Rania Khallaf speaks with playwright Lenin El-Ramli, one of this year's Prince Claus Award winners On 7 December playwright Lenin El-Ramli (b. 1945) will receive one of the 2005 Prince Claus Awards which focus this year on the theme of humour and satire. El-Ramli, says the Dutch-based Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development (PCFCD), "has been granted the Prince Claus Award for his emphasis on political satire and comedy, and for maintaining a balance between popular entertainment and serious social, political and ideological satire". El-Ramli's career has combined popular success at home with almost total neglect by the official cultural establishment, though he has been the recipient of a number of foreign -- mostly European -- honours. The reception accorded his celebrated play Bil-'Arabi El-Fasih (In Plain Arabic, first performed in 1991) -- performed by a cast of mainly amateurs -- is typical of El-Ramli's mixed-bag treatment in Egypt. "Despite its eventual success the play generated little revenue," El-Ramli says. "The actors were all unknown and we sold only 17 tickets on the first night, though there had been quite a bit of publicity in the press and on TV. It took time for it to become popular." Which it did -- and massively so. Not that this level of popular acclaim helped financially. "In most countries that level of audience acclaim would have resulted in financial support. What happened here, though, is that I was left without any support." Nor was the play performed outside Egypt. "Although it was scheduled to represent Egypt at the Carthage Theatre Festival," El-Ramli recalls, the Tunisian authorities refused to allow the performance because the play included a satirical portrayal of a Tunisian character, one among several allegorising different Arab countries. "The Tunisians demanded the character be omitted and I refused. The same thing was repeated at the Jerash Theatre Festival in Jordan and the play was dropped." And then there was the Egyptian Ministry of Information, which flatly refused to broadcast the play on television. While El-Ramli has never sought any official posts -- "they would," he says, "add nothing to my career" -- his lack of support for Ministry of Culture policies comes at a price. "I am over 60 now," he says, "and I have not received a single official prize, not even the State Incentive Award." It is not only his work in the theatre that El-Ramli believes has been unjustifiably ignored, but also his contribution to film. He cites his script for Al-Bedaya (The Beginning, 1986), directed by Salah Abu Seif and starring Ahmed Zaki and Youssra. It was conspicuously absent from any local prize lists though three months after it premiered it received the first Golden Audience Award from a comedy festival in Switzerland. "It was the Swiss audience that voted for the film," says El-Ramli, "even though the translation could not convey its full comic strength." His plays have also been translated into English, French, Hebrew and Danish. Unbeknownst at the time, El-Ramli may have been vetted for the Prince Claus Award earlier this year. "In April I attended an international conference in Tetuan, Morocco. The theme of the conference, held under the joint auspices of Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetuan and the University of Amsterdam, was 'Cultural Differences between Arab and Western Theatre'. When I returned I learned two young women representing the Prince Claus Award had attended the conference; they were only observing the debates." El-Ramli gave a paper -- 'Comedy in the East: The Art of Cunning' -- based on his own experience as a playwright and dramatist. A Dutch theatre critic gave a paper on In Plain Arabic during the conference, which also included a discussion -- by Hazem Azmi, an Egyptian researcher, and a Greek scholar -- of El-Ramli's latest play, Salam Al-Nisa ' (The Peace of Women), a one act adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata. "Somehow," muses the playwright, "I found myself at the core of conference discussions." Despite the huge popular success of many of his plays El-Ramli rejects the term "commercial theatre". "You can talk about a bad play, or a worthless play but there is no such thing as a commercial play. The term, coined in the 1960s, has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. Roping in famous actors is the only thing that makes a play commercially successful." Although several of his own plays have been staged in state-owned theatres El-Ramli believes the role of the state should be limited to providing an infrastructure that will allow theatre to develop unhindered. "The state, if it is seeking to encourage new and more developed forms of theatre, should restrict itself to providing financial support and venues which can then be used by independent troupes." Though by no means uncritical of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET), El-Ramli suggests that "for all its shortcomings CIFET is the best on the Arab front". "Unfortunately, Arab countries have no expertise in theatre," he continues, and he is far from optimistic that the situation will change. "Now theatre is the last thing people care about. Shows appealing to Saudi or Gulf taste have taken over -- dance-comedy performances staged in private theatres during summer specifically for Arab tourists coming from Gulf countries." Add to that the growing number of "people in our society who believe that art is a taboo, something that should be forbidden" and El-Ramli is not about to hold his breath while waiting for the situation to improve. "When people stop reading Mohamed Abdu because they would rather listen to [popular preacher] Amr Khaled's [sermons] on tape then there is something very wrong with our society." Chaos, believes El-Ramli, is now the prevalent register of Egyptian life. "The Beni Sweif theatre tragedy came as one inevitable result of that chaos," he insists. "And those who called for the resignation of the minister of culture are missing the point. I am not defending the minister, but if we reduce the crisis to this issue we blind ourselves from seeing the truth. We should face our weaknesses if we really want to develop."
