Nehad Selaiha looks at the Egyptian contribution to the 22nd edition of The Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre which opened on 10 October Over 10 days before of the opening of the 22nd Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre on 10 October, the seven members of the Egyptian selection committee appointed by the minister of culture to recommend two performances to represent Egypt in the festival's competition had to watch 23 proposed performances. At the same time, a 3-member international selection committee, chosen by the festival board and headed by Marta Coigney, the honorary president of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) for life, was shut up for hours every morning in the cinema hall of the Creativity Centre to wade through piles of DVDs of foreign and Arab performances that wished to compete for the festival's awards. Out of 62 hopeful candidates from 48 different countries, the international committee nominated 33, consigning the rest to the fringe section of the festival. What its choices were like remains to be seen, since I am writing this on the eve of the opening ceremony. But of the 23 Egyptian performances, I have plenty to say. Since having a show in the festival's competition is generally regarded as a privilege and sign of distinction, the heads of theatrical institutions in Egypt scramble every year to get as many of their productions as possible on the selection committee's viewing list in the hope that one of them would make it to the competition. This would not be a bad thing if they prepared for the event well beforehand, sponsored well thought-out projects that daringly adopted the principle of experimentation and supported them financially regardless of the risks. What happens every year, however, is that they wait until almost the very last minute then start looking frantically for something that might do for the occasion. This is truly amazing: though the festival has been around for over 20 years and is regularly held in September or October, every year it seems as if it takes them by complete surprise! Directors who cannot get work throughout the year are suddenly summoned, offered a measly budget and asked to come up in less than a month with something 'experimental'. What is usually meant by the word is something low-cost, untraditional in look but traditional in content and preferably full of gimmicks. No wonder the CIFET has come to be looked upon by young directors as an opportunity to get temporary work and some money and that most of the works specifically produced for it are usually half-baked, or hastily thought up and sloppily put together. Prime examples of such works this year are Al-Tali'a's Ahdab (The Hunchback of) Notre Dame, Hikmat Al-Qurood (Monkeys' Wisdom) and Akher Hikayat El-Donia (Last Tales of the World). Adapted by Mahmoud Gamal and directed by Mohamed Allam (still a student at the Theatre Institute like most of his cast and crew), The Hunchback is a shallow dramatization of Victor Hugo's famous novel that reduces it to a fairy tale on the model of Beauty and the Beast, or The Frog Prince. Heba Abdel-Hamid's gothic set is consistently dimly lit by Abu Bakr El-Sherif to presumably provide an eerie atmosphere, while voice-over narration, in both English and Arabic, is used to further simplify the story, connect the scenes and fill in the gaps in the action on stage. Clouds of smoke enveloped the actors at certain points and the scene in which the hunchback is transformed by the power of love into a handsome prince by simply taking off his stuffed jacket and mask was showered with soap bubbles floating all over the stage. Seen in another context, it would be amusing and not completely devoid of merit. But to propose it for an international competition seemed quite mad. Hikmat Al-Qurood is not only equally naïve but also vexingly pretentious. Written by Isam Abu Seif, intricately designed by Mohamed Gom'a and fancifully directed by Mohamed Mursi, it poses as a somber, satirical survey of political oppression in Egypt from the time of the Pharaohs to the present. The play's message is simple enough: throughout history, the rulers of Egypt have alternately used religion and the threat of foreign invasion to justify depriving their people of their natural rights and terrorizing them into total submission. This message is processed in the form of a didactic animal fable in which the planned marriage of two cats is repeatedly forestalled by the appearance of a monkey, acting as the messenger of invisible gods, priests, or rulers, to announce some imminent disaster or invasion and to counsel patience, abstinence, obedience and hard work till the danger is over. Assisting the 3 main actors are seven dancers who intermittently appear, in white trousers and black tops, to simulate battling against the enemy or suffering the rigours of hunger and oppression. For visual gimmicks and spectacular effects, the director relied mainly on Mohamed Gom'a's stage design and Ahmed Ragab's lighting. Initially, a huge pyramid dominates the desert-scene where the cats are courting. Suddenly, a massive explosion destroys the pyramid, raising thick clouds of smoke. When the smoke clears up, lo and behold, the rubble has been removed and another, smaller pyramid, sporting an ancient Egyptian engraving of a battle scene, has replaced the original one. For the rest of the play, at every appearance of the monkey one layer of stones is removed from the face of this pyramid by extras to reveal another carrying the engraved symbol of the next historical period. At the end of the show, which is predictably sad since the two cats never get to marry, one is left wondering why the sinister wiles of politicians and dictators should be described as 'monkeys' wisdom' and why cats, rather than any other animals, were chosen to represent Egyptians. Nothing however can beat Akher Hikayat El-Donia in terms of forced logic, superficiality and artificiality. Written and directed by Mohamed Al-Dorrah, it features a moronic grandfather and his equally dim-witted grandson enacting, in a string of senseless, haphazard and disconnected sketches, the stupid stories told by the former for the edification of the latter. A female figure in white, placed against a door at the back of the audience, regularly steps forward at the beginning of every sketch to assist with the acting, successively impersonating a parody of the legendary romantic Arab heroine Layla, a gullible woman tricked by two rogues into giving away her jewelry, an ancient Egyptian queen or deity, and God knows what else, before she finally dies. The grandfather promptly follows suit, whereupon the grandson, who had hitherto resented the old man's tyranny and wished for his death, suddenly feels lost and bewails him uproariously. Clumsily conceived, coarsely written and vulgarly acted, Akher Hikayat El-Donia also has an ugly, painfully cluttered set, with a mirror taking up the whole wall facing the audience at the small hall of Al-Tali'a and glucose bottles with dangling tubes fitted over every seat in the auditorium for some inscrutable reason. Equally eager to be represented in the competition, the Cultural Palaces organization rashly put forward a pathetically amateurish dance- and-mime version of Yusri El-Guindi's play, Ali El-Zeibaq (Mercurial Ali), about a legendary popular hero of that name, a garish and noisy version of Shakespeare's King Lear, clumsily performed as a circus act cum puppet show, and a crude, shrill version of Peter Weiss's Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. Even more amateurish and incredibly raw were two independent productions that mysteriously appeared on the list of the selection committee and were presented at Al-Sawy and Beit Al-Umma cultural centres, -- namely, Bila Ma'na (Meaningless), a monodrama about a woman who is progressively abused by her husband and finally crucified, and Door Shatarang (A Game of Chess), a half-finished confused and confusing piece of which none of the committee members could make any sense. That the people who made these shows and those who approved them for viewing could believe them fit to participate in an international contest bespeaks a degree of artistic ignorance and blindness that is deeply disturbing. Sadly, Al-Hanager's production of Saadalla Wannus's last play, Bilad Adyaq min al-Hob (CountriesToo Small for Love), was not ready when the committee went to see it at Al-Salam theatre. Neither the centre's manager, Huda Wasfi, nor the play's director, Tariq El-Dweiri, is to blame for this. Wasfi, who regularly contributed excellent performances to the festival in previous years, has been without a theatre since Al-Hanager was closed down for restructuring and renovation almost 3 years ago. When El-Dweiri proposed the play to her, she was eager and enthusiastic and fought with bureaucrats to get him a decent budget. Finding him a theatre, however, was more difficult. With Al-Hanager and the National out of commission, there is a real shortage of professionally equipped theatres in Cairo. The shortage is felt more acutely at such times as the present when dozens of shows, local and foreign, have to be accommodated in the space of 10 days. With great difficulty she could finally get Al-Salam for a few days, hardly enough time to prepare a big, complex and technically demanding production as El-Dweiri conceived. Ironically, like the two lovers in Wannus's play who find out that their country is too narrow to allow room for their love, El-Dweiri could not find a space in the whole of Cairo where he could develop his project and bring it to fruition. Another promising show that suffered from the lack of a suitable venue was Effat Yehia's Sahrawiyya (Desertscape) -- a daring, lyrical piece, alternately poignant and funny, inspired by the first act in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, with Egyptian female characters from different ages and walks of life replacing Churchill's original ones. When the Youth theatre accepted to produce her play, she faced a choice of 2 evils. Since the Youth theatre has only two performance spaces, she had to choose between its Yusef Idris hall -- a tiny chamber theatre -- and the Small Floating Theatre with its terrible acoustics and primitive technical equipment. She chose the latter perforce since her characters and stage design needed space, but her beautiful play suffered as a result. Mohamed Abul Su'ood's A Mass Requiem for Mozart -- an adaptation in colloquial Arabic of Pushkin's "Little Tragedy" Mozart and Salieri -- also produced by the Youth Theatre, was luckier in this respect, since it was originally conceived and designed for a chamber theatre. Its impeccably elegant, evocative set, consisting of a piano at the far end, a bookstand with flowers in a vase on top facing it at the other side, a big table with a red cover up front, a sliding door on one side, leading to a narrow passage, and another at the back, beyond the piano, which, when open reveals a wall to wall glass window with a black sky behind it and some tree branches on one side -- fitted beautifully inside Yusef Idris hall. But though the adaptation was neatly compact, the carefully stylized movement of the silent ghost of Mozart, impersonated by a young woman, had a strange, eerie effect and the flow and tempo of the whole performance was masterfully controlled, this haunting play would not have worked without Mohamed Salih's performance as Salieri. A professional concert pianist, trained in Russia, as well as a sensitive, competent actor with a distinctive face and physique, Salih was a perfect cast for the part, alternately bewitching us with his subtly shaded acting and stirring performance on the piano. Salih's contribution to Requiem for Mozart went further than this; not only did he translate Pushkin's text from its original Russian for Abul Su'ood to adapt, he also designed the whole musical aspect of the performance. This is truly a show not to be missed. The Youth Theatre's two other productions are also worth seeing: Al-Chaise longue (The Couch), is a lively collection of sketches based on the improvisations of actors in a workshop conducted by director Mohamed El-Saghir and cast in the form of a psychodrama where the patients in a mental hospital act out their problems under the eye of a psychiatrist; and Akram Mustafa's Al-Mat'am (The Restaurant), loosely based on a Turkish drama called The Restaurant of Live Monkeys, begins in a realistic vein but soon develops into a savage fantasy about the barbarity of Western capitalism and hegemony. While in the former El-Saghir put the audience together with the actors on the stage of the big Floating Theatre in the interest of intimacy, since the show was originally designed for a small, intimate theatre that was not readily available, in the latter, director Akram Mustafa, who also superbly played the main character, recreated the whole of Yusef Idris hall into a restaurant, with a bar at the far end, and seated the audience at tables just like the actors. I should, perhaps, also recommend the two productions that were chosen to represent Egypt in the festival's competition: the Creativity Centre's Zill Al-Homar (The Donkey's Shadow), a slightly adapted version of Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1951 radio play, The Trial of the Donkey's Shadow, and Al-Ghad Theatre's Do'aa Al-Karawan (The Curlew's Prayer), a drama and dance theatre piece based on Taha Hussein's novel of the same title and choreographed and directed by Karima Bedeir. Hopefully, I will have more to say about these and other events in the festival next week.
