For Nehad Selaiha, the best shows in CIFET were the grimmest Last week I promised to tell you in today's article about some bright spots in this year's Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre which ended on 20 September. Now, upon reflection, and given the nature and general drift of the majority of the shows, the bleak images of reality they displayed, and the air of despondency which seemed to shroud the whole event, I hardly think the word "bright" fits the picture; "poignant", "harrowing", "arresting", or "exasperating" would be more apposite. War and violence seemed to dog me wherever I went; or maybe it was I who unconsciously gravitated towards the works most likely to dwell on such themes. There were exceptions of course, many of which I stumbled on by chance rather than design. Most of these exceptions, however, were riddled with sexism and therefore gave one no relief. Of these, the most irritating (though it won the Best Performance Award) was the Russian Romeo and Juliet -- a drag show, directed by the Bulgarian Lilia Abadjieva, which burlesques Shakespeare's classic in a vulgar vein, sinking it to the level of a knock-about farce, with plenty of camp humour, and drowning the dying lovers in the final scene in a full 10-minute heavy shower raining from the flies. I don't know which I resented more: the offensively salacious taking off of women in a show directed by a woman, or the wanton waste of so much precious water. That many of the people whose judgment I value and respect liked the show was a further source of vexation. Like the Russian Romeo and Juliet, the Romanian The Intruder -- adapted from a short story by Jorge Louis Borges and directed by Mihai Malaimare -- opted for romance rather than politics, albeit in a serious vein, and was equally misogynous at heart. Centering on the rivalry between two brothers over a woman, it ends with the men resolving the conflict by consigning the woman to a brothel where both can share her together with other men. As common property, she is no longer an object of sexual jealousy. That the woman dies at the end is another example of how male bonding can drive women off the scene. While the inherent, possibly unconscious, male chauvinism of The Intruder was dexterously camouflaged by the sensuous, almost erotic, rendering of sexual passion in the movement, Malaimare's almost abstract set and subtle manipulation of colour and lighting within a musical frame of stirring Argentinean melodies made the performance into a visual poem and gave it a dreamlike quality, almost like a fairy tale -- one by the Grimm Brothers. Macedonia's production of August Strindberg's The Father, directed by Slobodan Unkovski and performed on the grass, in the new "open-air space" in the Opera grounds, matched The Intruder in elegance, imaginative originality and, also, misogynous intent. Staged as a private garden dinner- party at which the audience are made to share the tables with the seven actors, it looked deceptively idyllic and quite convivial at first. When I came across it accidentally as I wandered in the Opera grounds while waiting for the Sudanese Oghniyat Al-Dam (Blood Song) to start at the open-air theatre, I was intrigued by the scene and did not realise at once it was a performance. I felt a thrill when I did; it is not often that one experiences a genuine feeling of surprise in theatre nowadays. I stood watching for a while, since all the seats at the four long tables, set to form a square with only one exit, were occupied; and since the actors, only distinguishable by their formal evening dress, spoke in Albanian, it took me quite some time to figure out (from the names they called each other as the characters in the play) the title of the piece they were doing. As the Captain, masterfully played by Bajrush Mjaku, was led by Musherefe Llozana, in the role of Margarita, his old nanny, into the square created by the tables, as if into a trap, and wheedled into wearing a straitjacket while Laura, his wife, ruthlessly celebrated her triumph with a toast, the pathos of the situation became unbearable and the force of Strindberg's vicious denunciation of women shattered the charm and novelty of the evening. Another war-free interesting performance was The Grey Automobile from Mexico which sought to revive the great Japanese Benshi tradition of silent film narration. The show takes its name from a Mexican vintage silent movie directed by Enrique Rosas in 1919 and based on the real story of a ruthless gang which terrorised Mexico in 1915. While the film is shown on a screen which takes up the whole stage, two Mexican actors with an Arabic translator narrate the story and dramatise all the parts in a hilarious mixture of Spanish, English and Arabic, and are accompanied by a Mexican pianist playing a concoction of Japanese and Mexican silent movie scores. The most intriguing aspect of The Grey Automobile, however, was the fact that while the pianist was obviously a man, one could not be certain of the sexes of the narrators; they were so vocally versatile and mimicked male and female voices with equal competence. And even when they stepped in sight, in a brief interlude to perform a funny song and dance, they were so comically disguised, one in white face and kimonoed, the other in a black dress, hat and veil, Mexican style, that you could not tell their real sex. It was puzzling and exciting and gave one a real theatrical thrill. Unlike the six male performers in the Russian Romeo and Juliet, these were not men obviously masquerading as women to ridicule or denigrate them; they seemed to represent a neuter sort of performer who can easily take on the character of male or female and switch from one to the other at a moment's notice. As I watched them, I found myself thinking that perhaps all true performers in the past, in the days of ancient Greece and Shakespeare's times, belonged to this sort and the idea was comforting. The sexism I detected in some performances represents one form of violence. War is another, and many of the shows in this festival dealt with its far-reaching, devastating and dehumanising short and long-term consequences. Of these, the most reflective and also most unrelentingly harrowing and gruesomely graphic was Syria's (The Bath of Baghdad) -- a title which at once refers to the setting of the play in a public bath in Baghdad (a place with a powerful, sometimes ambivalent symbolic potential, connoting baptism, preparations for a wedding, the baring of one's self and shedding of social disguises, physical cleansing and spiritual purgation, as well as the burial ritual of washing of the dead) and ironically evokes the metaphor of "a blood bath" in association with the city. Written and directed by prominent Iraqi homme de theatre Jawad Al-Assadi, the play focusses on the turbulent, love-hate relationship of two uneducated, working-class brothers, Hamid and Magid, who earn their living driving trailers on the Amman/Baghdad land route and through them illustrates with brutal, unyielding honesty the psychological effects on the Iraqi people of, first, Saddam's reign of terror, then, the American occupation. Though the brothers reflect in their dialogue the divided attitude of the Iraqi people regarding the American intervention and voice the arguments of the two main opposing factions, they come across not as mouthpieces for the author, but as fully drawn, carefully individualised characters, as real people, each with his distinctive psychological makeup and moral orientation. The lurid drama which unfolds through their verbal and physical interaction is very much like a dance macabre in which one party tries to consume the other and the main acts, or steps, are eating, scrubbing, urinating, vomiting, spitting, hitting, pleading, running and clumsily handling a coffin; these acts are accompanied by gruesome tales of putrefying corpses, torn limbs, wanton shooting, mass graves and soldiers playing football with the skulls of their victims, and punctuated with loud explosions. Indeed, the sound effects which also included the sounds of crunching, burping, clattering clogs on bare tiles, pouring water into basins, and barking dogs plus some eerie strains, went a long way towards providing the play with the right atmosphere. With two wonderful actors -- Fayez Kozok and Nidal Al-Sigary -- who treated us to taut, richly detailed, sensitively orchestrated and intensely charged performances (and jointly won the award for best actor in reward), Al-Assadi wisely opted for two simple, uncluttered sets, representing the two locations in the play, and a few carefully chosen props. Each item on the stage, including the costumes, served a purpose, practical or metaphoric, and contributed to the overpowering impact of the whole composition. In the bath set, a huge painting by Gabr Ulwan, another expatriate Iraqi artist, consisting of merging patches of pale colours, with a few scattered, hazy figures, barely discernible, suggesting humans dimly glimpsed through thick smoke or heavy fog, dominated the background, visually echoing the clouds of steam which kept billowing upwards from a slit front stage and metaphorically suggesting the smoke caused by explosions as well as the sense of confusion experienced by Iraqis today. For the scene at the checkpoint, Al-Assadi shrouded the stage in black and darkness, only lighting the two characters, the passing soldiers and the ridiculous, unwieldy coffin which eventually comes apart, spilling its rotting contents. At every point you could feel the graceful presence of art and its power to offset the dismal reality on display. Equally powerful though less artistically sophisticated was the Polish dramatisation of Catch-22, the famous anti-war novel by American writer Joseph Heller, directed by Piotr Dabrowski. Though satirical, with the kind of morbid humour Al-Assadi used in plenty, the play was a poignant, furious protest against the cruelty and senselessness of war and the blatant moral hypocrisy of its perpetrators. A similar protest against the destruction of human life in war informed the lamentations of Samira Al-Weheibi as the dead warrior's widow in Oman's Rithaa Al-Fajr (Lamentations at Dawn) but was played in a gentler, more lyrical and deeply emotional vein. Unlike the heroine in the Omani Lamentations, Bayan Shbib who starred in the Palestinian monodrama Safad-Shatila, Vice Versa, by the Ashtar troupe from Ramallah, decides to counter violence with violence and becomes a suicide-bomber after losing her husband and all her family, friends and neighbours in the heinous Shatila massacre. Indeed, Safad-Shatila, Vice Versa was, as far as I know, the only show in the festival on the theme of war which seemed to argue that blood will have blood and that horrible crimes and injustices can drive people to desperate acts of violence as a last resort. Shbib, a young attractive actress with a lovely stage presence, portrayed the transformation of an ordinary human being, a gentle, affectionate, fun-loving young woman, into a doomed tragic figure, what some people call a terrorist, with profound conviction, lively spontaneity and touching emotional restraint. But though her performance was really captivating and deservedly won her the Award for Best Actress, I doubt very much that she could have won us to her argument and made us concede that in extreme situations, violence becomes an inevitable, justifiable reaction, had it not been for those harrowing photos of the massacre which flashed on the white screen at the back for what seemed like a full five minutes. After a few of them, I kept my eyes firmly shut but knew in my guts such insane brutalities cannot but breed insanity.
