7th Egyptian National Theatre Festival, 10-25 August, 2014. Writing two days before the end of the 7th Egyptian National Theatre Festival, I can safely say that the hallmark of this year's edition was variety. Whatever the taste of the spectator, be it for tragedy or comedy, realism or the absurd, modern plays or the classics, local or foreign texts, folklore, storytelling, or street theatre, one could find something to enjoy. Of the 42 productions in the competition, many have been covered on the pages of the Weekly since the end of the previous edition of the festival in 2013, including The Double Story of Dr. Valmy, Fando and Lis, The Frame, Snakes, Rosmersholm (rechristened House of Light), Inherit the Wind (billed The Trial), Macbeth Tonight, Rituals of Death and Life, Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides (adapted as Al-Ustaz, or The Master), Maknoon Macbeth, Hamlet, The Masked Prophet, to mention the most prominent ones (see the Cultural Section of the Weekly on 28 May, 6 June, 9 October and 12 December, 2013, and 23 January, 6 March, 19 and 26 June and 7 August 2014). In this article, therefore, I will use the space to cover plays hitherto unreviewed. For folklore lovers, Hi ya Leila Hoy (Hey, Night, Hey), written and directed by Shazli Farah, proved a real treat. The exotic-sounding title, unfamiliar outside Upper Egypt and the land of Nubia, vividly evokes that southernmost part of Egypt and points to the cultural and geographical provenance of the show's material without reference to any particular theme. Love, however, emerges as the general idea on which the author loosely strings together three stories drawn from the history and folk heritage of that region, though far-flung in terms of time. One is set in ancient Egypt and draws on a Pharaonic legend about a monster who kidnaps a princess, imprisons her on his island and is finally outwitted and killed by her; another dramatizes the folk tale of Yasin and Baheya, as enshrined in a famous popular ballad dating back to the 1920s, from two contrasting perspectives: the traditional one of the ballad, which celebrates Yasin, an avenging hero, fighting his oppressors – a kind of Robin Hood – and another, derived from a historical record, namely the memoirs of chief of police Saleh Harb who shot Yasin in reality, which represents Yasin as dangerous bandit and outlaw. The third tale is set in Nubia, before it drowned under the waters of the Aswan Dam, and nostalgically revives the folk rituals, ceremonies and daily life of that vanished land. The three tales also represent different literary genres: romance, melodrama, and farce, and were arranged in a curious manner by alternating different scenes from the three in succession. This technique caused some confusion initially, before the audience got used to it, and resulted in many blackouts to allow for set changes. It seemed quite arbitrary, adding nothing of dramatic or dialectical import to the stories and serving no artistic purpose save constant visual variety and change of mood. What held the show together and eased the transition between the scenes, softening the jolts and jumps, was Hazem El-Kafrawi's vibrant score, played live by his delightful band of musicians and singers. Hi ya Leila Hoy was only one of a number of plays representing contemporary Egyptian dramatists. Another of these was Sameh Osman's Al-Mukhattat (The Plot), directed by Sameh Basiouni for the Alexandria State Theatre Company. It adopted the formula of a quest, or a pilgrim's progress, which, though it fails to achieve its original goal, yields an important revelation. The pilgrim in question is an ordinary citizen who, having discovered a dangerous plot against his country seeks in vain to alert the authorities, or those in power, trying the security forces, the Islamists and businessmen in succession. His vain quest is projected in the form of a play in progress, thought up and staged by an authoritarian director who constantly bullies and abuses the members of his company, leading them to rebellion at the end. While the director insists that the play/quest continue, the actors, led by the one playing the Citizen, announce that in the presence of authoritarian systems that subjugate people and render them ineffectual and indifferent, any plot against the country is bound to succeed. The play has potential but is marred by too many stereotypes, forced attempts at comedy and direct political harangues. In performance, the sense of dramatic looseness was augmented by the intermittent intrusion of gratuitous group dances. More meandering still was Mahmoud El-Tookhi's Ba'd Bokra (The Day after Tomorrow), staged by Mohamed Mursi for the Alexandria Freedom and Creativity Studio. A topical political satire in the form of diverse sketches linked by a narrator/commentator and a homeless, jobless, young married couple, it seemed quite daring at the time it first appeared in 1993. Now, it seems to date and has no bite. Though many of the ills of Mubarak's reign (police abuse, rigged elections, social injustice, unemployment, etc.) still persist to some extent, Mubarak and his clique have gone and the national mood has changed. Rather than the day after tomorrow, the play seemed to drag us back to yesterday. Al-Safira Aziza, by Abdel Ghani Dawood, was another example of contemporary Egyptian dramatic writing in the festival. In this play, presented by the National Company of Aswan under Osama Abdel Ra'oof's direction, Dawood draws his material from the popular epic known as Al-Sira Al-Hilaleya, focusing on the love story of Aziza, the daughter of the king of Tunisia, and Younis, a leading member of the Hilaleya tribe that besieges her father's kingdom. As in the epic, love leads Aziza to collaborate with the enemies of her country and open the gates of the city for them. The story ends tragically with her death when Diab, the ruthless hero of the Hilaleya who leads the invasion, covets her for himself and kills her when she rejects him. Dawood's handling of the story stresses the dangers of internecine wars and feuds among Arabs and warns against absolutist rule and military dictatorship. Khalid Farghali's music and Mohamed Gabr's choreographed battle scenes and dances supported the modest acting of the cast and Mahmoud Eid's varied sets, though often bulky and naïve, were adequate and added a touch of pomp. Ali Abu Salem, another contemporary Egyptian dramatist, was represented in the festival by a musical version of his play, Beit El-Tayeb (Good Man's House), commercially rechristened Ishq El-Hawanem (Ladies' Amours). The plot centers on a female vagrant who artfully worms her way into the home and confidence of a wealthy widow and her only daughter in order to rob them of their inheritance. By regularly doping their coffee and spinning fanciful tales about an imaginary lover, she turns them into helpless addicts and deadly rivals. Rather than a domestic drama, however, Abu Salem's play is palpably intended as a political allegory of the rise of Islamists to power. The poor, hounded gypsy woman, who takes refuge in the house of El-Tayeb and eventually takes possession of it by vicious machinations, reducing its owners to senseless, quailing slaves who mortally hate each other, comes across as a clear metaphor for the Muslim Brotherhood and how they cheated their way to power in Egypt and stooped to conquer. Isam Abdel-Aziz's Rituals of Death and Life was such another political allegory, but more confused, elaborate and pretentious. I have written extensively about it in my article ‘Misplaced Energy' on 23 January this year (Issue No.1181 of the Weekly) and have nothing new to add. Surprisingly enough, the most satisfying piece of new dramatic writing in this festival was a monodrama. Yasmine Imam's Miraya (Mirror) is a veritable little gem, short, poetically condensed, and to the point. Like a good short story, it highlights a small, ordinary occurrence, revealing its social and psychological ramifications and wider resonances and implications. Lasting only twenty minutes, which is the exact duration of the fictional time of the action, it shows a young woman in front of her mirror, dressing to go to the wedding of a financially better-off cousin. From rehearsing the proper greetings, she moves on to choosing what to wear. This proves quite a dilemma, as she is assailed by echoes of all the contradictory opinions she has heard about how a decent young woman should look and behave if she is to avoid public censure and attract suitors. This is further complicated by the fact that mores and morals are not the same for all classes and vary according to social and economic status, as her mother's voice tells her. While her richer cousin can wear what she likes in the safety of her own car and aggressively repel sexual harassment in the confidence of her privileged social standing, the heroine has to observe a strict dress code and mode of behviour and meekly submit to sexual aggressors in public transportation for fear of attracting attention and causing a scandal. Painfully conscious of the Other's gaze all the time, she is deprived of the freedom of being herself and realizing her own individual identity. By choosing the culture of dress in contemporary Egyptian society as the subject of her scrutiny and dramatizing it in an act of dressing and undressing before a mirror, Yasmine Imam has poignantly dramatized the dilemma of the dehumanized female, trapped in the gaze of a society that constructs her according to its contradictory notions and fantasies of the ideal woman. In using dress, an essential component of theatre and acting, as the focus of the piece and vehicle of communicating her deep meditations on the status of women, Imam has produced an intrinsically, profoundly feminist theatrical piece that at once evokes uproarious laughter and serious reflections. Rooh wa Gasad (Soul and Body), the fruit of a writing and storytelling workshop by Ana El-Hekaya (I am the Story) Group, was another instance of new feminist writing in the festival, and was equally preoccupied with the Other's gaze in relation to true identity. Unlike Yasmine Imam's Miraya, however, where the writer uses a professional actress (Zeinab Gharib) to perform her text, the writers of Soul and Body are themselves the performers, and they take turns telling ten delightful stories of their own composition, punctuated with relevant lyrics by Iman Shahin, put to music and sung live on the lute by Iman Salah El-Din. Despite their variety in characters, subject matter, setting and mood, all ten stories share a central theme – namely, society's obsessive preoccupation with physical appearance coupled with a disregard for the inner self, and the struggle of individuals, particularly females, to transcend the soul/body dichotomy and achieve a synthesis of both. To be true to one's self and feel at home, free and happy in one's own body and at one with it, is the ultimate goal and only way to achieve human integrity. Though most of the group are academics and mainly use theatre as a tool to empower women and raise their awareness, they seemed to master the ancient art of storytelling and established immediate, intimate rapport with the audience, who loved the performance. Equally gripping and entertaining, albeit in a different vein, was Mohamed Adel's Qahwa Baladi (Local Café) – an original dramatic collage in which snatches and passages of published colloquial poetry by popular poets, past and present, were selected, stitched together and interwoven to form the verbal texture of a script that speaks the stories, thoughts and dreams of the customers and waiters in an ordinary baladi café, together with those of the beggars, shoeshine boys and street vendors who pass through it. Ranging in form and tone from lyrical monologues and amicable conversation to biting satirical comments, rousing, defiant speeches and angry squabbles, Adel's script was a superb feat of intricate construction which made the poetry come alive and seem like the stuff of daily speech. Adel staged his text in a typical baladi café, constructed by theatre designer Rami Azab in the open-air space opposite Al-Hanager centre in the opera grounds – a space that currently serves as the venue of the newly established state theatre company called Masrah Al-Midan (public square theatre). Delivered with meticulous attention to accuracy of characterization, and interspersed with popular satirical songs and famous ditties, beautifully performed by Fatma Adel to the accompaniment of a lute, Qahwa Baladi sported a gallery of vivid, memorable vignettes and offered a panoramic view of the problems, injustices, indignities and frustrations suffered by ordinary Egyptians in their daily life, as well as of their hopes and dreams. Two of the classics of Egyptian drama featured in the festival and fared rather badly at the hands of their young directors. The Modern Theatre Company's revival of Mikhail Roman's 1950s' Al-Dokhan (Smoke), directed by Sameh Basiouni, cut out a lot of the text to knock the play's three acts into a 90-minute one-shot, and in the process robbed the drama of its existential dimension and human complexity, reducing it to a flat sermon about the disastrous consequences of drug addiction. Salah Abdel-Saboor's verse play, Laila wa Al-Majnoon (Laila and the Madman), fared even worse in the Theatre Institute's production called Laila wa Al-Majhool (Laila and the Unknown). In the hands of director Ahmed Kishk, it not only underwent reduction, but also suffered severe deconstruction. Though the main characters and basic situation are preserved, they are projected and interpreted from the perspective of recent history and contemporary events in Egypt. The hero's quest for the long-awaited saviour is rejected as a pernicious illusion and an invitation to dictatorship, while the voice of the silent, downtrodden and long-suffering majority is given free rein in the figure of a new, added character, significantly called Namla (Ant). The play's three acts are whittled down to its two pivotal scenes: the one in the bar, when the broken, Hamlet-like hero and his colleagues get thoroughly drunk, squabble, and voice their frustrations, grievances and dreams, and the scene in which the hero discovers his beloved Laila (Abdel Saboor's symbol of Egypt) in the bedroom of Husam, a colleague, turned police informer, and realizes she has been desecrated thanks to his impotence and revolutionary ineptitude. These two scenes, moreover, are condensed, knocked together, overlaid with new writing that falls far short of the original, and set in the context of an orgy where all the characters are thoroughly discredited and Laila and two of her female friends behave no better than harlots. To see the symbol of Egypt reduced to a drunken prostitute shocked many in the audience, even though at the end she is divested of her sexy black dress to reveal underneath it the spotless white robe of an angel. This deconstruction of Saboor's play was tantamount to patricide and a total rejection of the past. No non-Egyptian theatre classic in the festival, be it of European or Arab origin, underwent such ruthless mutilation. But more on this next week.
