends and because he loves to travel and see theatre and makes a point of attending all regional festivals to keep in touch with fellow artists and their work and also to help out with money, effort and advice whenever difficulties arise, which happens quite often. Beni Sweif was a traumatic experience, but it is to Yaqoot's credit that he takes upon himself part of the blame and admits the responsibility of all present for that tragedy. It was a disaster waiting to happen, he says. We all knew how dangerous it was to have lit candles on that kind of set, made mostly of paper sprayed with highly inflammable paint, and to have the space packed beyond capacity and the main door locked. But, as always, we trusted to providence. Young artists with next to no budget would go to any lengths to realize their artistic conception and knowing what they are up against we cannot blame them. We sympathize and turn a blind eye. Rather than put him off theatre, the Beni Sweif calamity seemed to sharpen Yaqoot's appetite for it. To get over the trauma, he immersed himself in theatre, coming up the following September with a stunning production of A Doll's House which, though a Cultural Palaces production, was heavily subsidized by his Creation Group. It won Best Direction, Best Scenography and Best Rising Actress at the 1st Egyptian National Theatre Festival in 2006. Yaqoot became a celebrity overnight and those who never see anything but commercial and state-theatre productions wondered how it was they had never heard of him before. Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape followed in 2009 and was another resounding success, scooping five awards in the 4th National Egyptian Theatre Festival (for best Performance and best directing, lighting, set design and choreography). That same year, Yaqoot accepted the post of Director of Sidi Gaber Cultural Palace for Artistic Appreciation, and in 2011 the State Theatre Organisation recognized him at last, asking him to direct a play of his choice for its Al-Tali'a (avant-garde) theatre company. For this production, Yaqoot revisited The Crucible, staging it this time under its secondary title as The Witches of Salem (reviewed in the Weekly, Issue No. 1070, 27 October, 2011 under the title ‘Sounding the alarm'). Success however did not wipe off the terrible memory of the Beni Sweif disaster and for a long time Yaqoot mulled over the predicament of young artists with no funds and big dreams. The young artist from Fayyoum who staged the fateful Zoo Story with candles had risked his life, and lost it, to create beauty and meaning with primitive, dangerous means in the absence of money and affordable technical alternatives. His only other choice was to play it safe and compromise his art. The Beni Sweif inferno was rooted in this dilemma. Out of these reflections the idea of a zero-budget theatre festival was born – a festival designed to help and encourage young artists to make up with their creative imagination for the lack of funds and compete to come up with ingenious visual solutions that are safe and cost next to nothing. The first edition of Masrah bila Intag (No-Budget Theatre) Festival (or ‘Theatre without Funds' as it is billed in English) was organized in Alexandria in 2008 by Yaqoot's Creation Group in collaboration with the Sidi Gaber Cultural Palace for Artistic Appreciation. In the following years, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina Arts Center and the State Theatre Organisation joined in as collaborators, offering mainly safe and well-equipped spaces for workshops, rehearsals and performances. The 5th edition of this festival was successfully held at Beiram El-Tonsi Theatre in Alexandria this month (14 to 18 May) and will be the subject of my article next week. Right now, my main interest lies in the latest production of my Alexandrian phoenix. Yaqoot's version of Antonio Buero Vallejo's La doble historia del doctor Valmy (The Double Story of Doctor Valmy), a joint production of his independent Creation Troupe and Sidi Gaber Cultural Palace for Artistic Appreciation, opened at Beiram El-Tonsi Theatre in Alexandria on 7 May and I was lucky to catch the last performance on the 13th, the night before the opening of the festival. Like Yaqoot's 3 earlier productions since 2005, this one displays a remarkable degree of artistic maturity and that intriguing, paradoxical feature that has become the hallmark of Yaqoot's productions since 2005 – a combination of deep personal involvement with the major theme, on the one hand, and cool, artistic detachment and objectivity in the presentation of it, on the other. This curious blend takes the theatrical form of a calculatedly shocking contrast between the austere beauty and extreme surface neatness of the visual stage image and the horror of the reality underlying it and requires style of acting which constantly betrays under a cool, quiet surface turbulent undercurrents of repressed, passionate intensity. Yaqoot's dramaturgical treatment of his chosen texts – texts that invariably engage his deep-seated convictions, progressive, liberal views and relentless commitment to fighting all kinds of oppression – has been central to the evolution of his distinctive directorial style since 2005. Concentration, condensation and compression are key words in this respect. Yaqoot goes straight to the heart of the play, ruthlessly hacking away anything that stands in the way, can obstruct his vision, or threatens to divert attention from it even for a second. In A Doll's House, he boldly sacrificed Dr. Rank, compressed many scenes and cut away others. The same policy was pursued in The Hairy Ape and Miller's rather wordy Witches. And in Doctor Valmy, Yaqoot not only got rid of Daniel's mother, together with all the cozy domestic scenes in which she features, and which slightly soften the horror of the play's world, as well as the spurned love motive which in the original play drives Paulus, the mother's old flame and present head of the national security apparatus, to dehumanize her son, Daniel, by turning him into a brutal torturer out of revenge, he also severely reduced the role of the psychiatrist, Doctor Valmy, as commentator in the interest of foregrounding Daniel's predicament and whittled down the number of Paulus's assistants to one instead of 4, removing in the process the scenes where Mary, Daniel's wife, is sexually harassed by one of them. Yaqoot's dramaturgical intervention was guided by a principle of austere economy that rejected all duplications of character functions and variations on the central theme, together with any softening padding that did not directly relate to it. If a point is made once, it need not be made twice. As for ‘Papa Paulus', what better, more horrible and psychologically credible motive can he have in brutalizing Daniel's humanity than wanting to replicate himself through him? Does not such a motive accord more with the contorted, distorted psychology of a tyrant than spurned love? Those who do not agree with Yaqoot's interpretation can always go back to Vallejo's original text and mount other productions of it. In this particular production, the dramaturgical treatment suited the director's purposes, yielding a sharper, crisper, more focused performance that centers on the gradual disintegration of Daniel under the weight of guilt and sorrow, investing this originally repulsive anti-hero with something of the dignity and pathos of a truly tragic one at the end, and powerfully warns against the horrors of living in repressive autocracies and the dehumanizing effect of political torture on both the torturer and his victim. By sticking to the classical Arabic of Salah Fadl's translation in order to underline the ‘foreignness' of the play, thus creating a degree of detachment, and at the same time using stage imagery that universalizes the theme, brining it nearer home, Yaqoot managed at once to draw his audience emotionally into the drama while allowing them enough distance to generalize its meaning and compare it to their own lived reality. In creating this double effect of emotional involvement and reflective, critical detachment, Yaqoot was assisted by the neat and powerfully disorienting visual imagery created by stage and lighting designers Mahmoud Sami and Ibrahim El-Forn. In those images, a forbidding background of high stone walls, reminiscent of ancient pagan temples and medieval castles, represented the police headquarters, grimly overshadowing the other 2 cozy locations (of Daniel's home and Dr. Valmy's clinic left and right) the whole time. At certain, calculated points those walls would suddenly pale off, becoming almost transparent, to reveal a mass of iron chains and painted scenes of horrible torture. Mohamed Mustafa Abdel-Latif's arranged musical soundtrack intensified the horror of those moments. Yaqoot's capable cast – El-Sa'id Qabil as Daniel, Islam Abdel Shafee' as Paulus, Abeer Ali as Mary, Ahmed Izzat as Dr. Valmy, Isam Omar as the interrogated tortured and eventually killed political dissident Marti, Sally El-Sayed as his wife and former student of Mary, and Ahmed Basiouny as Paulus's assistant and Daniel's colleague – contributed actively to the vivid, lucid and powerful realization of his version of the play, performing with great sensitivity, understanding, discipline and harmony. Of the whole cast, however, Qabil and Abdel Shafee' stood out, creating an unforgettable, haunting duo in which Daniel gradually turns from a cocky, strutting straw man into a human wreck, gaining tragic dignity at the end, and Paulus is at once sinister and ebullient, hiding behind his soft, jovial exterior a wealth of sadistic energy and a boundless capacity for evil that makes him seem frighteningly undefeatable and larger than life. Combining extreme sophistication and accessibility, this version of Doctor Valmy has the impact of a purgatorial fire and is truly worthy of a risen phoenix.
