Nehad Selaiha is haunted by prison images in a week of hectic theatre-going This year's CIFET got off to a limp start. The performance chosen to grace the opening night after the official ceremony, which began with a colourful and ebullient musical piece designed and directed by Khalid Galal, fell far short of the audience's expectations. Hyped as a performance that compares the ancient Greek myth of the Hyperborean, a legendary race of Apollo worshippers who lived in the far north, beyond the North Wind, in a kind of paradise, with the myth of the indigenous population of Siberia in Russia, the Surgut theatre's Hyperborean, the Beginning of the World, a dance and movement piece, conceived and directed by M. Matiychen, showed a group of primitive people, predominantly young, battling with the forces of nature and mysterious dangers in order to survive, and was poorly choreographed, designed and lit. In the following days, prisons, of one kind or another, seemed to haunt the festival. Physical or mental, real or metaphoric, they provided the theme and setting for at least 6 productions, of which, significantly perhaps, 5 came from Arab countries . Lebanon's all-women Guantanamo, by Masrah Al-Farah (Theatre of Joy) company, written by Victoria Berteen and Jillian Slovo, translated by Maha Bahbouh and directed by Farah Chaer, consists of 5 separate, intersecting monologues by the wives of 5 inmates of the notorious Guantanamo prison. Each monologue tells a story based on factual reports of interviews that actually took place in real life with the wives of Guantanamo prisoners. On an empty stage except for some chairs and against a plain backdrop covered with newspapers, the 5 women, dressed in black from head to toe, alternately tell their painful stories, speak their personal memories and express the agony of waiting. In the background, the absent men are heard screaming, crying and moaning, and at one point their physical presence is strongly evoked as the women take off their black outer garments to reveal underneath the uniform of the Guantanamo prisoners. Apart from the obvious anti-American message, Guantanamo also implicitly criticizes the marginal status of women in the Arab world and their dependence on their husbands for self-definition and fulfillment, as well as the view of Arab women as mere extensions of their husbands rather than autonomous human beings adopted by the West. Regardless of her own views and convictions, a terrorist's wife is automatically branded as a terrorist. Given the monologic mode of the performance, the lack of dramatic interaction between the women and the similarity of their stories and predicaments, Guantanamo felt, inevitably perhaps, slightly repetitious and lacking in dramatic tension. Its painful subject, however, as well as the authenticity of its material and the sincerity of the actresses, captured the hearts of the audience who gave the show a standing ovation at the end. Jordan's Sogoon (Prisons), on the other hand, uses the prison theme metaphorically and expands it to cover all aspects of life in the Arab world. Written by Mefleh Al-Adwan, designed by Jamila 'Alaa El-Din, set to music by Wesam Qatawneh, choreographed by Dina Abu Hamdan and lighted, co-choreographed and directed by Majd Al-Qasas for her Modern Theatre troupe, it uses dance and movement, as well as a verbal text arranged by the director, to portray the life journey of Arab individuals from womb to tomb as a series of prisons, social, cultural, political and economic. With the help of some simple props (hoops, ribbons, chains, percussion instruments and giant keys, among other things) and a few mobile, detachable panels representing a prison gate and barred cells, all painted grey, as well as one carrying a big mirror that reflects the spectators in the auditorium, making them part of the world on stage, a group of young male and female performers/dancers, dressed in a variety of unusual costumes that carry stripes on one part or another, like the imprint of prison bars, enact the stages of this journey, getting out of one prison to immediately land into another, and they do this under the eye and direction of a masterful leader with metal stripes across his torso, who not only guides their movements but also manipulates the panels to create the set for each of the 9 scenes that make up the piece. Needless to say, the successive prisons are all aspects of the repressive patriarchal culture that dominates Arab societies and the traditional mores and morals it imposes on individuals. However, despite its harsh and forbidding grey set, Prisons ends on a defiant note with a collective call for freedom even on pain of death. Another mobile prison gate, this time orange in colour, with a window at the top, and standing at the centre of an empty, black-draped stage, constituted the whole of the austerely frugal set of Saudi Arabia's Mugarrad 'Alamet Istifham, Laysa Illa (Just a Question Mark, No More) -- a wordless mime, dance and movement piece by Al-Dammam Branch of the Saudi Arabian Society for Culture and the Arts, conceived by Yaser Al-Hasan and Okeil Al-Khamis and choreographed and directed by the latter. Behind this gate, a group of male prisoners, all in black and whiteface, struggle to get out. As the show progresses, with the prisoners alternately breaking out then getting back in, and in the process enacting the roles of jailors and jailed, torturers and tortured and fighting over an apple (a symbol of knowledge, of the original sin of rebellion against authority and of sexual desire) and a coat (the mantle of authority), the orange prison gate, the only splash of colour in the overwhelming blackness of the scene, acquires a metaphoric dimension as the gate to knowledge, freedom and control of one's own destiny. The show, however, does not end optimistically with the prisoners breaking out of the gate and achieving these cherished goals. Rather, it ends on a dubious note with the prisoners lying about, overcome by exhaustion and despair, while a shower of green apples rains on the stage. Though the show seemed to drag on a bit after it had fulfilled its purpose, it was a pleasant surprise from a country where actors and dancers cannot get professional training publicly and where theatre is only practiced in private clubs and societies. Iraq's Galsah Sirriya (A Session in Camera), by the Baghdad Theatre for Acting troupe, featured another metaphoric prison. Based on Jean Paul Sartre's Huis Clos ( No Exit in English), where 3 dead people, two women and one man, find themselves in a room with no mirrors or windows and a single locked door and eventually discover that they are in hell and that their being together is their punishment, in other words, that "hell is the others," (or, as Sartre put it, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"), this Iraqi version of Sartre's hell, adapted and directed by 'Alaa' Qahtan, creates a metaphor of an Arab earthly hell where religious authority, grotesquely represented by a bald, screeching priest with a paunch, dressed as a woman in a long, ornate evening dress, is used as a weapon to cripple the creative mind, rein in the imagination, outlaw freedom of thought and suppress scientific knowledge. Staged as a grotesque ritualistic performance, with heavily stylized, often weird movements and gestures and eerie lighting and sound effects, the play begins with a dead man lying in a circle of little red lights on the floor of an empty stage, except for a huge bell dangling at the back, with a woman in black silently weeping and wailing over him. When she withdraws, the priest appears in clouds of smoke (created by generous sprinklings of talcum power) and brings the dead man back to life. The rest of the play consists of the efforts of the priest to first persuade then force the revived man to surrender to him a book that he holds close to his chest, occasionally reading aloud from it to the utter horror of the priest who howls in agony or hoots like an owl, beating his head with his fists at every syllable he hears. Since what the revived man recites from the book does not belong to any known or unknown language, there is no way of knowing what is in that precious volume. It is clear, however, that it is something that this mock priest regards as abominably sacrilegious and heretical. Though the man repeatedly invites him to look into the book and share it with him, he always refuses and recoils in horror. When the man proves too much for the priest, he rings the bell at the back to summon his equally weird assistants one after the other. At one point, one of these tears off his frock and indulges in a rock-n-roll dance that lasts a few minutes. As a last resort, the priest has the man's widow brought in to persuade him to hand over the detested book, and when she fails, he has her shut up in a man-size, neon-lit, glass icebox and paraded before her husband to torment him. The conflict remains unresolved and the play, which began with spectacular lighting effects and clouds of powder, ends with jets of foam shooting up in the air and a gun shot spreading a shower of confetti over the actors. Simple in conception, Galsah Sirriya came across as elaborately artificial, quite pretentious and ridiculously gimmicky. This impression was enforced by the director's insistence on having us link it to Sartre's No Exit by treating us at the beginning to video projections of photos of the French philosopher at different stages of his life, sometimes in the company of Simone Beauvoir, and snippets of some of his recorded speeches and interviews. However, as a protest and a warning against religious authoritarianism, one cannot but applaud it. The prison theme was also at the centre of the Sultanate of Oman's Al-Gisr (The Bridge), by Al-Din Theatre for Culture and Art. Though predominantly realistic and set in the bedroom of a married couple and the adjacent courtyard, it dramatizes the predicament of a painter and former army volunteer, hopelessly locked up in a nightmare from which he can see no escape except through death. Not only does he try to commit suicide more than once, he actually implores his frustrated and long- suffering wife to shoot him in one scene. Without openly setting her play in Egypt, Amna Rabee', one of the very few women who write for the theatre in the Gulf, draws on the military defeat of the Egyptian forces in the 1967 war with Israel and its consequent demoralization and corruption of the people to show how the memory of that defeat and the gratuitous death of so many soldiers ordered to retreat from Sinai without air coverage became her hero's nightmare, sapping his artistic energy as a painter and his courage as a fighter, rendering him sexually impotent as a husband and physically and verbally violent as a man, cutting him off from reality and his friends and nearly wrecking his marriage. Like the hero's nightmare, the bridge in the title is at once real and metaphoric: it is a real bridge that the hero and his friends failed to cross to safety on the day of defeat and, therefore, constantly surfaces in his nightmare as a symbol of death; but it is also a figurative bridge that, paradoxically hints at the possibility of freedom. The prison image was also implicitly present in Lebanon's Kafka, Abooh, Al-Mudeer, Al-Zi'b wa Al-Khanazeer (Kafka, his Father, the Director, the Wolf and the Pigs), produced by the Lebanese- American University in Beirut. A highly imaginative dramatization of a long letter that Franza Kafka wrote to his father over 2 months in 1919 but never sent, it reveals through a series of arresting, quasi-surrealistic visual images how the father terrorized his son, dominated his life and turned him into a timid, withdrawn person. Watching the performance, one feels as if the father, acting like a jailor, had built an invisible wall round his son, isolating him from life and society. Lina Abiad, who co- translated the letter with Rachid Al-Daif, adapted it, and designed and directed the performance, projected the characters of Kafka and his father through several actors, all dressed (by Fatin Mushrif) in the typical fashion of the period, in long, black coats and hats, so that we always had several replicas of Kafka and his father on stage. This technique, together with Mona Kni'ou's inspired lighting plan, with its intricate play of light and shadow, a few video projections of old photos, some paper shapes of birds, ships and other objects that floated in and out, and the pig masks in the final scene gave the performance a definite dreamlike, poetic quality and a haunting atmosphere. One could also read the idea of prison in Iraq's other performance in this festival, the Iraqi National Theatre Troupe's version Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written and directed by Awatif Na'im. Shrewdly reset in Iraq and adapted to acquire topical political relevance, the work was rechristened Da'erat Al-'Ishq Al-Baghdadiyah (The Baghdadi Love Circle) and was superbly directed and performed in the style of Brecht's epic theatre. As I watched the Iraqi Grusha fighting to keep the ruler's child whom she rescued during the war when his parents, in their haste to flee to safety, forgot to take along, I could not help feeling that the Baghdadi love circle in the title was yet another kind of prison. Having seen so many prison images in the Arab shows, I was curious to find out what kind of prison Georgia's Liberty theatre would project in its Prisoners. It turned out to be a Nazi concentration camp where a troupe of pronouncedly Jewish actors are first forced by a Nazi officer to sing and dance to amuse him and then summarily gunned down. In an ideal world where Palestinians could have their own state and live side by side in peace and amity with Israelis, one could perhaps enjoy this show. But with the Palestinians suffering so much injustice at the hands of radical Zionists in Israel, it is unreasonable to expect an Arab audience to sympathize with the plight of Georgia's prisoners.
