Every year the National Theatre Festival provides a wonderful opportunity to catch up on the best productions in mainstream theatre and sample the choicest annual crop of regional and independent theatre. The first week of this edition showcased a number from each section. As I happened to have seen and reviewed most of the offerings of the mainstream over the past months, as I mentioned in my article ‘Stopping up the gaps' (in the Weekly, Issue No.1254, 9 July, 2015), I mainly concentrated on the few that got left out and on regional and independent productions. Of the state-theatre's six entries in the contest – namely: Rooh (Soul), 3D, Hona Antigone (Antigone Calling), A Midsummer Night's Dream, A Soiree chez Abi Khalil Al-Qabbani, rechristened Sahra Melouki (A Royal Soiree) and Riggala wa Sitat (Men and Women) – I only missed writing about A Midsummer, which I saw just before the festival started and needed to see again before committing myself in writing. The reasons were manifold. For one thing, it was made into a musical – a form to which, I must admit, I am not particularly partial when performed with pre-recorded music and songs and positively hate when the recording is played at a deafening volume, as was the case here. The text was adapted by Mustafa Selim, who removed whole scenes, severely reduced others, changing the order of some in the process, and replaced whole stretches of the original dialogue (in Mohamed Enany's translation) with mediocre lyrics of his own composition, which Ahmed Mustafa Deedo put to equally uninspired music, except for one or two numbers. What was left of the original dialogue was either rhythmically recited, or delivered at a painfully high pitch and in a ridiculously exaggerated style that reduced the characters, with the exception of Hermia (performed by Iman Imam), to silly caricatures, thus reducing the whole play to a mere entertaining fairytale and removing all its murky depths. It was left to Iman Imam to redress the balance and recover for us something of the play's humanity and original depth in her scenes. An extremely attractive, proficient, all-round performer, who can act anything, from a tragic heroine to a soubrette, and sings and dances when required, and who is also a three-time winner of the best actress award in this festival, she gave us fitful glimpses of those depths and conveyed to us something of the horror of the dream. Her acting expertise painfully exposed the lack of it in most of the rest of the cast, mostly students or recent graduates of the Theatre Institute where the show's director teaches. In line with this rather shallow, impoverished conception, which he probably initiated in the first place, and perhaps also to cover up the weaknesses of his cast, director Mazen El-Gharabawi opted for the acting style of slapstick farce, exaggerating movements and gestures to an intolerably riotous extent, and in the case of Puck, as if to swell the pandemonium, dividing the part among six actors who delivered the lines alternately or in chorus, all the time skipping and cavorting, tumbling and somersaulting around the stage. The excessive movement was matched by excessive visuals. With the help of set/costume-designer Ahmed Abdel-Aziz and choreographer Mohamed Atef, Mazen El-Gharabawi treated us to an impressively sumptuous display of weird costumes and spectacular lighting effects, turning the show into the nearest thing to a carnival ball. In every aspect of the show – in the outlandish makeup, the heavily ornate set (of a dark, star-studded sky with a huge golden moon, pink trees in the shape of violins and cornets, or some such wind instruments, boisterously coloured props and a huge carved pink elf), the disco-style lighting, the costumes, the movement and the acting – it was obvious that El-Gharabawi drew heavily on such popular forms of entertainment as the Xmas pantomime, the disco show, the spectacular American musical and animated cartoons. I have no quarrel with this and think it perfectly legitimate for any artist to draw upon any variety of sources he chooses in putting together a show. I could also forgive the shallow approach to the play and its simplistic treatment, which are quite familiar and generally condoned in musicals. What I really cannot swallow is the slapdash, seemingly haphazard and depressingly poor musical score, the thoroughly pedestrian lyrical rephrasing of the dialogue, the disconcerting glut of visuals and the deafening noise. Mazen El-Gharabawi is a promising, talented actor; but he has yet to learn to take things in moderation and that while ‘too little is nothing, too much spoileth'. Another mainstream production that I failed to see and write about before the festival was Women from Egypt by the Opera's Fursan Al-Sharq lil Turaath wa Al-Raqs Al-Hadith (Knights of the Orient for Heritage and Modern Dance) which specializes in using Egypt's history and cultural heritage as source material in creating its modern dance performances. Explaining the company's raison d'être, Karima Bedeir, one of its former artistic directors, said once: ‘The point behind the creation of the troupe was to bring the Egyptian heritage to a wide audience through dance performances, wedding folkloric material to contemporary art forms.' Established in 2009 on the initiative of Farouq Hosni, then Minister of Culture, Knights of the Orient has produced four works prior to the present one. Ironically, the first, Walid Aouni's Al-Sharia Al-Aazam (The Greatest Street), opened in June 2011, after the ouster of Mubarak, under whom Farouq Hosni served. Nevertheless, the former minister attended the show the night I was there, and it is a credit to Aouni that he invited him regardless of the general animosity towards all figures of the ancien régime. After all, Knights of the Orient was the Hosni's brainchild and it was thanks to him that Sharia Al-Muizz, the old street the show celebrates and refers to in its title, was restored and renovated and transformed into an open-air museum. Interweaving a variety of traditional Eastern dance forms with contemporary Western ones, the show attempted to present a quasi-archaeological survey of that rare historical site (it boasts the greatest concentration of medieval architectural treasures in the Islamic world), from the 10th Century, when the Fatimids built it, naming it after their first Caliph in Egypt, Al-Muizz li Din Allah, through the successive reigns of the Ayyubids, the Mamelukes, and the Ottomans. Bahiya, followed in 2012, choreographed and directed by Karima Bedeir (who had taken over from Walid Aouni as artistic director of the company in 2011), with sets and costumes by Anis Ismail. Based on two plays by poet-playwright Naguib Soroor that dramatized the folk ballad Yasin and Bahiya from different angels, the performance devised a rich choreographic language that combined acting, contemporary ballet and traditional Egyptian dances in a highly dramatic way. The company's next production in 2013, also choreographed and directed by Bedeir, similarly used folk material, this time the folk epic of Ayoub El-Masri (the Egyptian Job), and carried the name of Ayoub's loyal, long-suffering wife, Na'sa, another popular folk heroine. In 2014 folk heroines gave way to folk heroes when another gifted choreographer/director, Tariq Hassan, used the same mixture of modern and traditional dance traditions to dramatize the folk narrative of the adventures of the popular hero, Ali El-Zeibaq, who championed the cause of the poor and oppressed during the reign of the Mamelukes. In Women from Egypt, Tariq Hassan reverts to the feminist tradition of celebrating Egyptian women of outstanding merit started by Karima Bedeir, extending its range and scope. Whereas Bedeir drew on the Egyptian folk heritage and focused on a single folk heroine in each of her two productions, Tariq Hassan, who collaborated on the performance script with Tariq Ragheb, sought his material in the chronicles of Egyptian history from the times of the Pharaohs to the present age, bringing back to life on stage, not one, but five real women who have become legendary heroines. The struggles of these women, their achievements and sometimes tragic ends were imaginatively dramatised in separate sequences through innovative, spirited, and eloquently expressive choreography. The first was Queen Hatshepsut, the longest reigning female pharaoh in Egypt who after the death of her husband, Thutmose II, claimed the role of pharaoh while acting as regent to her nephew, Thutmose III. Though she led Egypt to peace and prosperity during her 20-year rule, her inscriptions were erased and her memory was all but eradicated by her male successor. For his next heroine, Tariq Hassan moved on to the 4th Century AD, when Egypt was part of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dug up Hypatia, the Greek/Egyptian mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who, as the head of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria, became the target of bigoted Christians. Accusing her, according to the Chronicle of Bishop John of Nikiu, written in Egypt around 650 AD, of ‘beguiling many people through her Satanic wiles' and using her demonic charm to persuade the governor of the city to leave the church and follow her philosophical teachings and persuade others to do likewise, they seized her, brought her to ‘the great church, named Caesarion', and there ripped off her clothes, then dragged her through the streets of Alexandria until she died and burned her remains. In another story, she was stoned to death in that same church for her scientific labours. Tariq Hassan draws on both stories in his compelling choreography. The three remaining heroines all belong to the first half of the 20th Century. In an inspired imaginative leap that transforms Hypatia's defeat and tragic death into a glorious victory and a rebirth, Tariq Hassan shows us Princess Fatma Ismail (1853–1920), who donated all her jewelry and six feddans of her land to fund the building of Cairo University, using the same stones that killed Hypatia in the previous sequence to lay the foundations of that university. The sense of continuity in the struggles and aspirations of women from generation to generation is further underlined by presenting a member of that same university as the fourth heroine. Samira Moussa (1917-52) the outstanding Egyptian scientist, who was nicknamed the Miss Curie of the East, studied science at the university Princess Fatma built, was the first woman to be appointed on the staff of one of its colleges, and the first Egyptian to obtain a Ph.D. degree there in atomic radiation. On the strength of this degree, she received a grant from the Fulbright Atomic Programme to do research at California University. There, she was allowed to visit the US secret atomic facilities as a pioneering nuclear researcher, becoming the first ‘alien' to have access to such facilities – a rare privilege that was eventually to prove a fateful one. In recognition of her outstanding talent, deep knowledge and expertise, she was repeatedly offered a U.S. citizenship and repeatedly turned it down, preferring to return home to serve her country and people. But on 5 August, 1952, when she was only thirty-five and at the height of her career, and just as she was preparing to leave for Egypt, she was tragically killed in a car crash thought to have been engineered by the CIA or the Israeli Mossad. Hassan and his creative team focused on that fatal visit to the US nuclear facilities, presenting the whole sequence in a lab-like set, dressing the dancers in stiff, protective clothing, communicating a sense of menace through the music, and dramatizing the violent objections the visit raised and its fatal consequences in the choreography. The last of Tariq – the Egyptian Feminist Union in 1923. In that same year, stepping off the train in Cairo after attending a womenfs conference in Europe, she removed her veil in front of the crowd, in a public gesture of defiance that marked a watershed in the history of women's struggle for liberation in Egypt and virtually put an end to the veil for decades to come. That gesture was the focus of the Hoda Sharaawi sequence and when she finally rips off her veil, she is joined by the other four heroines, in their distinctive costumes, in a jubilant dance of celebration. But Women from Egypt has more to it than merely celebrating the past. It also has its eyes on the present, which has witnessed since the 1970s a resurgence of religious fanaticism, intolerance of difference and anti feminist attitudes among the majority of the population. Indeed, Women from Egypt is undisguisedly didactic, meant to re-educate men into valuing and respecting women. The five historical figures are projected in the present as part of the education of a growing boy. The performance opens with a fast dance/acting sequence in a classroom, in a mixed school, where a boy and a girl fight over the position of class monitor. Shocked by the boy's chauvinist assertions of male superiority and his denigration of women's abilities, the teacher, an enlightened male, forces him to read their history, and what the boy reads is bodied forth on stage in the five sequences we watch. The progress of the boy's education as he grows into adulthood frames and punctuates the five episodes, providing a narrative thread that strings them together. After every episode there is an encounter between pupil and teacher in which the former is given more books to read, and as the show progresses, we see the pupil (through a change of costume) growing older and, as we gather from the dialogue, much wiser. At the end of the show, with his education completed, he can repeat with his teacher: ‘Woman is a Homeland.' Performances with an obvious lesson can be a drag, but in dance performances, unless they are terribly botched, the medium can usually guard against this. In the case of Women from Egypt, the obvious didacticism was remarkably offset by the beauty of the choreography, sets and costumes and their rich variety – all captivatingly lighted by Rida Ibrahim. The different historical periods the script indicates and the different callings of the chosen five women allowed choreographers Tariq Hassan and Suzan Fayyad, set-designer Mohamed El-Gharabawi and costume-designer Hala Hassan to draw on a wide variety of traditions in each field and come up with highly imaginative, powerfully evocative and dramatically charged aesthetic designs. Like the choreography, which mixed Western and indigenous dance traditions, the musical track, put together by Tariq Hassan, was powerful and richly varied, combining traditional oriental melodies with Western harmonies and rhythmic dance music. However, at the end of the day, it is only the performer who can make a production come alive, and in the case of Women from Egypt, the Knights of the Orient's superb dancers performed their parts with remarkable skill and thrilling dynamism, giving, individually or as a group, graphic performances and creating one dramatically riveting scene after another. Their talent, grace and virtuosity simply enthralled the audience. In the end, and though I am no expert on modern dance, or any dance tradition for that matter, I can at least safely say that Women from Egypt is an enchanting, invigorating work that should be seen by all Egyptians.
