Nehad Selaiha finds politics taking centre- stage in two independent theatre festivals Running almost simultaneously, the Third Independent Theatre Festival for Light Comedy (15- 22 August at Al-Hanager, a hall in Mahmoud Mukhtar Museum and the Jesuit Centre in Minya) and the Second Al-Saqia Theatre Festival for independent groups (18-22 August at El-Sawy Cultural Centre) provided critics, sociologists and students of culture with a valuable opportunity to find out first hand how a large, widely diversified and therefore representative segment of young Egyptian artists see the world and think and feel about reality. In both festivals -- whatever the socio-economic provenance of the troupe, its ideological orientation, level of intellectual maturity, subject matter or artistic mode -- politics cut a high profile and anger, in a variety of moods, was the dominant note. It ranged from sombre irony and cynical resignation to obstreperous vituperation and cheeky defiance. The choice of Salwomir Mrozek's 1961 Striptease (in an adapted stage version by Hamada Shousha's troupe) for the opening of the Light Comedy Festival was significant and acted as a keynote; a kind of telling epigraph to the whole event. In this tragi- grotesque, ironical, two-character piece, one of the earliest examples of the theatre of the absurd in Polish drama, freedom is the central issue and is examined in relation to power and rebellion. The two nameless characters (simply called 1 and 2) who find themselves suddenly thrust into a room with two doors by a mysterious, invisible force are forced for the first time to meet the challenge of freedom. But, having lived as the slaves of authority all their lives, they fail to take it. Though both doors are open, they act like prisoners and wait to be released by the force that put them there. Despite 1's incessant blabbing about his inner freedom -- which he values so much that in order never to limit his range of choices he constantly refuses to act -- and 2's vociferous but empty expressions of revolt, both are unable to shake off their deeply ingrained fear of authority and their long habit of submission reduces them to cowardly impotence. When the invisible force materialises as a huge hand which keeps appearing to demand in turn items of their clothing by pointing at them, they meekly surrender and docilely strip until they are reduced to their underpants. Frantic with terror, they finally decide to do something; but rather than rebel, they throw themselves humbly at the mercy of the Hand, kissing it and profusely apologising for whatever they could have unwittingly done to offend it. At that moment, a second Hand appears and ominously beckons to them and the two semi-naked, handcuffed men pick up their briefcases and stumble cringingly towards it. This savagely ironical ending which tells you that power is a multi-headed hydra and that pacifying one master or submission to one tyrant can only breed others was thought too theatrically subdued to satisfy an Egyptian audience. Shousha replaced it with a more graphic physical sequence in which Karim El-Tonsi, who choreographed it and played the Hand throughout, throws the two ends of a long, red scarf round Hani El-Mettenawi and Mohamed Farouk, holding it in the middle and manipulating it so that as they blindly turn round and round they get more and more entangled in it. A bit simplistic and less subtle than the original, this new ending however was visually effective and drew huge applause and loud cheers. In this respect, it matched the opening sequence in which Karim El-Tonsi, dressed in black with a mask, appeared in a pool of red light, amid clouds of smoke, stretching and writhing ominously like an evil spirit -- Shousha's metaphor for oppressive political power. The brash chasing after stage effect extended to the movement much of which seemed quite gratuitous and distracting, particularly in the first 20 minutes of the play. Its sole motivation was seemingly to showcase Farouk's athletic prowess; the same exaggerated vigour infected his vocal delivery which was consistently, inordinately loud. In contrast, El-Mettenawi's performance was smooth, finely-tuned and sophisticated, with every movement, gesture and facial expression carefully calculated. He was alternately smug, ridiculously pompous and painfully pathetic, and whatever the mood he was effortlessly funny. Indeed, much of the political relevance and impact of the play depended on his performance. Equally preoccupied with freedom, though in a gentler, pensive mood was Fadfada (Unburdening the Heart) by the Light Group. Composed solely out of selections from the poetry of Salah Jahin, with the chosen lines distributed among four actors to form the semblance of a dialogue, and punctuated with recordings of some of Jahin's Quartets in his own voice or sung by Ali El-Haggar, it flowed softly, simply, like a clear stream alternately sparkling in the sun and darkened by clouds. There is no story here but a constellation of related themes -- all variations on the vital need to speak out. The key to the whole performance is one quartet which is used like a refrain. In it Jahin urges a bird to sing, warning it that it is never the song, whatever it may be or however dangerous, that kills, but rather the suppression of the song. Fadfada, scripted and directed by Tareq Said and sensitively, lovingly performed by Hamada Barakat, Sulafa Abdel-Ghaffar and Mena Ethansios along with the director, ends on a painful note with an embittered elegy for the children killed when their schools were bombed by Israeli planes. All that remains of them, the poem tells us, are a few scattered, blood-stained school books. The bright red lines and squiggles on them look like children's drawings and should amuse their murderers, it sardonically concludes. More politically direct and topical was Al-Hala troupe's Salam Mirabba -- a punning title which plays on the word mirabba, meaning jam, and murabbaa, ie square. The word salam which means peace is also used as a form of greeting equivalent to hello, or good- bye. In the phrase salam murabbaa both words change meaning and denote a traditional popular welcoming march played to greet important personages at weddings, receptions or similar festive events. Keeping the word salam (peace) and coupling it with the Arabic word for jam creates a new ironical meaning which describes peace as sticky while retaining an ironical hint of the original meaning of a welcoming march. The title points to the thematic focus and mood of this delightfully satirical skit on what passes for peace these days and how the word is used to mask the most outrageous forms of injustice. Conceived as a street show, it was performed in the open air, outside Al-Hanager, opposite the box-office, with no sets or props except a small booth with the traditional Qaraqoz puppet inside and a white sheet used in one scene to discreetly hide some obscene acts committed behind it and described as "peace negotiations". The cunning play on words in the title carries into the whole show, with songs and words twisted out of their original meanings or wrenched out of context to create an irony or shoot a barbed quip. In a series of farcical sketches, seven teenage boys and two younger girls, all found and trained by Mohamed Abdel-Fattah, grapple with the meaning of peace under the eye of Qaraqoz, their teacher, muddling historical events and characters, ridiculing sacrosanct ideas and sentiments and coming up with outrageous parodies of cherished national songs. There seemed to be no limit to their rebellious, debunking audacity, and the official political/ media discourse was torn to shreds, its vacuity and deceitful intent revealed. The performers seemed to have boundless energy and infinite zest and their bodies were completely uninhibited. Like all street shows, Salam Mirabba was often impudent, shocking and offensive to demure sensibilities. Like a rough diamond, it was often coarse, loud and garish. Its robust honesty, however, and its physical vitality were refreshing and invigorating. Openly political too, even didactic at times, and executed with varying degrees of passionate involvement, artistic inventiveness, and technical precision were: Brecht's The Exception and the Rule by Masrah El-Saa (Theatre of the Hour); Nijm and Imam on Mobiles, by Al-Haraka (The Movement); an adaptation of Durrenmatt's 1948 one-acter, Der Gevettete (The One Who Was Saved), which turned it into a harsh indictment of American policy in the Middle East, by Al-Ghagar; Egyptian Citizen, by Al- Aragouz Al-Masri (Egyptian Qaraqoz); and the Theatre Atelier's imaginatively uneven and verbally rambling At Degree Zero. By contrast, in Al-Sanf Gahiz Lilmuaayna (The Goods are Ready for Inspection), by the Alexandria- based Mishwar group, the political is given a wider definition and takes the form of a quest for personal freedom, integrity and fulfillment in a repressive, hypocritical, corrupt society, inimical to life and love. On an empty stage, with a white projection screen at the back, the author/ director, Mohamed Mursi, poses as an aged man reminiscing about his love- life since he was a boy and showing us in five successive stories how authority and power, in one form or another -- as parents, teachers, bosses, or political foes -- always stepped in insidiously or openly to spoil or end his love-stories. The narration alternates with acted scenes and film footage against a background of incidental live music provided by a lute, a guitar and a violin. The taboo against any kind of physical contact with males before marriage in the case of females is introduced early on as a baffling conundrum and reaches a gory climax in a sequence of shots which show the narrator's first love, almost a child, being terrorised by her father and his friends, threatened with rape, then genitally mutilated in order to put her off boys, and all because she was seen exchanging an innocent kiss with the narrator on the stairs. Another story exposes the moral hypocrisy which results from the sexual repression of women when the narrator, still in secondary school, goes for a private lesson at the house of a teacher and is sexually solicited by the teenage daughter of the teacher -- a girl who outwardly looks the epitome of modesty and observes all the outward shows of chastity, including the veil. More shocking still is his discovery of the same girl in the flat of an older friend and being told that she trades her favours for money. His one true love is a Palestinian university colleague who dies in an Israeli air raid when she goes to visit her sick mother in Gaza and it is at this point that social and sexual oppression merge with political coercion. The-personal-as-political view also informed Al-Misaharati's exquisite and highly original and entertaining Tales of the Harem, Al-Qafila's half- baked At the Café, and the semi- confessional Just a Domestic Performance by Al-Abath Al-Masrahi troupe. This muted, complex approach to politics was prominently missing from the Al-Saqia Festival. Most of the plays, whether adaptations of foreign texts, like Alfonso Sastre's The Condemned Squad, or local ones, like Saadeddin Wahba's Al-Ustadh (The Professor), or original scripts, like Ragab Hassan's Bagogo (a coined word that has no meaning) were furiously political, dividing the characters into rulers and subjects, villains and victims, oppressors and oppressed. This made for a certain degree of simplistic naïveté and melodramatic shallowness in all the shows I saw there since none of them attempted to reach beyond the symptoms and look for the roots of the political malaise. Bagogo, voted the best show in the festival by the jury, was the noisiest, most cluttered and most garish; but the anger was passionate and genuine, and the energy of the army of actors (almost 40 on the stage) and their frenzied movement routines were overwhelming. Intended as a historical phantasmagoria, it unfolds (amid a riot of colours and sounds) as a series of quick, short sketches burlesquing Egyptian rulers from the pharaohs onwards. In each scene the word "bagogo" is inconsequentially dropped so that by the end it comes to stand for all vices and forms of corruption. How to exorcise this bogey Bagogo the play does not tell us, nor does it answer the question why all Egyptian rulers, even the promising ones, are doomed to failure and either turn vicious or get betrayed and killed. Bagogo, however, was the best on offer at the Al-Saqia Festival and whatever its shortcomings it harnessed the impotent fury and mood of political disenchantment prevalent among young artists in Egypt today.
