Lebanon cuts a high profile at the 18th Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET). Nehad Selaiha examines some of the facets of this presence Coming within only a few weeks of the end of the war on Lebanon, with the Lebanese people still mourning their dead and living in the midst of terrible destruction, CIFET 2006 (10-20 September) was bound to reflect the sympathy many artists all over the world feel for the suffering of this small, brave country and to demonstrate their support for its artists, especially in theatre. At the press conference held on 6 September at the Cultural Development Fund to officially reveal the highlights of the festival's current (18th) session, minister of culture Farouk Hosni announced that Lebanon would get special attention this year in a show of solidarity with its people for their admirable "steadfastness in the face of the Israeli aggression". Not only would the festival honour one of its prominent theatre figures -- playwright, director, actor and professor of theatre Antoine Multaqa -- in the closing ceremony, it would also give the honour of marking the opening of the event to a Lebanese performance, one of two hosted by the festival. Lebanon also features prominently in the cultural activities accompanying the performances. After the three-day international seminar held at the Supreme Council for Culture (11-13 September) to discuss the seminal literature and documents which laid the foundations for experimentation in playwriting, directing, stage-designing and styles of acting and performance -- the chosen topic this year -- another three-day symposium entitled "Lebanon and the Arab Theatre" is scheduled to start today (Thursday, 14 September) in the same location. Bringing Lebanese and Egyptian scholars and artists together, this symposium is intended to highlight the contribution of Lebanon in founding theatre in the Arab world, define the features of contemporary Lebanese theatre and pay tribute to the revolution in Arab musical theatre brought about by Al-Rahbaneyya brothers and the great singer Fayrouz. Lebanese speakers will include: Usama Al-Aref, Refaat Trabeya, Antoin Kourbaj, Michelle Jabr, Abeedo Pasha, plus the renowned actress and director Nedal Al-Ashqar, the founder of the prestigious Masrah Al-Madina (City Theatre) in Beirut and the distinguished poet and playwright Paul Shaoul. Many of those were present on the opening night, Sunday 10, at the Main Hall of the Opera house where Al-Nasheed (The National Anthem, inaccuately rendered in the festival's programme as "The Hymn) was performed. And how proud they must have felt watching it, and how gratified by its reception. Al-Nasheed, a black comedy at once profoundly poignant and grotesquely funny, was a powerful testimony to the Lebanese people's creative ability to survive the worst of disasters, celebrate life in the face of death and squeeze laughter out of the darkest moments of tragedy. Adapted from a Hungarian text via a French translation by Ghibrial Yamin and Randa Asmar, the founders of the Theatre Athenee troupe and main actors in the show, the play portrays the abject misery and slow, relentless disintegration of a poor working class family, their hopeless daily struggle to cope with their sordid reality and bleak existence, and the many forms of humiliation and oppression they are constantly subjected to by an inhuman, authoritarian social system intent on preserving itself by crushing their individuality and running their lives for them under the guise of helping them. The husband, an oppressed, harassed labourer, takes refuge in alcohol and, though essentially a kind, affectionate person and decent man, regularly abuses his wife and kids, waking them up every night when he comes home drunk, and forcing them, often with brutal blows, to sing with him in a loud chorus the national anthem. As he sinks deeper in despair, his crazy obsession with this absurd ritual grows worse and more frantic, spilling out onto the street and making him a public nuisance. And since he is also addicted to collecting and hoarding all kinds of leftovers and castoff things in the hope of selling them to buy booze, his home progressively turns into a veritable rubbish dump emitting nauseous smells. Such a character would never command sympathy were it not for the fact that he never remembers in the morning what he does at night and seems genuinely baffled and pathetically disturbed by what his wife tells him. In a life where people can only sink lower, with no hope of ever surfacing, do we blame them if they scream out their rage or try to achieve an illusion of dignity by holding on to a cherished symbol, even it has become devoid of meaning? As rendered by Ghibrial Yamin (who also directed), Fawzi, the crushed hero of Al-Nasheed, was strongly reminiscent of the much-abused eponymous hero of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck -- a man driven to murder in the end by an excruciating sense of futility and utter degradation. Unlike Woyzeck, however, Fawzi, vents his rage in the end in the right direction -- not on his poor, long-suffering, equally victimised wife, as Woyzeck does, but on his real torturers and oppressors -- the agents of the system. Cunningly structured in a manner similar to Ravel's Bolero, Al-Nasheed initially takes the form of a slow, repetitive, circular dance, suggesting a vicious circle in which two people are caught, then begins to spiral in a rising crescendo to its climax as new elements are introduced. The first movement consists of a number of quick, short scenes which repeat each other with slight, subtle variations, portraying the senseless daily routine of the couple and introducing their problem through their morning conversation. As the Lebanese critic Pierre Abi Sa'b has noted, this is achieved mainly through questions and answers, the basic narrative technique in the play. Things begin to spiral as help starts to arrive in the form of outside forces -- solicitous neighbours, willing money-lenders, officious social workers, diligent welfare-officers, media and union representatives, and other such guardians of the system. It is at this point that the central dramatic paradox on which the play revolves, and which encapsulates its satirical message and broad political significance, begins to emerge and develop: the help turns out to be a real curse in disguise. Rather than investigate the root causes of the family's misery and Fawzi's deteriorating mental state -- an investigation which would ultimately irreparably discredit the whole system and call for radical change -- the agents of the system can only offer glossy palliatives and decide that tearing the family apart and putting the children into care would put an end to the problem. Faced with such callous indifference and moral hypocrisy, the hero decides to take on the system single- handedly and wipe out all its malevolent 'helpers'. On his way to give himself up, having killed them all (actually or symbolically is left for the audience to decide), he stops at home to bid his lonely wife farewell and for once she offers voluntarily to sing with him the national anthem. Has it been finally validated by the hero's action? Perhaps. It is not often that one comes across a play like this -- so profoundly political without one word about politics, so touchingly human without the slightest hint of sentimentality, so serious and yet so funny. The sophisticated dramaturgy was matched by the technical polish of the performance, its subtle rhythmical pacing and the delicacy and metaphoric eloquence of Ali Shari's stage design. With nothing but a flimsy skeleton of a box, made up of slender wooden poles suspended with ropes from the flies (which sometimes moved, threatening to bring the whole structure down), a table and two chairs inside this box, a coal bin on one side of it and two video screens flanking it at the back, this abstract set worked as a visual metaphor for the empty, fragile existence of the family and left the stage free for Randa Asmar and Ghibrial Yamin who treated us to thoroughly absorbing, fastidiously controlled and sensitively, richly textured performances. Though Al-Nasheed would have fitted better into a smaller performance space than the stage of the Opera's Main Hall, it still was an unforgettable experience. Another Lebanese contribution to the festival is Li Wannus (For Wannus), by the Haigazian University troupe, which consists of three scenes adapted from three one-act plays by the great Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannus -- Ma'sat Ba'e' Al-Dabs Al-Faqir (The Tragedy of the Poor Treacle-Seller), Lu'bat Al-Dababees (The Pins Game), and Al-Maqha Al-Zugagi (The Glass Café). In adapting those early Wannus plays, director Farah Khawaja attempted to give them topical relevance while faithfully preserving their original satirical intent and rebellious political drift. I have yet to see this performance and therefore can say no more about it. Lebanon is also strongly present in some of the best Egyptian productions performing in the festival. Al-Hanager's Antigone in Ramallah... Antigone in Beirut, a dramatic poem for three voices written, directed and designed by Mohamed Abul Su'ood, evokes through the two legendary warring brothers, Eteocles and Polynieces, the conflicts and tensions in the region past and present, interweaving telling quotations from sacred texts and other sources, including media reports of recent massacres, and pitching Antigone in the middle as the eternal sufferer of the consequences of those conflicts and the embodiment of the spirit of peace and reconciliation. Coming in nine short parts, a mere 10 pages, this poem is a truly magnificent feat of intertextuality, so full of haunting echoes and voices and so stunningly rich in vivid pictorial details that it seems to sink all temporal barriers and merge all time in a sad, elegiac song and a heart-rending plea for peace. To allow the poetry to produce its full impact, Abul Su'ood opted for a minimalist set, consisting of black walls, a single ladder and a few simple props and cut down the movement to the bare essentials, carefully orchestrating to follow the rhythms of the words and his haunting soundtrack. Less sophisticated in conception and more facilely, directly emotional in appeal was Walid Aouni's Fayrouz, Hal Zarafat 'Uyouniki Dam'atan? (Fayrouz, Have Your Eyes Shed a Tear?). The work was obviously produced on the spur of the moment, as a spontaneous emotional protest, a gut reaction by a Lebanese living away from home to what happened to his country. Using Fayrouz as a symbol for Lebanon, Aouni placed his performers on a craggy, multi-level set, in the open air (in the Opera grounds), representing the wreckage of a bombed, gutted out building, and made them dance to a recorded collage of her patriotic songs interspersed with sounds of explosions and a voiceover (Aouni's own) loudly condemning the enemy and the superpowers supporting this aggression. Though impressive and well-executed, the set seemed a pale, somewhat ridiculous imitation of the horrible scenes of destruction displayed on television screens for more that a month; and, on the technical side, it seriously cramped the movement of the dancers. This negatively affected the choreography, often making it seem erratic, or far too feeble to express the pain and tragedy of the situation. It seems that in the grip of violent emotion, in moments of deep stress and distress, artists do not usually produce their best. Another Egyptian show, Tareq El-Dweri's and Rasha Abdel-Mon'im's Al-Mawqif Al-Thalith (The Third Position) -- a collage of texts, including Albert Camus's The Just, Euripides's Trojan Women, and Max Frisch's Fire-Raisers, with live songs and music, sponsored by the Modern Theatre company, was also inspired by the war on Lebanon, though it never mentions it by name. Rather, it uses it to launch a moral investigation into the validity of war and armed struggle in general, giving both sides of the argument. This theme is certain to crop up in many of the performances taking part in the festival, and they number over 60. It seems that for the duration of the festival, war will figure as a regular item on the menu.
