Nehad Selaiha finds Hamlet popping up twice at the 1st Youth Theatre Encounter Paradoxically, while Shakespeare's literary authority makes young theatre makers feel on safer grounds, his background and the quality of his plays allow them a degree of imaginative freedom they cannot enjoy with other writers foreign or local, alive or dead. This is the reason they keep going back to Shakespeare, especially when they have limited budgets. The kind of theatre Shakespeare wrote for was, in a sense, a 'poor theatre' that did not rely on sophisticated sets and complicated stage machinery and technical equipment, and the Bard turned this deficiency to advantage, manipulating it to give his texts a cinematic flow. It is a lesson that many young directors on the fringe have learnt, and it was significant that the 4th Egyptian National theatre festival last year featured two productions of King Lear, one by students at Ain Shams University, and the other by a regional troupe, as well as a Youth theatre production of Julius Caesar, offering an intriguing reading of the play, and an equally intriguing version of Titus Andronicus by students from the University of Alexandria. Since the slogan chosen by the 10-day, 1st Youth Theatre Encounter, launched by the State Theatre Organization on 1st June at Al-Tali'a (Avant-garde) and Al-Arayes (Puppet) theatres in a bid to discover new theatrical talents, as the event was hyped, was 'Towards a Poor Theatre', I was almost sure that the 10 productions selected by the organizing committee would include at least one of a Shakespearean play. As it turned out, there were two, and both of Hamlet : a doctored version of the play, adapted and directed by Hussein Mahmoud, and a new production of Mahmoud Aboudoma's Hamlet -based Dance of the Scorpions from Alexandria. Predictably perhaps, they scooped most of the awards, with the former winning 7: Best Performance, Best Director (Hussein Mahmoud), Best Choreography (Mohamed Fahim), 2 seconds for Best Actor (Ahmed El-Shazli) and Best Actress (Yasmine Wafi), Best Actress-jointly (Amira Abdel-Rahman) and Best Music (Tamer Abdel-Mageed), and the latter, 6: Best Actor (Islam Abdel-Shafi'), Best Lighting Design (Ibrahim El-Forn), 3 seconds for Best Performance, Best Director (Mohamed El-Hagrasi) and Best Actress (Marwa Yehia0, as well as a certificate of merit for its Stage Design (by Waleed Gaber). Taking his key from the fact that the idea of 'pretence' and playacting dominates the play, with most of characters, including Hamlet, pretending to be what they are not, director Hussein Mahmoud, who works almost exclusively, and by choice, in university theatre and has won many best director awards there, opted for a thoroughly meta-theatrical mode, beginning his version with a troupe of ham actors rehearsing Hamlet in a hilarious parody of the declamatory style. Gradually, however, and almost imperceptibly, the mood changes and the burlesque style fades out, giving way to serious acting. To bring out the obvious connection between Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, and emphasize that the latter two are facets of the former, Mahmoud divided Hamlet's lines and movement among three actors (Mohamed Mohammadi, Ahmed El-Shazli and Mu'tasim Sha'ban), who were most of the performance present together on stage, but acted in different styles that reflected the different facets. After the murder of Polonius, however, they separated, assuming their separate identities as Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras. To fit the performance into the time slot stipulated by the Encounter organizers, Mahmoud made many cuts and did a lot of editing, changing the order of the scenes and at some points placing 2 different scenes on the stage at the same time and cross- cutting between them. This technique produced stunning effects, provoking us to rethink our traditional perceptions of the characters and question afresh their relationships, particularly in the part where Hamlet's meeting with Ophelia is played off against his confrontation with his mother. Indeed, thanks to this technique and the galloping tempo of the performance, within half an hour of its farcical beginning, which seemed, to me at least, tediously familiar, the performance suddenly became quite gripping and surprisingly fresh. This Hamlet could have been a little gem were it not for the forced striving for comic effect at whatever cost, the cramming of too many styles and moods to impress the jury, and the garishly red set. The performance suffered from an excess of energy that seemed at times like chaos and was unbearably noisy at times. This is one instance of trying to be innovative to a fault. By comparison, Mohamed Al-Hagrasi's production of Mahmoud Aboudoma's Dance of the Scorpions, a beautiful and profound political reading of Hamlet which dates back to the late 1980s and projects the whole tragedy through the eyes of Ophelia's ghost after her death, was blissfully free of any gimmicks, flowed smoothly and quietly, and was characterized by subtlety and finesse in every detail. Aboudoma's text argues that the essence of Hamlet's tragedy was not his hesitation, but, rather, his failing to understand the source of the rottenness in the state of Denmark. Like Claudius, Hamlet's father was part of a corrupt system, which Polonius and his like manipulated behind the scenes. Justice in Aboudoma's Denmark, a symbol of the whole world, is not a matter of individual revenge for a father's death, or any other personal grievance, but requires the collective effort of the people to bring about radical change and demolish the whole corrupt edifice. Even if Hamlet kills Claudius, nothing will change; Polonius will still remain the puppet master, replacing one head of state with another to preserve the same rotten system. The only real danger to the system in Aboudoma's Hamlet is posed by 'the bearers of the Cross', a religious, fundamentalist movement not unlike the Jihad or the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, and the choice between them and the corrupt regime in Denmark is one between roasting in a fire or jumping into a frying pan. That Hamlet could have offered his people a third option but failed them was, according to the play, his tragic mistake. This is the message that Ophelia in Aboudoma's Scorpions tries to convey to Hamlet from beyond the grave, and its relevance to the current political scene in Egypt, and many other third world countries, is unmistakable. Al-Hagrasi, who has worked with Aboudoma for many years in the latter's Alternative Theatre company in Alexandria, tried to convey this message in the best and finest way he could, putting his vast talent and the talents of his actors and artistic crew in the service of the text he chose and believed in. The ascetic, evocative set, by Walid Gaber, consisted of a steep ramp at the back, covered with a red carpet and leading up to the throne, and surrounded with grey walls dotted at floor level with many grim-looking arched doors than seemed to lead into subterranean tunnels. It was a gruesome place that held no comfort, and Ibrahim El-Forn's lighting, projected from different sources and angels, in shades of red, blue and yellow of different intensity, worked wonders with this set, making it an active signifier and vital player in the drama. While Claudius, Polonius and Horatio wore modern suits, Hamlet and Ophelia's historical costumes marked them as outsiders, and Hamlet's use of a wheel chair, though he could walk, was an obvious sign of his impotence. But it is in the presentation of the dead king's ghost that Al-Hagrasi's original creative imagination is seen to best advantage. In Aboudoma's play, as soon as Hamlet declares that he has seen his father's ghost and that it ordered him to do something, Polonius cunningly decides to exploit this superstitious phenomenon and instructs the king and lords to claim that they too had seen the dead king's ghost sanctioning their actions. In his production, Al-Hagrasi goes a step further, and following the inner logic of the text, makes Polonius the manufacturer of this illusion in order to drive Hamlet to rid him of the king who has served his uses. In a veritable coup de theatre, he presents the ghost as a enlarged silhouette of Polonius, in a trim evening suit, holding a microphone, like a typical, modern media personality. And rather than use masks and human-size, cut-out paper dolls in the council meeting scene, as Aboudoma's stage directions suggest in the printed text, Al-Hagrasi made do with empty chair frames, in the form of seated humans, with question marks for heads. Equally brilliant was his management of the two crucial scenes, in which we suddenly discover that the king and Polonius had secretly plotted with Fortinbras to wage war on Denmark to allow them to extort money from the people for the war effort and replenish their depleted coffers. In this dirty conspiracy, into which Horatio is drawn, it does not matter who wins or loses, since victory and defeat have their set prices and Fortinbras will get paid in end in either case. These two scenes were cynically performed while Polonius, in the first, sets the table for the king's dinner and, in the second, spruces him up and applies a beauty mask to his face. When Claudius is finally killed by Hamlet, it is not Fortinbras who climbs to the throne, but Horatio. In a subtle, telling gesture, Al-Hagrasi prepares for this by making Polonius casually throw an apple to Horatio during the dinner scene, which Horatio consumes forthwith. When in the final scene, visually devised by Al-Hagrasi, Horatio started climbing upwards to the throne while Polonius stood at floor level smugly watching him and preening himself, I literally gasped. This was not in the original text and its impact was literally stunning. As the smooth, wily, oily Polonius, Islam Abdel Shafee' more than deserved the first actor award he got. In fact, as far as I am concerned, this elegant, intelligent, profoundly insightful and intensely relevant production was way above any other in this Encounter, and all the awards of the Encounter put together could not do it full justice.
