Nehad Selaiha faces despair and rebellion at the CFCC's 3ème Festival des Jeunes Créateurs Whether it was an adaptation of Jean Genet's Les Bonnes, an adumbration of Fathiya El-Assal's Al Bayn Bayn (Betwixt and Between), a distillation of the basic themes in Salah Abdel-Sabour's Leila wal Majnoun (Leila and the Madman), billed as The Dark Room, an honest rendering of a theatre classic like Eugene Ionesco's Les Chaises, or of a new poetic drama like Ahmed Al-Ablag's intriguing Al-Nahr Yughayer Magrah (The River Changes its Course), a purely visual, wordless piece like Waw...Harf Atf (And, a Conjunction) or Milad wi Hagat wi Tafaseel 'Ilaqat (Birth, Objects and Details of Relationships), a collage from a number of literary sources like Masafa Fadya Bayn Qawsayn (A Space Between Brackets), or a string of individually improvised monologues collectively arranged to form a script, like Ana Ash'ur bil Goo' (I am Hungry), I'tirad (Objection), Ana Dilwaqt Mayet (Right now I am Dead), or La (No) -- all the shows presented at the French Cultural Centre in the context of the third festival of young creators (27-31 January), despite their different styles and techniques, seemed like desperate attempts at survival against overwhelming odds. For these gifted young people, I kept thinking, theatre has become the last line of defence against loneliness, impotence, madness and despair. In none of the shows could you find a hint of joy, a throb of real excitement, a glimmer of hope, or glimpse even a shadow of an opening anywhere. Everywhere, whatever the script and however different the set looked, a sense of entrapment prevailed, like a thick, dark cloud enwrapping the stage and spreading to the auditorium. The characters in all the plays were lonely and defeated, speaking in monologues even when seemingly engaged in dialogue or acting as a group. Wherever you looked, death seemed to be lurking in the shadows. It felt unnatural that so many young people should be so thoroughly obsessed with death. In And, a Conjunction, a haunting, atmospheric piece by the Qasquette group, the whole earth becomes one big graveyard or a kind of limbo where you cannot tell the living from the dead, where a shop can turn in an instant into a coffin and there is never any time to embrace our loved ones and tell them how much we love them. Death, a silent shadow, flits across the scene, sending tremours of terror down the spines of the semi-dead characters and before they know it, it has felled down the only seemingly living person around -- the peaceful, aged shop-keeper. Space between Brackets, by Al-Khoroug group (a name which ominously means "exit" in Arabic) also features a corpse in a coffin. Indeed, the whole piece which is loosely based on Naguib Sorour's Al- Dhubab Al-Azraq (Blowflies or Bluebottles), with excerpts from Yusri El-Guindi's play Al-Yahudi Al- Ta'eh (The Lost Jew) and several poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani and Amal Dunqul, centres on the efforts of a group of young people to rid themselves of this coffin and find a burial place for the corpse. They embark on an epic journey across the Arab world, but in every country they visit they find hypocrisy, indifference and oppression and are forbidden to speak their minds. They end up outcasts, in no man's land, with the smelly corpse still on their hands and can only seek comfort in screaming their frustration to the wind. To see the coffin and corpse as symbolising the Palestinian cause is not an adequate interpretation though quite obvious. It would be nearer the mark to read the coffin as embracing all the broken dreams the Arabs once had, together with their failures and defeats -- as the rotting legacy previous generations bequeathed to the present one while denying them the right to object and fobbing them off with slogans and illusions. When the corpse finally rises to join the young people it tells them, in the words of Sorour, what they have already discovered for themselves: that since they are doomed whether they speak or remain silent, they might as well speak out. Though we see no corpses in Right now I am Dead, by Hani Afifi's Al-Sa'aa (The Hour) group -- a name which ominously recalls the sentence "the hour hath come" -- the setting is an intensive-care unit with a patient in the throes of death and the monologues of the three young men who wonder around dazed and disconsolate are punctuated by hallucinatory medical reports on the state of the patient, delivered in a rising crescendo by a demented doctor in front of a microphone. The dying patient turns out to be a metaphor for the three seemingly alive young men who assure us, each in turn, and for different reasons, that they have died long ago. As a lone female musician fitfully threads her way in and out of the scene and through the monologues, changing her tunes and instruments to suit the mood, and followed each time by one of the young men in the hope of catching the sun before it sets, as a voiceover tells us, distorted images of war and destruction, of horrible human suffering and ridiculously absurd human endeavour, flash on a screen at the back. And though the mood alternated between pathetic humour, heart- rending sorrow and outrageous grotesquerie, the tone remained touchingly confidential throughout and the subdued agony of chasing after a dream of the sun was unbearably vivid and poignant. No, by Mirette Mikhail's Blue group, I am Hungry, by Ayman Abdel-Fattah's Stone Modern Dance troupe, and Objection, by George Wahib's Ghorba Hena (Alienation Here) group were also verbally cast in a confessional mono-mode and consisted of a single or several alternating, sometimes intersecting monologues. The sense of loneliness and isolation signified by this verbal mode was enhanced in every case by a dark, empty set, indicating an unspecified location, which could be any and everywhere, and minimal props. As the light picked up every speaker, dimming the rest of the scene, each pool of light shone like a fleeting vision -- it was as if one was seeing a pathetic little island, precariously perched on the crest of a wave for a moment, and about to sink in an ocean of darkness and the physical space the actor occupied on stage was suddenly transformed into an internal space -- a dreary mental landscape. No was about broken relationships and the transience of love; I am Hungry blabbed interminably about food, sweating hands and rotten teeth to cover a gnawing emptiness inside that can never be filled; Objection was about unemployment, social and mental degradation and betrayal; in all three, however, external reality was inimical and grimly hostile, pushing the characters underground, into little solipsistic, self- absorbed holes, infested with violent, nightmarish visions, self- destructive urges or searing, dream-like memories. From there to madness is a short step. Though there is plenty of dialogue, or a semblance of it in Betwixt and Between, by the Lamma (When) group, in The Maids, by Amira Shawqi's Al-Shakmageya (the Jewel Box) group, in The Dark Room, by Studio Moroni, in The Chairs, by the Studio group and in The River Changes its Course, by Nojoum Al-Ghad (Tomorrow's Stars) from Itsa in Fayyoum, it invariably fails to establish real communication, acting rather as a barrier between the speakers or between them and reality while ironically revealing their impotence to us, as in the case of the first three of the above-mentioned plays, or as a means of coercion, deception and falsification, as in the fourth. In all four cases, particularly in The Dark Room where the characters become progressively entangled in a thick mesh of string and in The River where a man-size dummy of a warrior hung with instruments of torture dominates the scene, the pointlessness of the dialogue or its warped nature and final ironical impact are enhanced by subtle lighting effects and some telling visual details, mostly expressionistic in style. Of the three festivals of Jeunes Createurs held so far by the French culture centre (thanks to the ceaseless energy, selfless dedication and profound faith and enthusiasm of its artistic director, Latifa Fahmi), this year's was doubtlessly the strongest and has evidenced the presence of a vast reservoir of rich, young theatrical talent. Nevertheless, and though most of the plays were admirable and a few of them quite unforgettable, I cannot pretend that watching them was a joyful or heartening experience. Every time I tried to revel in the gifts of the young artists, the dismal cascade of cheerless images which nightly drenched the stage drowned any intimations of joy. What next? I kept asking myself as I always do at the end of such festivals; where do these young artists go from there? And what will become of them in ten years time? True Right now I am Dead, voted best production, will get a chance to perform a couple of nights at Al-Hanager and its director, Hani Afifi (voted best director) and one of his actors, Yehya Yusri (voted best actor), together with Rasha Samir, who won best actress for her performance in The Chairs, as well as Omar Ghayat (who played the lead in The Dark Room ), Mirette Mikhail (who directed and partly wrote and choreographed No ) and Hanaa Atwa (who stage-designed The River and played the wife of the prisoner in it) -- all of whom won incitement awards from the jury -- will get the chance to go to the Avignon festival this year and attend a training workshop there. It will be wonderful for them of course; but what will they do when they get back? Start another year- long struggle to put together a 20 or 30-minute show and wait for the next Jeunes Createurs festival? For how long can they sustain such a struggle before they get tired and give up, or grow too old to fit comfortably in such events? Apart from anything else, this festival was a cruel reminder of the ordeal of young artists, indeed, of all young people in Egypt today, and it is perhaps in this that its value primarily resides.
