El-Saqia's fourth Theatre Festival leaves Nehad Selaiha pondering the difference between amateur and independent groups For El-Saqia's habitués, this summer has been, as usual, one continuous ball. Apart from the stream of concerts and other regular activities, there were three festivals in a row: a Pantomime Festival, 6-8 July, held for the second year running; a festival for Documentary Films (15-18 July), also established last year; and then the 4-year old El-Saqia annual Theatre Festival, 13-17 August. I have followed this theatre festival since it started and have often been surprised by the number of young people who flock to it either to air their talents or support their friends. Though it always coincides with the revived Festival for Independent Theatre Groups which predates it by a year -- a tiresome fact which needlessly puts the few theatre critics around still taking an interest in off-mainstream theatre under great strain and causes lots of frustration -- it is never short of enthusiastic audiences or budding theatre-makers. This year, the selection committee of experts enlisted by Mohamed El-Sawi, the founder of the centre, had to wade through 50 candidate productions, at the rate of four or five a day, to pick out the best. Unfortunately, however, compared to former sessions, the best this year were not good enough. Notwithstanding the apparent fervour and good intentions of the participants, and however reluctant I am to admit it, one could not but note a definite deterioration in the artistic quality of the shows on offer and a disturbing degree of intellectual immaturity. After three days and five plays, the prospects looked grim; and with only two more days to go, the jury began to wonder anxiously what to do with the five cash awards allotted for the top five performances (totaling LE 19,000) if nothing better came up. More depressing was the fact that out of those five plays, four were original compositions -- a worrying sign which augurs ill for the future of playwriting in Egypt. Mohamed Abdel-Salaam's Ana Wa Ana (I and Myself), which featured a young man and his doppelganger caught in some sort of incomprehensible stalemate and trying to while away the time playing silly games, was palpably a lame imitation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot minus the bleak humour and tragic sense of absurdity. Dressed in identical black, with their faces painted half black, half white, the two characters seemed to take themselves too seriously, indulging in endless tirades which the author (who played the "I" and also directed) seemed to think were profoundly philosophical, but were in fact nothing but a heap of inane and pompous verbal rubbish. As I watched them, I remembered with affection and deep gratitude Beckett's two delicious clowns and wondered whether Abdel-Salaam had completely misread Beckett and if the translation he used had anything to do with it. Translations of Becket and other foreign playwrights are invariably given in classical Arabic and, in the hands of inexperienced or untalented translators, this can produce a kind of quirky, outlandish Arabic which no one has ever spoken, or lead to a deadening uniformity of tone and style and a substantial loss in humour and subtle shades of meaning. Young people with an ambition to become dramatists read a lot of these translations (much more than texts originally written in Arabic) and are seriously, damagingly, one might say, influenced by them. Disdaining comedy and thinking realism too old fashioned, and with no experience of theatre except what they watch on television or at the CIFET (Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre), many of them fail to get the necessary grounding in the craft of writing for the stage and blindly ape the often badly translated plays of avant- garde dramatists, lured by their apparent disregard of plot, characterisation and other dramatic rules. Of course artists, especially young artists, and especially in these postmodernist times, are free to do and write as they like and I wouldn't dream of trying to cramp their style (if they have one) or dictate to them how to go about their business. All I ask is that a person takes the trouble to learn the rudiments and basics of an art before practicing it. This requires a bit of hard work, something which many of our young, so-called 'independent' artists seem singularly loath to do. I wouldn't mind the kind of texts Abdel-Salaam and his ilk keep churning out, would even feel more sympathetic towards them, if only they did not have so many grammatical mistakes, did not sound so pretentiously serious and were not so tediously, garishly assertive and emotionally effusive. Hani Mahran's El-Nass Elli Taht Taht (People at the Rock Bottom or The People Down, Down, Below) amply displayed such faults. A pity, since the basic conception has a lot of dramatic potential. While the title ironically echoes No'man Ashour's 1950s' El-Nas Elli Taht (The People Downstairs), as if to invite a comparison between the lot of the downtrodden characters in both plays and the suffering of the poor past and present, the initial situation was obviously inspired by Mohamed Salmawy's Etnein fil Balaa'a (Two Down the Drain) in which two people accidentally fall down an open manhole in the street into a disused sewage pipe and eventually decide to stay there and build an alternative life. Unlike Salmawy's middleclass Mona and Hassan, however, the victims here are three miserable, down-at-heel sewer workers, who spend all their days underground in order to be able to eke out a living and support their families, and who end up being trapped down their separate manholes by some vicious, unseen force. As they try to work out who fastened the lids, they can think of no one but Ahmed, their lifelong friend, who went to buy some food. And why should Ahmed do this? He has always been a womanizer and possibly coveted their wives. I would have preferred the author not to belabour this point or chase after rational, realistic explanations for what is essentially an absurd situation -- a situation which vividly brings to mind the image of Nagg and Nell, imprisoned in rubbish bins in Beckett's Endgame. But Mahran seems to have wanted to write a play with a strong social message which was at the same time an existentialist absurd drama in which the three characters, who are mysteriously buried alive (very much like Winnie in Beckett's Happy Days ), turn out to be the same lonely, oppressed, deprived person, shown at different stages of his life. Quite a tall order. What started off as an intriguing situation, full of dramatic possibilities, soon dwindled into melodramatic whimpering over the plight of the poor, with occasional eruptions of loud ranting against social injustice. Sherif Salaheddin's Papa -- collectively directed by the author and his Lahazat (Moments) team -- was a collection of intersecting reminisces by five artists -- a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a musician and an actress -- about their fathers, delivered in the form of monologues or sketches, and intended as a vehement protest against oppressive patriarchal authority. With more concentration, some excisions, a bit of verbal polishing and more tightening of the thematic links between the different scenes, it could pass for a decent, promising play. The same cannot be said of Amr El-Bahr's El-Metlawineen, which could translate as 'the many-coloured', 'turncoats' or 'chameleon-like', depending on what you make of the play -- which, in my case, was very little. I like to charitably think that the atrocious vocal delivery of the actors and the faulty sound-system, rather than the play itself, were largely to blame for this. From what I could catch of the dialogue and endless declamatory speeches I gathered that the setting was an imaginary country and the conflict about whether people should wear many colours or stick to only black and white. Weren't these the same symbolic terms in which Youssef Idris had couched the conflict between democracy and totalitarian dictatorship in Al-Mukhatateen (The Striped Ones)? Of Idris's witty dialogue and tickling satirical hilarity, however, there was not a single trace. The play came across as a confused jumble of unrelated scenes featuring a lot of torture, violence, screaming and agonized physical and verbal writhing. As in the three other new plays mentioned earlier, the author here directed and also played the leading part -- making the writer/director/performer something of a phenomenon in this festival. Using well-known texts, by major Egyptian and European playwrights, the five remaining productions were a vast improvement. Though the actors' enunciation and quality of voice-production still needed attention, you did not have to read the texts in print, as I did with the other plays, in order to know what they were saying and, equally important, there were fewer grammatical mistakes in the pronunciation of classical Arabic. While the Egyptian plays -- Nagui George's The Letter, directed by Amir Salaheddin, and Ali Salem's Ughnia 'Ala El-Mamar (Song in the Mountain Pass), staged by Basim El-Qenawi -- were done in full, both being short, one-act plays, Georges Schehade's L'émigré de Brisbane, directed by Mohamed Allam, and Alejandro Casona's The Lady of the Dawn, directed by Mohamed Nash'at, needed abridgment to fit within the one and a half hour time slot allowed every performance. The result, predictably, was some vagueness and a bit of confusion in both cases. At times, the audience seemed to lose the thread and did not understand what was going on. This happened more often in the case of The Lady, a difficult text which focusses on the mystery of the cycle of death and rebirth and subtly mixes realism with fantasy. Like the Egyptian plays, Sophocles's Electra, staged by Ahmed Seif, was performed in full, in Taha Hussein's beautiful Arabic translation. The actors (who obviously had a great deal of respect for the text and its translator and were awed into working hard on it) delivered their lines clearly, with very few mistakes and a lot of commendable gusto. It is the kind of text amateurs need to exercise a lot more with by way of honing their vocal skills; and, indeed, the performance often looked and sounded to me like a demonstration by the cleverest students in an elocution class. These last shows were the best in the festival and garnered all the prizes. Curiously, none of their teams presented themselves as an 'independent group', as is currently the fashion, or sported such fanciful, maudlin, or pretentious names like El-Maganeen (The Lunatics), guilty of El-Metlawineen, Raheel (Departure), responsible for Ana Wa Ana, Lahazat (Moments), who did Papa, or Falsafa (Philosophy) who dragged us down the sewers in El-Nas Elli Taht, Taht. One could say that the weaker, more insecure a group of amateurs is, the more likely it is to hide under such titles and strive to associate itself with the Free Theatre Movement spearheaded in 1990 by actress and critic Menha El-Batraoui; but it is not as simple as that. We need to face the question of why, nowadays, no one, not even a young student treading the boards for the first time, or rehearsing his first production with friends at home, at a youth club, or in any makeshift space, is willing to be called 'an amateur'. Though the Egyptian Society for Theatre Amateurs (ESOTA) has been around for nearly a quarter of a century, boasts a membership of thousands, spread all over the country, and has in late years regularly held an annual festival, it has not managed to free the word from its off-putting negative associations. Rather than "a person who engages in an activity as a pastime rather than professionally," which is the first dictionary definition, an "amateur" is still used derogatively, dismissively, to refer to "a person unskilled in, or having only a superficial knowledge of a subject" -- according to another subsidiary lexical entry. Though positive, the first definition is neither adequate nor satisfactory. Many of the founders and members of the oldest independent groups do not engage in theatre as 'a pastime' but rather as a primary activity and way of life. Many of them too have high professional standards, even though they are not 'professional' in the sense of getting money for what they do. In Egypt, and many other third world countries, skilled, proficient artists, including writers, can rarely survive on the proceeds of their art and have to earn their living doing other jobs. Naguib Mahfouz, who for many years held a government post, only writing in his spare time, is a case in point. To my knowledge, no one ever thought of calling him an amateur writer in those years. What do you call such people who dedicatedly pursue their art and get nothing out of it to support their material existence? Would you call them 'amateurs'? And if not, what? Before 23 August 1990, there was no alternative label. On that day, however, the historic meeting organised by El-Batraoui to protest the cancellation of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre on account of the Gulf war provided one. The meeting soon took a political turn and developed into a brainstorming discussion of the state control of the arts, its subsidising policies and treatment of the artists who work outside government cultural organisations. The meetings continued through September, spawning a fiery manifesto phrased by Khalid El-Sawi, and culminated in a declaration of the birth of a Free Theatre Movement and the launching of its 1st Free Theatre Festival at the small hall of the Opera House on 1 October. Though a clear-cut definition of an 'independent' or 'free' theatre group was not laid down in those early historic meetings, it gradually emerged through years of hard work and many trials and errors. After so many years in the movement, I can now tell you that, at least for me, an independent troupe signifies a basic core of two or three talented, dedicated and professionally, technically, competent creative artists who mount non-profit productions, seeking subsidies anywhere they can find them and often use unknown or amateur actors, training them in the process. Hassan El-Gretly's Al-Warsha is one such troupe; Mahmoud Abu Doma's Al-Masrah Al-Badeel (Alternative Theatre) and Abeer Ali's El-Misaharati are others -- and so were Khalid Galal's Liqaa' (Encounter), Ahmed El-Attar's Al-Maa'bad (The Temple), Mohamed Abul Su'ood's Al-Shazia (Shrapnel), Hani Ghanem's Al-Masrah Al-Mutamared (Theatre of Rebellion) and Khalid El-Sawi's Al-Haraka (The Movement) before they were disbanded. Neither elitist nor exclusive, the Free Theatre Movement soon embraced many new-comers, regardless of their experience, seriousness, or artistic merits; and since its (maturer) original organisers handed it over to the younger members as soon as its first festival ended, content to remain on the fringe as observers and consultants, a power struggle was inevitable, and in this vulgar struggle, the newcomers, who had jumped on the bandwagon without the right credentials, were the victors. This resulted in a mass withdrawal of the major, original independent groups from the movement's 1994 festival. The movement did not begin to recuperate until eight years later, and right now you cannot say it has recovered; gasping for breath is about the right description. At El-Saqia's festival and the concurrent Independent Theatre Festival, I found a lot of confusion and mixing of the cards. While Amir Salaheddin, a theatre professional by any standards other than the monetary, performed at a festival primarily designated to encourage amateurs, I found the group who call themselves Lahazat performing the same show at both festivals. Once more, we come face to face with the irking question of value. To tell you the truth, I have long given up on that and all I ask for now is a bit of humility, some hard work, less boredom and vanity, and, above all, a modicum of fun.
