39th Regional Theatre Festival of the Cultural Palaces Organisation, Balloon Theatre, Manf Hall, the theatre of the Supreme Council of Youth and Sport, 1-10 February, 2014. Ever since El-Samer theatre in Agouza was pulled nearly 20 years ago to make room for a modern, multi-storey theatrical complex of highly equipped performance, rehearsal and workshop spaces – a project that has yet to see the light of day – the Cultural Palaces Organisation has been reduced to hosting the productions chosen from all over the country to participate in its annual regional theatre festival/competition in extremely primitive spaces, consisting of make-shift stages, erected in the open air, on the derelict site of the defunct El-Samer, or in the courtyard of Manf Hall. There was a time when the Organisation had a kind of poor substitute for the equally technically poor El-Samer in the form of a spacious, open-air floating theatre on the banks of the Nile in Al-Bahr Al-A'zam Street in Giza. This venue, however, was closed down following the Beni-Sweif inferno in 2005, having failed the anti-fire regulations of the public safety department; and it has remained closed since. For its 39th Regional Theatre Festival, originally scheduled for September 2013, but put off till the 1st of February this year due to the turbulent events following the 30th June uprising, the festival board decided to beg around for alternative performance spaces in a bid to improve performing conditions for artists. They were lucky to get the elegant, well-equipped theatre of the Supreme Council of Youth and Sport for 5 out of the 7 cultural palaces entries and another 5 out of the 6 offered by cultural homes. The rest of their performances (numbering 3) were originally designed for the open air and were, therefore, accommodated in the painfully draughty Manf Hall courtyard, which is rarely used in winter. For the 5 productions of the regional national troupes, the festival organisers managed to secure the Balloon theatre – a disastrous choice if there is one. The stage of the Balloon, originally designed for big musical performances, is simply too vast to suit any dramatic production and its acoustics are terrible, making the use of microphones mandatory if the audience is to hear anything. Add to this the huge orchestra pit (rarely used nowadays since live music and singing have long been replaced by pre-recordings), which so distances spectators from performers as to make emotional interaction or flow of energy absolutely impossible. These conditions, plus poor lighting facilities, marred all the shows performed there, since most of the actors, particularly those in supporting roles, could not be provided with wireless microphones, and even those who had them were harassed by their frequent technical failures and disconcerting rasping squeaks. Performances conceived as musicals, or semi-musicals, with little spoken dialogue, large choruses and group scenes, prerecorded musical soundtracks and lots of choreographed dance sequences – like the Menya national troupe's musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (directed by Ahmed El-Banhawi), Ibrhim El-Mahdi's staging of a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream for El-Qalyoubeya national troupe, Ahmed Abdel Gileel's production of Naguib Sorour's peasant verse drama, Minein Ageeb Nas (Where Can I Get People), or Adel Barakat's adaptation of Abdel Ghani Dawood's folk play El-Safeera Aziza (Aziza, Ambassadress Extraordinary) – managed to overcome the Balloon shortcomings to a reasonable extent. In contrast, the National Ismailia troupe's faithful rendering of Albert Camus' State of Siege, directed by Khalid Tawfiq, amounted to a devastating tragedy. I say tragedy rather than disaster because one could see that the directorial conception of this 1948 satire on bureaucratic totalitarianism was impressive and substantially credible, capable of yielding a highly effective performance. Using mobile metal stands and frames of various heights, deployed and redeployed in clever formations round the stage, a vast number of extras for the crowd scenes and competent actors in the major parts, Khalid Tawfiq (a talented director whose production of Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty won several awards in last year's National Egyptian Theatre Festival) sought to create a series of compelling, eloquent stage images while preserving Camus' dialogue. But the lighting equipment of the Balloon theatre failed him, leaving the performance in semi-darkness most of the time, its vast stage seemed to swallow the performers, messing up the rhythm of their carefully choreographed movements, and its horrible acoustics made the dialogue spoken on stage (the main vehicle in this case in the absence of prerecorded songs and music) barely audible. My heart bled for the actors as they screamed their words in a vain effort to be heard and for the director and his artistic crew as they watched their work going to pieces and failing to reach the audience across that vast, dark and chilling orchestra pit. The 3 open-air performances hosted at Manf Hall – Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the 1957 lyrical, playful folk epic about outwitting the devil by Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian poet and playwright, directed by Mohamed El-Zeini and presented by Borg El-Arab Cultural Palace in Alexandria; Islam Farghali's Hikayat El-Nahr (Tales of the River), a folk play based on an Ancient Egyptian legend about 2 brothers, very much like Osiris and Set, but of humbler social status, directed by Hamdi Tolba and performed by the Beni Mazar Cultural Palace troupe; and Raafat El-Dweiri's ritualistic folk drama Kitta bi Saba' Terwah (Cat with Seven Souls), staged by Mohamed Gamal for El-Sadat Cultural Home – fared much better. Unfolding like folk tales, with plenty of folk rituals, songs and dances, they were perfectly suited to the rugged open courtyard with its two majestic trees. Luckiest of all, however, and far superiour on the whole were the productions hosted in the theatre of the Supreme Council for Youth and Sport. And part of the credit for that should definitely go to the technical facilities and excellent acoustics of that space. There, on 10 successive nights, we enjoyed a richly varied theatrical feast drawn from different countries. From Sweden came Strindberg's Miss Julia, decently directed by Emad Mahrous and diligently performed by the Abu Hommos Cultural Home troupe; from Spain, director Riham Abdel Razzaq fetched Lorca's Yerma, transplanted it into rural Egypt and exquisitely acted the title role, supported by an admirable cast; and from France, Khalid Abdel Salam and the troupe of El-Mansoura Cultural Palace gave us a lively, well-designed, well-orchestrated and robustly acted performance of the events of a memorable day in the history of the French Revolution – the day the Bastille fell – as dramatized by Romain Rolland in The Fourteenth of July. Arab drama was represented in the 10-day programme at the theatre of the Supreme Council for Youth and Sport by two Egyptian playwrights and a Syrian one. The Egyptian plays were: Mohamed Abdalla's relatively unknown Laylat Urs Zahran (Zahran's Wedding Night), which Amr Hassan directed for the Tamia Cultural Home, and Yusri El-Guindi's modern classic Antara, which draws on an eponymous Arabic folk epic about the life of that famous, black, Arab hero and invincible warrior who rose from slavery to glory by his bravery and the power of his sword. Antara was decently directed by Ali Khalifa and enthusiastically performed by the troupe of Ein Hilwan Cultural Palace. Syria's leading playwright, the late and great Saadallah Wannous, cut a high profile in the programme, with two of his late, one act plays performed within 4 days of each other. Ahlam Shaqiyyah (Anguished Dreams), a powerful melodrama, with political overtones, about female oppression and venereal diseases, and involving extramarital love and murder, was directed by Ziyad Yusef who set it in Egypt during the Islamist reign of ousted president Mursi, plastering photos of him all over the flat of the young couple, and playing himself the tyrannical husband with a kind of sinister reserve that felt deeply menacing while fitfully betraying under the somber, sober exterior a lusty sexual appetite. The rest of the cast, Amira Hafiz as the abused, constantly raped wife, Nirmeen El-Boreidi and Islam Salah as the aged, Christian couple next door, Alaa Hilmi as the student/new tenant, tuned well with his superb performance, while Nur Abdel Rahman, as the neighbour, and Mohamed Boreiqaa, as the Doctor, provided some comedy to relieve the pervading gloom of the piece. The other Wannous play, Yaumun min Haza Al-Zaman (A Day of Our Time), by the troupe of El-Dilingat Cultural Home, directed by Mohamed El-Bayya'. Mohamed Shaaban's adaptation of the play focused mainly on the gradual, ruthless awakening of the innocent hero to the ugly realities of the world around him, which eventually leads to his suicide, splitting the character between two actors, reducing the other parts to essentials and removing the character of the wife all together, giving whatever lines are kept from her part to the hero's double. Mohamed El-Naggar provided an elegant, ornate background set of walls studded with paintings of nudes and mirrors that reflected the hero's image wherever he moved, adding a few simple props to indicate different settings. This created the impression that the whole of the hero's world has turned into one, big high-class brothel, not unlike the one we find in Genet's The Balcony. The acting, though not outstanding in any one part, was sufficiently adequate to support the text. Italy was represented in the festival with Dario Fo's hilarious political satire, La signora è da buttare (The Lady is to be Thrown Away), in which the titular lady represents American capitalism and just before her death is elevated above a sink in a Statue of Liberty pose and then ascends to heaven packed with consumer good. Unfortunately, Amr Agami's adaptation for the Port Fuad Cultural Home troupe, though boisterous, colourful and quite vivacious, fell far short of the original text in terms of humour and pointed satire. By expanding the central metaphor of the Lady to cover other dominant, capitalist powers, including the United Nations, he diluted the attack and blunted its sharpness. American capitalism was more sharply attacked in El-Sayed Fagal's production of Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape for the troupe of El-Mahalla El-Kobra Cultural Palace. Though a powerful, well choreographed and quite graphic rendering of the text, it seemed like a more or less exact copy of Gamal Yacoot's production of the same play a few years ago. Yacoot himself was present in the festival with a new production far superiour to his earlier Ape. His version of Antonio Buero Vallejo's The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, a joint production of his independent Creation Troupe and Sidi Gaber Cultural Palace for Artistic Appreciation, which he brought to the festival, was first performed at Beiram El-Tonsi Theatre in Alexandria from 7 to 13 May. I saw it on the last day of that short run and was struck with its freshness, remarkable concentration, pristine clarity and sophisticated artistry. In my review of it for the Weekly I particularly noted the curious blend in Yacoot's style of deep emotional involvement and artistic detachment and objectivity, which “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” – a style, I added, which requires a mode of acting that constantly betrays under a cool, quiet surface turbulent undercurrents of repressed, passionate intensity. I also enthused about his dramaturgical treatment of the text, describing how he compressed and condensed it, guided by a principle of austere economy (see “How like a phoenix”, at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/Print/2759.aspx). In reviving this production for the 39th edition of the Annual Regional Theatre festival, Yacoot worked on the acting more, refining the performances of the already powerful elements in the cast and replacing the weaker ones with other, more competent and experienced actors. With the beautiful, emotionally and technically versatile and admirably disciplined Iman Imam, a native of Alexandria like Yacoot, who won Best Actress in three out of the 7 editions of the National Egyptian Theatre Festival, now playing Mary, the sensitive wife who suddenly discovers he is married to a professional torturer, goes berserk and shoots him, Islam Abdel Shafee' even more stunning and overwhelming as Paulus than he was before, and more skilled actors in the difficult parts of the husband, who gradually turns from a cocky, strutting straw man into a human wreck, gaining tragic dignity at the end, and the eponymous psychiatrist, Dr. Valmy, who is torn between his duty towards his patient and his horror and disgust at the deeds he confesses to him, the work seemed quite faultless and difficult to match. To an even higher degree than before, Yacoot's Doctor Valmy combined extreme sophistication and easy accessibility, producing the impact of what I described before as “a purgatorial fire.” No wonder that at the end of the day, it deservedly walked away with all the top awards, scooping Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Scenography.
