I had waited a long time to see this performance and review it. Actually I waited years while the text of Rasha Abdel-Moneim moved from one production venue to the other until it reached the Taliaa Theatre. Originally named Made in Egypt, the text was exposed to all kinds of interpretations and evaluations prior to and after the revolution of 25 January 2011. As a playwright and cultural activist, Rasha Abdel-Moneim is quite stubborn. Her stubbornness is always for the right cause, and is usually supported by exceptional patience. Knowing her personally for a good half of my life, I can confidently say that Rasha's plays represent cycles in her life and her intellectual perseverance towards change and socio-political criticism. Some time before the revolution of 2011, She had already envisioned the kind of revolt that was about to explode, and with it the necessity for artistic expression that would somehow bridge the gap between unspoken oppression and the manipulated platforms of public opinion. In that context, Rasha created Made in Egypt, the story of an Egyptian Bouazizi, a man who instead of setting his body on fire kills his own family with a poisonous meal. Not far from reality, the story reflected several incidents of Egyptians fathers killing their children out of mercy, and sometimes killing themselves afterwards. The poverty and de-humanisation were beyond imagination. In Rasha's play, the father eventually fails to kill his family because the poison he has bought has no an effect, like many products carrying the mark “Made in Egypt”. The text's dramatic event is a double criticism of oppression and poverty on the one hand and the failure of Egyptian manufacture and nationalism on the other. All of which is a very good reasons delaying staging or refusing to stage the production in a state owned theatre. Nevertheless it was Rasha's stubbornness and patience that led to the staging of her text in 2019 under a new title, A Broken Window. Joining forces with director Shady Eldaly, Rasha was finally ready to resurrect her play, albeit with some sacrifice. The text that had to wait for several years before being staged, still had to deal with all kinds of censorsial edits before coming to life. Reality had gone far beyond censorship, but this official department of the Ministry of Culture was still keen to apply its silly rules as if containing the lively criticism within the text. Egyptian theatre makers have to struggle not only to produce but also to validate their work – sheer agony for artists who are creating theatre specifically to criticise power and oppression. I wonder how it feels to for them to criticise oppression and still have to seek the oppressor's validation for such an operation. And how can one escape the heavy feeling of having one's own aesthetic revolt being attributed to the system's tolerance of opposition. Shady Eldaly has done an amazing job as theatre director under the circumstances. Not only is he one of the most talented and skilled directors of his generation, he also specialises in topics of oppression and socio-political criticism, which gives him a lot of stamina in negotiating the content of public criticism in a creative way. Eldaly has his own artistic signature, one that lubricates any revolutionary content in a theatrical and artistic way by employing humour and intimacy in a style that transcends political opposition to address the inherent feeling of collective de-humanisation and indignity. One cannot separate his directorial from his personal style: an artist who has fought his way through all kinds of obstacles and power manipulations and yet managed to preserve his integrity, feeding it into his theatrical creations. Eldaly has so far survived many crises, personal and professional, always succeeding in creating his own place with the support of his authentic and lovely voice. Belonging to a generation that is often deprived of the power of speech, or that of existence, Eldaly has surpassed the stereotypical stamp of being “a young artist”, becoming an artist of his own calibre. He cannot be defined in relation to other generations of artists who had their own level of complicity with the system. And even if he decides to make compromises, Eldaly will have already created an artistic signature that annuls whatever concessions he may have had to make. For concessions have become a rule for those who wish to provide criticism of any sort to the current status quo. Those who are clever enough, and creative enough, will navigate through and preserve their integrity and artistic identity, even if they have to go through phases of complete paralysis. The theory of destroyed windows, as formulated by the playwright within the play's dialogue, says that if you leave your window broken it will definitely attract crime and evil. A broken window leads to the transformation of a whole environment into a place of corruption. Fix it or die. The family of Atteyya (played by the versatile actor Ahmed Mokhtar) is a model of any lower middle class family in Egypt, a microcosm of Egyptian society itself. Stuck between religious fanatism (represented by the wife who is also a school teacher, played by the legendary Nadia Shoukry), superstition (represented by the youngest daughter Samar, played by Hend Hossam), and constant anger (represented by the older daughter Lawahez, played by Marwy Keshk), the family has no way out. Atteyya is frantically fighting for the survival of his family with very little resources. An existential question beyond any political or social issue here is how to live on the tiny salaries of Atteyya and his wife, and how to support six family members. The older daughter gets married, then returns to her parents' tiny house with two little children after the disappearance of her husband. The only son constantly fails at university, and goes to protests and sit-ins which leads to his brutal arrest and the devastating psychological implications that follow (inadquately played in an almost clownish style by Marwan Faisal). Thus the only outspoken revolutionary character of the play, the son, is muted and ridiculed by an acting style that does not support the message of change but rather condemns those who fight for it by portraying them as clowns. One memorable achievement of the director here is bringing Nadia Shoukry back to the stage. The actress who once played the daughter of Ramadan Al-Sukkari in El-Eyal Kebret (The Children Have Grown) has grown up enough to play the role of a mother, this time – unlike Karima Mokhtar in El-Eyal Kebret – with no laughter but only sadness and torment. Ahmed Mokhtar guided the whole performance from beginning to end, playing the lead role of the father, as well as the storyteller through whom the story unfolds and returns to the beginning in a circular fashion. Mokhtar, who is a master craftsman in acting, used his expertise to guide the spectators towards shouting out what the censorship had omitted from the finale of the performance: when he finds out that his family was not not killed by the poisonous meal, he looks at the tiny poison pack, and loudly wonders where it was manufactured. The spectators answer as if in chorus, “Made in Egypt”. Maybe censorship can omit some words, even whole lines from a play, but it definitely has no authority over spectatorship. If the Egyptian theatre can still speak to Egyptian suffering, that is due to exceptional artists and activists like Rasha Abdel-Moneim and Shady Eldaly, and above all to Egyptian spectators who speak out and can never be restricted by any given power script. Spectatorship like citizenship cannot be pre-scripted: that is the lesson of 2011 revolution and beyond.
