At the third Al-Saqia Annual Theatre Festival, Nehad Selaiha notes a marked resurgence of classical texts In a brief speech preceding the announcement of the awards of the third Al-Saqia Annual Theatre Festival (17-22 August), Mohamed El-Sawi, the founder and manager of this thriving, non-governmental cultural centre, remarked on the poor quality of most of the texts used by the independent groups who applied to join the festival. For eight days (from 7 to 14 August), the highly qualified selection committee chosen by the centre, which included two drama professors, the head of the National Theatre Centre and the artistic director of Al-Ghad theatre, sifted through 42 productions -- at the rate of five to six shows a day -- and ended up nominating only six for the contest, half the number chosen last year. With the exception of Fiche (Police Registration), a new play by Mohamed Nur, directed by Mohamed Fikri and presented by a group curiously called The Nameless, the rest of the entries were reworkings of European and Arab stage classics. This seems striking when you remember how the Independent Festival for Light Comedy held in early August at Al-Hanager consisted mainly of fresh scripts, some collectively written, and has led me to wonder whether the obvious classical bent of this festival reflected more the taste of the selection committee rather than a burgeoning trend in the independent theatre movement. But without actually seeing all of the 36 pieces which did not make it to the festival one cannot be sure, and the fact remains that there really is a shortage of new stage-worthy dramatic texts and a paucity of new playwrights. To address this lack, El-Sawi wound up his speech by announcing a playwriting competition, like Rashida Taymour's, to be launched next year in advance of the festival. The winners would have their plays recommended to the groups who want to take part in next year's festival and those who take them on, it was implied, would be given preference over others and have a stronger chance of being chosen for the contest. I am not sure I feel quite comfortable with this plan and dislike the idea of curtailing the imagination and initiative of actors and directors by imposing certain texts on them or even putting temptation in their way in the form of a recommendation. Choosing the text is part of the responsibility of the group and its director and should express their most pressing needs and concerns. Besides, doesn't the choice of script constitute part of one's overall evaluation of a show? How can you recommend a text to a group then act as arbiter, letting them compete with others who choose to follow their own lights? Still, if El-Sawi's proposed competition can discover for us even one good playwright a year, it will be a wonderful project; but to do this, it has to be free of censorship and open to new, experimental modes of writing. The fact that Mohamed Nur's intriguing Fiche won The Nameless group the best production award this year leads one to be optimistic in this respect. Featuring a police investigation of a string of killings committed by a self-confessed murderer which turn out at the end to be no more than wishful fantasies and compensatory hallucinations, the play involves tricky role-switching and keeps tantalisingly wavering between reality, memory and illusion, constantly shifting its grounds, thwarting our expectations and generating a lot of delicious suspense. That El-Sawi's selection committee and jury recognised its imaginative and technical daring and rated it above Albert Camus' Caligula, for instance, though presented in toto, without any dramaturgical meddling with the text by a Ein Shams university group, evidences a liberal attitude and a sensitive appreciation untrammelled by preconceived ideas or traditional evaluations. In fact, Caligula didn't even make it to third place, nor did Charisma's Antigone, Where Are You? -- a patchwork of several famous dramatic treatments of the mythical Greek character (including, among others, Sophocles's and Jean Anouilh's) stitched together and directed by Ahmed Seif. By comparison, Mohamed Abdel-Monsif's curious version of Othello, rechristened Black and White, and presented by the Su'al (Question) group, though it shared the same fate as Caligula and Antigone awards- wise, was definitely more inventive in conception and treatment. Slashing the Shakespearean text to half an hour and whittling down the characters to three, Abdel-Monsif opened his play with Iago's vicious insinuations at the beginning of the climax in Act III, skimming quickly through the rest of the text, condensing several scenes into brief, cryptic shots, and reducing the dialogue to a kind of shorthand in which only the most memorable and significant lines were kept. But the really startling innovation was knocking Othello and Iago into one character, making the latter the darker side of the Moor -- the sick part of him which feeds his doubts and inferiority complex and prompts him to murder. And since Abdel-Monsif also directed, the psychological split in Othello's personality was visually echoed in the set which consisted solely of long black and white drapes which ensnared the characters at times and were manipulated by a chorus of extras in black shirts and trousers, with faces painted half black half white. But this is not the whole story. The Othello/Iago identification, besides its psychological significance, also carried a subtle political message which, as in some post-colonial interpretations of the text, attributes the disintegration of Othello's personality to his desire to forgo his authentic black identity and belong to a white, superior culture. The key to this message is embedded in the audio-visual composition of the opening scene. In it, against the black and white drapes at the back, two actors, in identical white costumes, one in whiteface, one in black, sit back to back, as if glued together, with the head of each slumped on the other's shoulder, creating an illusion of a monstrous headless being quite reminiscent of Othello's "men whose heads/Do grow beneath their shoulders." Close behind them, a black man sits in the shadows, his head looming above their bodies, as if to supply the missing head, while a singer on the other side of the stage describes a corrosive sense of defeat which has led him to assume many masks, and how these masks have ultimately eroded his real face, and mourns the loss of his identity and sense of direction. According to this new interpretation, Othello's tragic mistake was forsaking his original culture and trying to belong to what he thought was a superior one, ending up with a confused mind and a split personality. The only way to communicate with and relate to the culturally different other, Black and White seems to imply, is to recognise and embrace your own identity, regardless of what the world thinks of it, while, at the same time, accepting and respecting the difference of the other, regardless of their colonial history and past crimes. But since Othello fails to do this, the play ends with his mind and world plunged in chaos. Holding a candle, his "flaming minister", he stumbles blindly across the darkened stage, as if across a murky mental landscape, pathetically declaiming, over and over, Othello's ominous prophecy that "when I love thee not,/Chaos is come again." Though boldly original in conception, Black and White scored badly on the acting which was quite ham and embarrassingly clumsy. In the case of Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City, by El-Masrawiya (The Egyptian) group, and Sa'dalla Wannus's Al-Feel ya Malik Al-Zaman (The Elephant, Oh King of All time) by Lahazat (Moments) -- both less imaginatively adventurous and provocative than Black and White, the acting proved a definite asset, scooping for the former the second best show and best actress awards and for the latter the third best show and best ensemble performance. Director Mohamed Shuman kept the indefinite spatio-temporal setting of Wannus's play and its folktale atmosphere, but gave the text a meta-theatrical frame, presenting it as a play-within-a-play, with the director acting as tyrannically as the king in the play, and the actors frequently interrupting the action with comments, suggestions, objections and protests. This created plenty of room for comic repartee, farcical squabbles and hilarious improvisation. It is when the play finally gets going, however, that you begin to appreciate the virtuosity, discipline and technical skills of both the actors and director. With a minimalist set, and relying solely on mime, Shuman punctuated the progress of his actors through the imaginary halls of the king's awesome palace with equally imaginary doors, each lower than the previous one, so that by the time they reached the seat of power, they were literally crawling and grovelling on their hands and knees. The progressive physical crushing of the townsfolk on their way to the king visually translated, in a powerful, concrete metaphor, the insidious power of the physical symbols of authority which mentally intimidate the people and awe them into silence. It therefore comes as no surprise that when finally faced with the king the people cannot complain of his elephant as they had intended to do. Rather, to pacify and please him, they beg him to find his destructive elephant a female companion to dispel its loneliness. Another potent, ironical detail which Shuman adds to Wannus's text is the stuttering man who is asked by the group at the outset of the journey to keep silent so as not to spoil the vocal harmony of their choral plea and offend the king's ears, and emerges at the end as the only citizen with the courage to speak out but not the ability to do so. The play ends with his pathetic, desperate efforts to formulate coherent words and make himself heard above the chorus of loud, obsequious adulation. Friel's The Freedom of the City was a very happy choice by El-Masrawiya troupe. First produced in 1973, it was written shortly after the "Bloody Sunday" in January 1972, when 13 peacefully demonstrating civil rights marchers in Londonderry were shot dead by British troops. Mixing fact and fiction, the play centres on the shooting by British troops of three unarmed civil rights marchers in Londonderry in 1970, the British judicial whitewashing of the culprits who were absolved of responsibility, and conjures the events of Bloody Sunday two years later. Though overtly political, with portions directly drawn from the investigative reports which exonerated the soldiers, and set mostly in flashback, with some documentary film shots and many freeze-frame cross-cuts, it manages to mix comedy with pathos, horror with humour, and generate a lot of human sympathy as well as anger and disgust. Above all, it presents us with three vivid, delightful, unforgettable characters (wonderful parts for actors): Lily Doherty, a 40 year old charwoman and mother of 11, with a sick husband, who lives with her family in two squalid rooms with no running water except "down the walls" and one tap and one communal toilet down in the yard serving eight families; 22-year-old Michael Hegarty, the most political of the three, an intelligent, idealistic college student and earnest fighter for the Nationalist cause, who never contemplated terrorism or taking over civic buildings as means of resistance, believing instead in peaceful protest and thinking that decent, responsible behaviour can save him and even win him his enemy's respect; and 21-year-old Skinner, a cynical drifter who thinks marches and protests are sport, and yet, despite his apparent indifference and defensive flippancy, realises more than any of his companions the gravity of their situation and senses their imminent death. Overcome by water cannons and tear gas, the three stumble through an open door, seeking safety. To their dismay and delight, they soon discover that they have stumbled into the mayor's sumptuous parlour in the Guildhall of Derry. Assuming at worst that they will be arrested and charged with trespassing, the three wait for the crazy pandemonium outside to subside and while away the time with singing, dancing, chatting, clowning, sipping the mayor's liquor and trying on his regalia. Unbeknown to them, however, rumours and media reports outside have built them into dangerous armed terrorists who have occupied the Guildhall. When the British troops surround the place and ask them to surrender and come out arms held high above their heads they obey and are shockingly met by a barrage of automatic weapons fire. The play, however, proceeds in a tortuous way: it opens at the end, with the bodies of the victims slumped across the apron of the stage, while a priest and a photographer hover around them, and a judge conducts an inquiry into their deaths from an elevated place. The scenes documenting the victims' final hours are framed and punctuated by scenes from the subsequent official inquiry, a solemn requiem mass, media reports and excerpts from a lecture by a pompous American sociologist on the subculture of poverty and how it breeds violence -- which implicitly endorses their description by the media and court as terrorists and justifies their murder. In his adaptation of the play, Yasser Allam stuck more or less to Friel's structure and scene arrangement, transferring the setting to Egypt, replacing the civil rights march with an anti-Israel, anti USA demonstration and the judge with the head of the intelligence service, giving Friel's sociologist a distinctly foreign accent and adding to his comical, mechanically sermonising priest a Muslim counterpart in the figure of a ludicrous, obedience-urging sheikh and making both part of the oppressive establishment. Egyptianising the three central characters was not a problem, given the similarity between the Irish and Egyptian temperament and the fact that the poor and downtrodden usually look alike and speak the same language whatever their culture. The set, though, was terribly poor which made the characters' wonder at its sumptuousness ring false and sound quite ridiculous. The modest budget was also behind the removal of the deliciously comical scene in which the three Bogsiders, who have no freedom in their city, appear togged out in the ceremonial robes and accoutrements of the mayor and alderman and ritualistically stage a mock ceremony of granting the freedom of the city to each other. The drinking spree, however, was kept (it only needed a cast-off empty whisky bottle and three glasses for props), and the sight of Do'a Ramadan, as Lily, dressed as a peasant, tipsy and clinking glasses with her two companions was absolutely hilarious and strangely moving. The sense of liberation she displayed under the effect of alcohol intensified our awareness of the miserable drudgery and cheerlessness of her life. Indeed, one felt glad that she and her companions had those few drinks before they died and did not go "unfortified before their maker", as the priest in Friel's original, unaware of the imbibing that went on in the parlour, ironically declares after administering absolution at their funeral. To say that the Egyptian Lily was a little over-ebullient and Khalid El- 'Isawi's direction a bit strained, too noisy and over-cluttered would be carping. Friel is practically unknown in Egypt and, except for one visiting production of The Faith Healer in the summer of 1993, his plays have never appeared on the Egyptian stage. To present one of his plays, especially a gem like The Freedom of the City, at a popular venue like Al-Saqia is quite an event, and the fact that it happened at the initiative of an independent group and not any state-theatre company demonstrates the value of those groups and the festivals which air their work.
