Nehad Selaiha joins the crowd for the opening of the third United Drama Teams Festival at the Nile Hall Luckily for the United Drama Teams, the Egyptian Catholic Cultural Centre which last year sponsored their 2nd festival, hosting it at its Nile Hall downtown, next-door to Saint Joseph's church in Mohamed Farid street, has had this spacious and much needed venue thoroughly refurbished in time for their 3rd festival. In fact, the renovation work extended to the whole three-storey building which houses the hall and went deeper than a mere new coat of paint or redoing the floors in shiny ceramic tiles ( beautiful but dangerously slippery). The chairs and carpets in the hall were cleaned up and restored, a new sound- system was installed, the stage was fitted with new curtains, and the backstage and flies were reasonably updated in terms of facilities and appliances. On the opening night, last Thursday, the whole building seemed to glow and the smell of fresh paint still clung to the air. The only snag was having to climb three floors, but I am assured work on providing the building with a lift is already underway. That the stage is still too high and not sufficiently raked is something we have to live with it seems; underneath its wood covering the stage is a solid block of concrete which forms an integral part of the structure, explains stage-designer Fadi Foukeih who had a hand in the renovation. First and second rows, therefore, are to be diligently avoided if you don't want to walk away with a stiff neck. But given the huge attendance this event invariably attracts, you cannot always bank on finding a seat elsewhere. With its 'new look', the Nile Hall seemed to have especially decked itself up to celebrate this year's much expanded festival. Rather than six performances spread over three or four days, as was the case in the two previous festivals (in 2005 and 2006), this year's edition takes up a whole week (from 22 to 28 March) and boasts 13 performances by 13 different groups. Two of these, however -- the Heaven Team's colourfully theatrical Overture, which served as a kind of inaugural fanfare piece at the opening ceremony, and a show to be provided by Al-Kalima (the Word) team by way of a valedictory finale at the award-giving/closing ceremony -- are not in the contest. The four-member jury, however, with as many as seven special jury awards on their hands this year, apart from the nine traditional ones (for best performance, director, scenographer, composer, playwright, leading and supporting actors and actresses), could very well afford to spare one for each or either by way of compliment. Indeed, with so many awards to go round (16 in all), I doubt of any of the 13 groups performing in this festival whether in or outside the contest will go home empty handed. As the number of groups swelled, so did the number of awards. It is as if the organisers, while keen on preserving the atmosphere of suspenseful excitement contests always generate, are equally anxious not to slight or discourage any of the groups. While an abundance of awards can rob the contest of some credibility, one can still understand the logic behind it. The United Drama Teams is a new, fragile movement that needs to stick together if it is to survive; competitiveness of the kind you see in other festivals could destroy its solidarity. And come to think of it, what is wrong with having too many prizes? After all, these are amateur groups who go to a great deal of trouble and expense to stage their shows; why begrudge them the pleasure of going home a little plaque or piece of paper (the awards carry no money value) saying 'well done'? With only two days into the festival, it is still too early to predict the direction it will take in terms of themes and issues and whether the increased number of groups and productions will result in a higher artistic quality than in previous years. The first two productions, however, bode well. One of them, the Angels Team's Nahwa Hayat-en Afdhal (Towards a Better Life), which played on the second night, I had already seen at the Abba Antonios church in Shubra last August. Extensively adapted from a 1955 short, didactic piece by Tawfiq El-Hakim which plays a variation on the Faust theme to drive home its lesson, it struck me then as a very pleasant surprise and a vast improvement on the original. A "modern morality play with pronounced political overtones and a pungent satirical flavour," was how I described it in a review on this page at the time (see "Ten candles for the 'Angels'", Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 806, 3 August, 2006). Last night, though out of its natural habitat, as it were, and despite the strained atmosphere created by the contest, it seemed to retain its earlier vigour and zany vivacity. Unlike the Angels' Better Life, Al-Rahaya (Millstone), by the Mar Murqus (St. Mark) Church team, was a completely new experience; I had not seen it before, or any of the group's work for that matter, either in Shubra, where the church is located, or anywhere else. It played on the first night after a rather long opening ceremony which included -- besides the usual speeches and presentation of the jury -- video projections of the two previous festivals and of various workshops attended by the groups, the Heaven Team's Overture, and the honouring of Huda Wasfi, the artistic director of Al-Hanager, accompanied by a short film on her achievements. In the interval before the play, I learnt it was an adaptation of Youssef Wahbi's famous mid-twenties classic Kursi Al-'Itiraf (Seat of Confession) which won him a gold medal from the Vatican, no less, in 1927. I suddenly remembered that Wahbi's Ramses company was publicly launched on 10 March, 1923. What a curious coincidence, I thought, that 84 years on, one of the most popular plays in the Ramses repertoire should be revived in the same month that marked the birth of the company, missing the actual date by only 12 days. Adapted by Wahbi himself from an Italian melodrama (the title of which and name of its author I have yet to trace), Kursi Al-'Itiraf features the traditional conflict between love and duty, set here in Upper Egypt, and played in a violent, tempestuous key amid floods of tears. When a village priest whose brother is falsely accused of murder discovers the identity of the real culprit in the course of a confession, he is torn between his desire to save his brother's life and his oath of secrecy where confessions are concerned. That the vicious murderer only went to confession to torment him, certain he would never betray him, makes the dilemma of the priest all the more distressing. Harassed by his mother's tears and groans, haunted by his brother's helpless pleading of innocence, wracked by his secret knowledge and reviled and taunted by the villagers, the priest is nearly driven out of his wits and his faith in God's justice begins to waver. Alone in his now deserted church, with his brother already in the shadow of the gallows and the villagers outside demanding that he surrender the keys and leave, he finally has a violent confrontation with God. It actually works: a few scenes later, the truth is fortuitously revealed, without the priest having to open his mouth, and the innocent are saved and the guilty punished. The play ends with a jubilant, passionate hallelujah which urges the audience never to doubt the Lord's justice however harsh the trials He puts his subjects through. A far cry this is from the end of the Angels' A Better Life where no deus ex machina descends at the end to put things right and the hero, having lost to the devil, shoots himself in despair. In adapting Wahbi's adaptation, director Remon Zaki with his team of dramaturges, Hani Maher, Rami Adli and Imad Abdel-Malak, went for simplicity and directness, paring down the plot and dialogue to essentials and removing all the scenes that could suggest that the truth came out through human machination rather than, or even as well as, divine intervention. They ended up with 90 minutes of straightforward, fast-moving, highly credible scenes, interspersed with songs (culled from the poetry of Ahmed Fouad Nigm and Naguib Sorour, set to music by Magid Girgis and sung by Amir Ghibrial) to fill in the gaps between set changes and invest the priest's suffering with a wider significance. The sets (by Mary Milad and John Faris), the lighting (by Mina Nagui and Fahim Sam'an) and Nirmeen George's costumes were at once frugal and convincingly realistic, and Remon Zaki, with Munir Saleeb, an expert in Upper-Egyptian dialects constantly at his elbow, got his team of talented, disciplined actors to adopt a style of heightened naturalism in delivering their parts. Inherently melodramatic in conception, style and structure -- naively positing black versus white with no colours or shades in between, and honestly unashamedly didactic in its general thrust, underpinning assumptions and resolution of the conflict, Al-Rahaya, nevertheless, never sank to the level of the ridiculously shallow or insipidly sensational. Though childishly simplistic, it had a palpable integrity of purpose that was strangely moving. The festival did well to drop the phrase 'for Christian Theatre' from its title this year. Though religiously motivated, regarding theatre-making as a form of worship, what it offers is not strictly religious drama (plays on the lives of saints or dramatizations of the scriptures) and its artists and patrons, though predominantly Christian, are not exclusively so. In the case of most groups, the churches mainly serve as rallying points, providing meeting places, communication routes, performance venues and sponsorship in some form or other. Though they give themselves the right to exercise a degree of censorship on what goes on under their roofs and could object to certain products and deny them patronage, they never dictate to the artists beforehand what plays or themes to choose or how to go about staging them. That the plays, however far they may travel on the road of skeptical questioning, should ultimately affirm the Lord's existence and endorse the basic moral values upheld by all religions is nonetheless a basic requirement. Such a stricture, though it leaves the artist a substantial degree of freedom, inevitably puts a ceiling on how far the imagination or dialectical thought can soar. One could argue that such a ceiling exists for most artists in conservative societies anyway, be they Christian, Moslem, or Jewish, and that it is not always imposed from outside but may often take the form of self-censorship (voluntary and conscious or otherwise); this, however, does not invalidate the point I am trying to make: that in the presence of such constraints, external or internal, artistic works, with very few exceptions, tend to be timid and conciliatory rather than authentically, profoundly questioning.
