Eleventh Saqia Theatre Festival, 1-4 December, 2013, at El Sawy Culture Centre The 11th Saqia Independent Theatre Festival started on 1 December, heralding, as it were, what seems like a virtual end-of-the-year theatrical race. The second half of November had been hectic enough, God knows, with two new State-Theatre productions — the Youth Theatre's Qareeb Gidan (So Close), a play by Akram Mustafa about Siamese twins, the first in Egypt to treat this rare phenomenon, and the Comedy's Mahasalsh (It Never Happened), a colloquial Arabic musical version of Moliere's Sganarelle, or the self-deceived husband, adapted by Yassin Abul-Enein and directed by Amr Kabil — opening on 17 and 24 November respectively at two of the Floating Theatre's halls, the AUC's Arsonists (covered in last week's issue) opening on the 20th, and the Theatrical Prospects Independent Theatre Association (in collaboration with the Cultural Development Fund of the Ministry of Culture) launching on 24, at the Balloon Theatre's Salah Jahin hall, a six-day theatre festival featuring no less than thirty varied works, including monodramas, mime shows and musicals, at the rate of two to six successive performances a day, depending on the length of the scheduled works. The first 10 days of December, however, have already broken the over 33 different productions in a fortnight November record. Only one day after the opening of the Saqia festival, which featured 14 new productions, the International Association for Creation and Training (I-ACT) launched its six-day Reveil Arab Theatre Forum in Alexandria, hosting 14 shows, and on 3 December, Theatrical Prospects held its seven-day New Playwrights Festival at Metropol Theatre, showcasing 16 productions of new plays by young Egyptian playwrights. That makes 44 productions in 10 days — an unbeatable record in my experience of theatre in Egypt amounting to a veritable theatrical glut. The reasons why so many new productions were crammed in such a short time, giving each no more than a one-performance chance, rather than spaced out more evenly over an adequate period, to allow longer runs and wider exposure, are not difficult to discover. The collapse of Mohamed Morsi's regime in early July not only disrupted the work of the Ministry of Culture, delaying budgets for state theatre productions and subsidies to independent ventures, but also eventually led, on 14 August, following the dispersal of two Cairo sit-ins by Morsi's supporters, to the new government imposing a state of emergency and nightly curfews that lasted for three months, ending on 14 November. No wonder the lifting of the curfew led to this theatrical avalanche. The 14 new independent productions presented in the Saqia festival at El Sawy Culture Centre were quite varied and included two adaptations of plays, one dramatisation of a novel, five new Egyptian plays, a production of a modern Spanish classic, two productions of classics of the modern Arabic stage, and three texts based on the troupe's improvisations and collectively written. Of these, the most intriguing and most ambitious, if not the best, was Mohamed Youssef's Al-Afaai (The Snakes) — an adaptation that knocks together Raafat Al-Dweri's Al-Waghish (The Pest) and Shakespeare's Hamlet — two plays that hark back to the Agamemnon myth and centre on avenging a father's murder by an uncle who later marries the widow of his victim (for a synopsis of Al-Waghish, see ahram.org.eg/News/1652/23/Invitation-to-madness.aspx 27 February 2013). The problem was that by superimposing Shakespeare's Hamlet on a play that already superimposes a sixth century Arabic folk epic on its Greek sources, dramaturge and director Mohamed Youssef produced a bewildering, splintered text which seems like fragments of a broken mirror at once reflecting different images and each other. In this play of overlapping echoes and reflections, scenes from both plays alternate, with the language constantly shifting from Al-Dweri's Upper Egyptian colloquial Arabic to the classical Arabic of the used Hamlet translation, and the action swings back and forth between the two dramas and visually oscillates, in terms of scenery and consumes (both by Safaa Mokhtar) between Al-Dweri's rural setting in Upper Egypt and Shakespeare's Court of Denmark, with both locations sharing the stage, each engaging one half and represented by a few eloquent motifs. With the exception of the actress who played Morra, the members of the cast doubled as characters in both plays, and to further complicate the stage images, Youssef provided a dancing, chanting chorus of five females in flaming red, who constantly hovered over the two corresponding worlds, moving freely between them, physically enacting the different characters' inner emotions and tensions, and made the chorus leader, who silently shadows Morra throughout, identifying with her, eventually impersonate Ophelia as well, merging the two bereaved daughters and bringing out their similarities and differences. The Snakes finally brings Morra and Hamlet face to face when she receives him as her absent brother Hagrass, mistaking Horatio for Hagrass's friend. In this scene, where comedy is momentarily triggered by the misunderstanding, we are forced to compare Hagrass's rejection of personal revenge in Al-Dweri's text with Hamlet's hesitation and procrastination. Ironically, rather than dovetail the two plays to some kind of conclusion, this meeting marks their separation as Hamlet firmly alerts Morra to her mistake, plainly asserting that he is Hamlet and not Hagrass. The separation established, the two plays go their different ways, each proceeding to its original end, leaving us wondering why they were ever joined in the first place. I doubt if audiences unfamiliar with Hamlet and Al-Waghish and their sources can make any sense of The Snakes — an abstruse work that exclusively targets the theatrically well-informed and seems designed to confuse, obfuscate and browbeat ordinary Egyptian theatre-goers. But even the well informed would be at a loss to discover a raison d'être for this elaborate exercise in intertextuality and the technique of variation on theme and character. Beyond deconstructing both plays to reveal their similarities and common sources, The Snakes seemed to have no other purpose, meaning, or relevance and, notwithstanding its visual beauty, intricate choreography and stage gimmickry, felt as cold as a mathematical parallelogram. Far less adventurous and more coherent was the Utopia troupe's production of Mohamed Al-Maghout's Al-Muharig (The Clown) — a profoundly bitter, grimly hilarious political fantasy that scathingly satirizes the fragmentation of the Arab nation in modern history into rigidly isolated, heavily guarded dictatorial police states that brutally oppress their citizens, robbing them of all human dignity and reducing them to abject cowards incapable of defending the homeland or standing up to tyranny. The dramatic action is triggered by an imaginary meeting between a contemporary street clown trying, at the insistence of a spectator, to impersonate the famous Arab warrior, Abdel-Rahman Al-Dakhel (popularly nicknamed Saqr Quraish), who founded the Omayyad Caliphate in Spain in the eighth Century, and that historical figure himself, who suddenly materialises, as if conjured up by the magic of theatre, to protest his farcical representation by the clown. Informed of the present degraded state of the Arabs, Al-Dakhel undertakes a journey in time to the 20th Century to restore their former glory and unity. This journey, with its many mishaps and mortifying revelations, constitutes the dramatic action which ends with the Arab hero surrendered by an Arab dictator to the Spanish authorities to be tried as a war criminal in exchange for a fat bribe in the form of a business deal. Staged with admirable lucidity and economy by director Mohamed Hafez, with a minimal set by Noha Wagdi, the right costumes by Mohamed Hani, and powerful, well orchestrated acting by the cast, it deservedly won the second best performance award. Another modern Arabic classic in the festival was Mohamed Salmawy's Elli Baado (Next in Line), a short play featuring a long, endless queue that seems never to move, and which includes people from different backgrounds and walks of life, representing all classes of Egyptian society. What these people are queuing for is kept a dark mystery; and as the play proceeds among the complaints and wrangles of the queuers, we learn that this queue has always been there, that people have aged and died waiting in it, bequeathing their places to their descendants, and we watch the queuers being conned, intimidated, or wheedled by high sounding slogans and empty rhetoric into allowing glib newcomers, posing as organisers or leaders seeking the common good, to jump the queue and move to the top. By suppressing any logical, rational reason for the queue, the play slides into the absurd and the queue develops into a stage metaphor of the state of Egyptian society, the passive, patient submissiveness of its members, and the way they have been deceived for centuries by sleek and oily intellectuals and corrupt politicians into surrendering their rights. Requiring no special sets, lighting, or costumes, Next in Line has always been a favourite with amateurs and independent troupes and is invariably a success. Al-Masraheya troupe were wise to choose it and director Mohamed Shawki staged it quite simply, trusting to the power of the text in hand, the talents of his well-cast actors, and the resourcefulness of his artistic crew. Looking every inch a very low-budget production, it nevertheless shared the third best production award with the more elaborate, more expensive looking The Snakes. Unlike previous Saqia festivals, this one featured only one foreign text — Alfonso Sastri's extremely popular 1953 tragedy The Condemned Squad (in Arabic Faseelah Ala Tareeq Al-Mawt) — presented by the Shazaaya (Shards) troupe and directed by Nour Afifi. Though the choice was excellent — a powerful, intense drama about five soldiers and their tyrannical colonel sent on a suicide mission as punishment for past transgressions, expecting death every minute and fighting among themselves and against their commander, dredging past memories and wrestling with their own demons while they wait — the production needed better trained actors with more finesse competence in handling classical Arabic. The same can be said of the Malameh troupe's Al-Muzniboun (The Guilty), which also featured soldiers in uniform. Loay Ibrahim's classical Arabic text is set in an unspecified police state and dramatizes the idea that tyranny and oppression inevitably corrupt their victims, driving them to sin against one another and rendering all guilty. With a bit of cutting and condensing, the text could be made clearer and stronger. But even as it was, it could have come across better had not the actors made such a mess of the classical Arabic of the dialogue and had director Mohieddin Yehia restrained his passion for embroidering even the soberest and most somber scenes with excessive acrobatic movements. The Guilty was only one of several original texts by new playwrights in the festival — a commendable feature to be sure, if only the quality was a little bet better. Other new plays in the festival which showed promise but required better craftsmanship included: Al-Takht (Oriental Band), by Salah Al-Dali and Ayman Abdel-Fattah, a raucous, farcical satire on the latest wave of Egyptian pop music and singers, called shaabi, relying heavily on parody, caricature and farcical exaggeration; Adham Othman's Glucose featuring the thoughts and hallucinations of a dying patient in a hospital and reviewing through them some of the social problems faced by young people in Egypt; Mohamed Hassan's Baad Leilet ‘Ard (After the Performance), Nagui Abdallah's Al-Mahatta Al-Gayah (Next Stop) and the collectively written Khaltabeeta (Potpourri), all of which featured actors in rehearsal, exposing their feuds, tensions and jealousies, as well as their personal histories and private fears and frustrations, and took the form of a string of confessional monologues punctuated by group scenes; and Walid Talaat's Shagaret Al-Morr (Tree of Bitterness) — a disconcerting mix of tragedy, satire and farce set in an imaginary kingdom ruled by a good who, forced to choose a husband, puts to the test several suitors, whose greed, inadequacy, shallowness and selfishness are exposed in a string of farcical scenes, and ends up marrying the chief of her army who promptly betrays, deposes and banishes her. The festival ended triumphantly with the Sou' Tafahom (Misunderstanding) troupe's Al-Itar (The Frame), a dramatisation by Mohamed Mabrouk of Sonallah Ibrahim's Al-Toq wa Al-Iswera (The Collar and Bracelet) — a novel about the suffering of women under the weight of oppressive traditions and the corrupting effects of poverty and ignorance, set in Upper Egypt. In terms of formal and textural cohesion, pace and rhythm, stage imagery, technical competence, acting skills, social relevance and total impact, The Frame was absolutely the pick of the bunch. Mabrouk directed his own dramatization with admirable fineness and opted for a non-realistic, imaginative set of mural paintings of women (by Ahmed Amin), which lined the back and sides of the stage, embracing the five women on it, at once reflecting their suffering and seeming to protect them by dwarfing the male characters. Equally original were the women's costumes which avoided the traditional attire of females in rural Upper Egypt, except for the head scarves, shawls and ornaments, dressing the actresses in plain beige tunics and trousers. The male characters, however, kept to the traditional male outfits in rural areas, creating a stage image in which the males wore long, flowing, white robes while the women wore the trousers. It felt as if the costumes, just like the set, were trying to defend the women and protect them. The traditional music, songs and dances, though delightful in themselves, were far from ornamental and were carefully interwoven into the performance to mark particular moments. Zeinab Gharib and Sarah Salah gave impressive, well honed performances and were supported by a competent, highly disciplined cast, which included: Mohamed Hefzi, Bassem Maurice, Nermine Helmi, Ibrahim Mustafa, Lamiaa Masoud, Nagui Nabil and Reem Al-Sawi. Mabrouk's The Frame deservedly won the top award for best performance.
