7th Egyptian National Theatre Festival, 10-25 August, 2014. Arabic drama by non-Egyptian dramatists was represented in this year's National Festival by only two plays: Hanzala's Journey, by Syrian playwright Sa'dalla Wannus, produced by Al-Qabbari Cultural Home in Alexandria, and The Masked Prophet, by the Algerian Abdel Karim Al-Khattabi, translated from the original French by Mohamed El Khaghat and produced by Kafr Saad Cultural Palace in the Damietta governorate. Hanzala's Journey, a didactic political satire, based on Peter Weiss's play How Mr. Mockinpott Was Cured of His Sufferings, has proved a perennial favourite with young Egyptian directors, particularly in regional theatre, since it first appeared in 1978. In it, Wannus sought to explode the comfortable myth that one can live in safety under dictatorial regimes by closing one's eyes to the injustices and abuses around one, minding only one's own business and steering clear of politics. Hanzala, the protagonist, an ordinary, meek civil servant, gets arrested one day for no crime or offence. This marks a watershed in his life, launching him on a journey of awareness, in the course of which he discovers that the corruption of the regime (which arrested him only to rob him of his savings in exchange for his freedom) has infected every quarter of society and every aspect of his life. The stages of the journey, which continues after his release, developing into a grotesque nightmare, are punctuated with satirical comments by a Brechtian chorus of clowns, who also impersonate different characters in the successive episodes. At the end of the journey, after much suffering and abuse, Hanzala is completely purged of his indifference and converted to the belief that the political is intimately personal. Director Wisal Abdel-Aziz stuck faithfully to the original text, abstaining from the common practice, followed in all the productions of the play I have seen, of converting Wannus's classical Arabic into colloquial Egyptian, and opted for a farcical style of acting that accorded with the intrinsic Punch-and-Judy quality of the play. With the help of Waild Gaber's brightly colourful set and costumes, Ibrahim El-Forn's vivid lighting effects, Sherif Abbas's lively choreography, and Mostafa Soliman's nimble musical track, he created a visually exhilarating show that had the atmosphere of a harlequinade. Rather than a literary text, The Masked Prophet uses for its source a real episode in Arab history dating back to the 8th century. During the reign of the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mahdi (775-785), a man called Hakim bin Hisham declared himself a prophet in Khorasan, in North Eastern Persia, attracting many followers and spearheading an insurrection against the Caliph. He is said to have been an ugly, one-eyed leper who wore a golden mask to hide his repulsively disfigured face, which led to his sect being called Al-Muqana'iyya (The Masked Ones). After some victories against the forces of the Caliph, he was finally defeated and is said to have killed himself in his castle, together with some followers, by poison or setting themselves alight. Director Khalid Tawfiq, who also designed the production, first came across Al-Khattabi's play in 1993, but only decided to stage it after the rampant spread of militant Islamist movements, like the Jihadists, Boko Haram and ISIS, in Africa and the Arab world. As in the play, the production not only exposes the manipulation of religion for political ends by these movements, but also argues that political tyranny, corruption and social injustice provide fertile soil for their germination and growth. The palpable parallels between the events in the play and the current upheavals in the Arab world resonated with the audience, infusing the performance with an overwhelming sense of urgency and relevance. Using a simple mobile set of bamboo frames that were constantly shaped by the actors to represent different locations (the sultan's palace, a prison, the town square, etc.), with some locations represented simultaneously, and relying mainly on the acting talents and discipline of his cast and Karim Khalil's eloquent choreography, Khalid Tawfiq created a vibrant, fast-flowing and powerful production. Western drama, on the other hand, was strongly represented in the festival, with as many as twenty classics of varying dates featured in the contest and three outside it. French drama boasted the lion's share, with no less than seven plays. Four of these – Fernando Arrabal's Fando and Lis, by the independent Creation Group, directed by Rif'at Abdel-Alim, Eugene Ionesco's Macbett, by Al Hanager Centre, directed by Ashraf Sanad, Jean Anouilh's Becket, or The Honour of God, presented by Ein Shams University, directed by Tamer Karam, and Jean Paul Sartre's Les Morts sans sépulture (The unburied dead), by the Faculty of Engineering of the Suez Canal University, designed and directed by Mohamed Hozayen – were generally faithfully presented, except for some slight cuts here and there. The rest were either extensively whittled down, or altered in different ways and degrees. While Fernando Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, presented by the Theatre Department of the University of Alexandria, was only severely reduced in length, Moliere's Tartuffe, as adapted by director Mohamed Makki for the State Theatre Company of Alexandria, was turned into a simplistic vehicle for attacking the Salafis, and was thickly overlaid and heavily weighted down with newly-written cautionary harangues against their dangerous wiles and religious hypocrisy. Cuts and additions to texts, be they harmful or beneficial, whether they reduce a play's complexity, or make it heavy-handed and less subtle, come under the umbrella of the broad term ‘adaptation' so long as they do not substantially alter or oppose the basic ideational content and dramatic trajectory of a play, or its ideologically determined reading/construction of reality and its world view. Even when the setting of a play is transposed to a different culture and the names of places and characters are accordingly changed, the resulting version may still legitimately qualify as an adaptation. In this sense, the plays I have just mentioned, together with others in the festival I shall presently speak of, belong to this category. In the case of Mohamed Mahran's version of Bernard Koltes's Roberto Zucco, however, the rewriting was so extensive as to justify the director in describing it (after Ionesco's example in Macbett) as an independent, new play and giving it a different title, calling it Matloob (Wanted). Koltes's Roberto Zucco (1998), his last before his death in 1990, was based on the real story of a young Italian psychopathic killer, called Roberto Succo, who murdered his parents then went on a killing spree throughout France, Italy and Switzerland during the 1980s, becoming Europe's most wanted man. Whereas Koltes's play uses the story as a vehicle for a profound existential questioning of our relation to life, death, violence and love, Mohamed Marhan's re-written version (which he himself directed for the troupe of the Sayed Darwish Academic Centre of Culture and the Arts) does not stop at changing basic features of the drama, but drastically alters its purpose. Reducing the characters to six, Mahran projects the story in a mixture of narration and reenacted flashbacks in the course of an imaginary meeting in a cheap bar between the murderer and the police inspector who has been hunting him for years. The relationship between hunter and hunted is tailored on the pattern of the Javert-Valjean relationship in Hugo's Les Miserables; here as there, the confrontation between the two shakes the hunter's convictions at their foundation as he begins to doubt the moral legitimacy of the hunt. The play, however, which ushers in the confrontation with a silent scene, showing the inspector alone in the bar, perusing a copy of the murderer's memoirs, and ends it with another silent scene, showing the inspector walking out quietly, deep in thought, leaves us in doubt as to whether that confrontation actually took place in reality, or was simply imagined by the inspector while he read the memoirs. Nor is this the only ambiguity in Mahran's play. When the inspector leaves, the poor drudge we had seen silently flitting through the scenes, sweeping the bar, faces the audience and finally speaks, delivering a confessional, confidential monologue that brings the play to a close. In this monologue, some of the events he relates from his childhood and adolescence are disconcertingly similar to those earlier related or enacted by the murderer. For a moment, we doubt the identity of the sweeper and wonder if he could be the real Zucco of the memoirs. What matters, however, is that brutal patriarchal oppression was the force that blasted the two men's lives, and this seems to be the message of Mahran's Wanted. While Koltes's play denies the spectator the satisfaction of knowing the motivations behind the crimes of the murderer, in much the same way as in Albert Camus L'etranger, thus thwarting realist interpretations in order to give the story an existential dimension, Mahran's version hints at causal links between abuse within the family in childhood and adult violence and perversion. Mahran was perhaps justified in providing this kind of straightforward explanation of the hero's actions. Few Egyptians would credit or accept existential angst as an explanation for homicide, or could understand, let alone sympathize with, the kind of hero Koltes offers – a hero who (according to Kristof Jacek Kozak in his Philosophical aspects of the tragic subject) represents “the post-deconstructive subject … whose central conflicts are unavoidable and irresolvable.” (http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/ER/detail/hkul/2983868). British drama was also strongly present in the festival contest, with four productions of Shakespearean tragedies, two of Macbeth and one of Hamlet (all previously covered in the Weekly on 10/10, 2013 and 25/6, 6/8, 2014)). Besides Shakespeare, the festival featured a free adaptation by director Effat Yehia of Ronald Harwood's 1995 Taking Sides, which addresses the dilemma of artists under oppressive dictatorships and the agonizing personal and moral choices they have to make, presented by Yehia's Al-Qafila (Caravan) troupe under the title Al-Ustaz (The Master). You can read more about it in the Weekly, Issue No.1202, on 19 June, 2014. Another modern British drama of an earlier date was Tom Stoppard's 1977 Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, rechristened Citizen Zero and presented by the theatre department of Alexandria University under the direction of Sameh El-Hadari. The change of title was in order, since the production used neither a full, live orchestra, as the original play required, nor the musical score André Previn specially composed for it; the original title (which derives from the popular mnemonic used by music students to remember the EGBDF notes on the lines of the treble clef) would have only baffled the audience. As a play about the erosion of individual identity by brutal oppression and an indictment of the nefarious practice of detaining political dissidents in mental asylums in totalitarian states, the new title, Citizen Zero, fits it better and pointedly sums up what happens to its two main characters. Mohamed Adel's austerely bare and somber set of black and white, Ibrahim El-Forn's chiaroscuro lighting and the muted colours of Mohamed Abdel Qadir's costumes provided the right frame for the gruesome action, creating a series of haunting images. The play may seem to date when presented now in Western countries; in the Arab world and some third world countries, however, such an outrageous way of silencing dissidents is not yet quite a thing of the past. In Egypt, though political dissidents are no longer sent to the madhouse, people can still be sent there by their nearest and dearest for simply being different and insisting on remaining so. This explains, perhaps, why the predominantly young audience of the festival loved it and widely praised it in social media. Spanish drama was represented in the festival by three plays. Buero Vallejo's The Double Story of Doctor Valmy, directed by Gamal Yaqoot for Sidi Gaber Cultural Palace, was extensively reviewed in the Weekly on 28 May, 2013. Garcia Lorca's Yerma, rechristened Batoul (Virgin) and directed by Reham Abdel-Raziq, who also played the eponymous heroine, was reset in Upper Egypt and rephrased in the dialect of that region by Shazli Farah. He had done the same with Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba last year, which Reham Abdel Raziq also directed, and the success of that venture encouraged them to repeat it this year with another Lorca play. Alfonso Sastre's The Gag, an indictment of censorship under patriarchal tyranny, which exposes the abuse of power in authoritarian social structures, was the second Spanish play, and was presented in an abridged version by the Theatre Institute of the Academy of Arts. Despite an elaborate realistic set by Hadi Gamal, director Adel Azouz was let down by his actors, who showed a marked tendency for brash declamation and melodramatic exaggeration and often resorted to acting clichés. Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Trial of the Donkey's Shadow, which is quite popular with independent and regional troupes, was the sole representative of German drama in the festival, and was performed with obvious relish and infectious vivacity by the students of Al Munufeya University. Likewise, American drama was solely represented by Tareq El-Dweiri's excellent production of Inherit the Wind, which, as you can see from the list of awards below, garnered 5 top awards, including best performance. (For a full review the production see my “In defence of reason”, Ahram Weekly, Issue No.1187, 6 March, 2014). Nora Amin's slightly adapted version of Ibsen's Rosmersholm was also the sole specimen of Norwegian drama in the festival, and you can find a full description of it in my “Forthcoming delights” in Issue No.1201 of the Weekly, published 12 June, 2014. Lovers of Russian drama could seek consolation for its absence in Mohamed Abdalla's stage version of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which closely followed the popular Egyptian film version of the novel, or, better still, in a dramatization of Chekhov's long short story, The Black Monk, which successfully communicated the story's questioning of the definitions of sanity and madness, and its preoccupation with the connection between madness and inspiration. Like the original story, Ahmed Sami's excellent stage version, elegantly presented by the independent Hussein Mahmoud Troupe, blurs the boundaries between mental illness and furious intellectual speculation, keepings us wondering whether the black monk who appears to the protagonist as vision signifies mental derangement or genius.
